Multifaceted Coach Drew Svoboda Discusses Special Teams, Tight Ends and Juggling Responsibilities

STILLWATER — Drew Svoboda wears a lot of hats.

He has three titles as part of Oklahoma State’s football staff: associate head coach, special teams coordinator and tight ends coach. The juggling of responsibilities is something Svoboda said he is used to.

“I’ve done this for 26 years now,” Svoboda said. “The biggest thing is learning how to multitask. No. 1, I’ve got great help. I know we have a great support staff here which is what makes that possible. I’m not doing all of it by myself, so I’ve got some great assistants.

“Really, the biggest thing is staying organized, time management and learning how to delegate efficiently because that’s a tough thing to do. When you’re new at something, you don’t want to delegate anything. You want to do everything yourself. And as you start understanding, like the flow of how the day is going to go, and when the meetings and when we meet on offense, when we meet on special teams, recruiting for offense, recruiting for special teams, full staff meeting — everything just kind of slots into its role. And you just stay organized and stay on top of it.”

Svoboda’s coaching career started at the high school level, where being multifaceted is even more of a requirement. In fact, he served as Klein Collins High School’s head football coach and athletic director.

He was part of the North Texas staff that transition to Stillwater with OSU head coach Eric Morris. Svoboda joined Morris in 2023. Before that, he was on Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama, working as a special teams coordinator and tight ends coach. Svoboda has also coordinated special teams at Memphis and Rice.

With that much experience in the special teams game, I asked Svoboda what was something fans maybe don’t appreciate enough about the third phase.

“Probably the detail that goes into the kicking game as far as the nuance to the protections on punt,” Svoboda said. “If you’re protection breaks down on punt, you’re potentially giving up a touchdown. It’s a sack-fumble that just got scoop and scored — on fourth down. If you ask every special teams coordinator in the country, if he could be great at one thing, it’s punt protection because that’s really where if you’ve got a weakness and it gets exposed, everybody in the stadium is gonna know that doesn’t look right.”

So maybe the next time you see a successful punt operation, appreciate it a little more.

As far as tight ends go, Svoboda compared the position to a Swiss Army Knife and that it’s normal for a tight end room to be “a band of misfits” given that not all tight ends start out being tight ends. There are converted quarterbacks, receivers, offensive linemen, defenders — heck, even basketball players — who have transitioned to the position over the years.

Svoboda’s current tight end room includes Bodie Boydstun, who was a quarterback at SWOSU before transitioning to tight end and now climbing his way up to the Power Four ranks. In the past, OSU has seen guys like Jelani Woods transition from QB to TE, Blaine Green move from WR to TE for a time and Braden Cassity move from the defensive line over to tight end.

There is a certain archetype of tight end that Svoboda said fits the best within this offense.

“I would say the H tight end,” Svoboda said. “You’ve got the U tight end, and that’s kind of the guy that’s a cheeseburger away from being an offensive tackle, which it’s good to have him on your roster, too. You’ve got the Y tight end, which is the traditional tight end — he’s a big guy who runs well enough, but he’s kind of your old 1985 tight end. You got your F tight end, who was a receiver not long ago, and he’s making the transition. He’s gotta decide he wants to do it — that’s the F tight end.

“And then you’ve got the H. That’s the true hybrid. That’s what we love here. He’s part running back, part fullback, part receiver, part tight end, part offensive tackle, part offensive guard. He can kind of do a little bit of everything. That true H tight end is what really flourishes in this offense.”