Larry Wayne Lacewell, the former football coach and athletic director at Arkansas State, took his teams to the NCAA Division I-AA playoffs for four straight years, to two Southland Conference championships, and to the 1986 Division I-AA National Championship game. In 1992, he began work as a scout for the Dallas Cowboys professional National Football League (NFL) team. Lacewell is the only coach in the nation to have led college teams to back-to-back championships and been a part of back-to-back NFL Super Bowl wins.
Lacewell arrived at what is now A-State to coach the freshmen in 1960–61. He went on to serve as defensive aide at Arkansas A&M in 1962. He also served as assistant head coach at Kilgore Junior College in Texas (National Junior College champion, 1964), assistant coach at Wichita State (1966–67), and assistant coach at Iowa State (1968).
Lacewell was named defensive coordinator for the University of Oklahoma (OU) Sooners in 1969 and became assistant head coach in 1973. During Lacewell’s tenure there, OU won two national titles and six Big Eight championships and had a thirty-seven-game winning streak.
He returned to ASU in 1978 and became Arkansas State’s head football coach and athletic director in 1979. He coached five first-team All-Americans and twenty-four All-Conference players and was spotlighted in The Sporting News for having “perhaps the top I-AA program in the nation.” At A-State, Lacewell led his team to two back-to-back Southland Conference titles (1985 and 1986) and ended his career there with a 69–58–4 record.
In 1990, Lacewell left to become defensive coordinator at the University of Tennessee (UT), helping the Volunteers win the Southeastern Conference (SEC) title that year. Following a heart bypass operation, Lacewell decided to leave coaching and joined the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys in 1992 as director of college scouting and, later, director of pro scouting. During his tenure in Dallas as chief scout, the Cowboys won three Super Bowls.
