Legendary Coach Dies

Keasler led McNeese football for nine seasons

By Jim Gazzolo

The Cowboys have lost a legend.

Bobby Keasler, who guided the McNeese football program to four Southland championships and a Division I-AA national title game, passed away Tuesday. 

He was 80 years old.

Keasler coached the Cowboys from 1990 to 1998, posting a 78-34-2 record, a program record for wins that lasted until last fall. Keasler left McNeese to coach Louisiana-Monroe before retiring after the 2002 season. 

Keasler led McNeese to seven Division I-AA (now FCS) playoff appearances, including the national championship game in 1997, which the Cowboys lost by one point to Youngstown State. His teams went 8-7 in the postseason.

Keasler was named the SLC Coach of the Year five times. Matt Viator passed Keasler for wins last season. 

Before Keasler took over, McNeese had hit a dry spell. The Cowboys had gone 10 seasons without winning a league championship, finishing second in Keasler’s first year in town. He would lead McNeese to four titles over the next seven seasons.

Last summer, as Matt Viator was about to break Keasler’s win record, former players remembered him.

“Coach Keasler came in here, brought a lot of good coaches with him, and changed the culture,” said Lance Guidry, who played three seasons for Keasler. “He gave us confidence right away, and we wanted to play for him. Then, better players wanted to play here.

“He changed the way the program was run. He turned us back into the power of the league.”

Keasler fit right in at McNeese after being an assistant at Northwestern State.

“He could really relate to the people of Lake Charles and Southwest Louisiana,” Guidry said. “He just changed things, but also brought back some of the traditions. We just started winning and kept on going.”

Viator was a high school head coach when Keasler took over the Cowboys, and saw what McNeese became before moving up to the college level as an assistant.

“Coach Keasler came in and totally changed the entire way McNeese football worked,” Viator said. “I hold Bobby Keasler in the highest regard.

“He set the bar here. He puts the pressure on all of us to live up to the standards that he set.”

During his time with the Cowboys, Keasler coached 53 first-team All-Southland players and 16 first-team All-Americans. He had seven Southland Players of the Year and four who won Freshman of the Year honors.

Keasler was inducted into the McNeese Hall of Fame in 2006. He was inducted into the Southland Conference Hall of Honor in 2014, a year after being named the league’s Coach of the Decade for the 1990s. 

After his three years at Monroe, Keasler retired to Lake Charles, where he kept a close eye on his Cowboys.  

Jim Gazzolo is a freelance writer who covers sports in Southwest Louisiana. He is also the host of Poke Nation, which airs weekly on CBS-Lake Charles.