Warren Powers

Warren Anthony Powers (born February 19, 1941) is a former American football coach. He was the head coach of the Missouri Tigers football program from 1978 to 1984. Prior to coming to Missouri, Powers was an assistant coach under both Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne at Nebraska. He was an all-state high school quarterback from Kansas City, Missouri, and also played on Devaney's first team at Nebraska in 1962, earning three letters as a Husker.

Powers played safety for six years with the American Football League's Oakland Raiders. He started for the 1967 AFL Champion Raiders and in the second AFL-NFL World Championship game.

He had a one-year stint as head coach at Washington State before leaving to join the Tigers.

After leaving Nebraska, Powers took an unranked Washington State team into Lincoln, Nebraska and knocked of the 15th ranked Huskers. The following year he went to Lincoln with another unranked team, the Missouri Tigers and he pulled off a victory over a #2 ranked Nebraska team. The Missouri Tigers would lose 25 straight games to Nebraska before their next victory over the Huskers, prompting Tiger fans to wonder what might have been had he stayed at Missouri.

During his tenure at Mizzou, Powers compiled a 46-33-3 (.579) record, including four straight bowl appearances from 1978 to 1981. His best seasons came in 1980 and 1981, where he posted back-to-back 8-4 records. In addition, his Tiger football teams went 3-2 in bowl games, defeating LSU in the 1978 Liberty Bowl, South Carolina in the Hall-Of-Fame Bowl in 1979, and Southern Miss in the 1981 Tangerine Bowl. Mizzou also played in the 1980 Liberty Bowl, a loss to Purdue and the 1983 Holiday Bowl, losing to a BYU Cougars squad, led by a then-future National Football League MVP for the Super Bowl XXIX winning San Francisco 49ers, Steve Young.

On October 24, 1979, the NCAA's Committee on Infractions publicly reprimanded MU for a violation of NCAA Constitution 3-2 related to a failure to exercise institutional control. The violation was in regard to the use of a fund established outside the university for the purpose of paying Powers for debt he assumed while negotiating to become MU's head coach. NCAA regulations require the university's involvement when its coach receives a cash supplement related to duties he is performing on the institution's behalf, and the NCAA found that MU had failed to do so in this case.

Since leaving the Tigers, Powers worked in a variety of sales and administrative jobs. For the past several years, he has been in executive sales at Bommarito Automotive in St. Louis. He should not be confused with Warren Powers (defensive end) who once played with the Denver Broncos and who currently heads the "One Nation" team as a Regional Vice President at Primerica Financial Services.

In 2002, Powers was head coach of the Show Me Believers, a National Indoor Football League team that played its games at the Family Arena in St. Charles, Missouri, about 20 miles west of St. Louis.