On the day Tony Reno was introduced as Yale’s football coach in January 2012, Carm Cozza and his wife, Jean, were rejuvenating in the Florida sun.
In a quiet moment during the press conference, Yale’s athletic director, Tom Beckett, pulled his new hire aside to remind him that Cozza was available to talk if Reno wished.
“I called him after I met with the team,” Reno said Thursday. “We talked for about 20 minutes. He offered me his advice about hiring a staff, being true to myself. He said to me that [Yale] was in a crisis situation, but it was nothing we couldn’t overcome. He reminded me not to expect to fix it immediately. And every day since he had been by our side; he was the one I’d always been able to call to ask him what he thought about things. It was a lot of fun to have that resource.”
On Thursday, less than two months after Reno carried Yale to its first Ivy League championship in 37 years, Cozza, Yale’s legendary coach who led the Bulldogs from 1965 to 1996, died. He was 87.
“It must have been really good for coach to see the program finally get back to where it belongs,” Reno said. “Whatever I do for the team, and the program, I do wondering how Carm would have dealt with this. I always wanted to do right by him because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be doing my job.”
As expected, the Yale football community publicly mourned the passing of one of its greatest coaches ever.
“He was a gentleman. He was at the right place at the right time,” said Rich Marazzi, a noted Yale football historian and author of “A Bowl Full Of Memories. “He was first-class guy. He had it all. He related to all types of kids, from all types of backgrounds. He was the perfect coach for the perfect place.”
Cozza won 10 Ivy League championships and 179 games in 19 winning seasons. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2002, was named UPI New England Coach of the Year four times. He remains the Ivy League’s winningest coach.
“Today, we the men of Yale football, lost a piece of our foundation,” Dr. Pat Ruwe, Yale’s captain in 1983 and president of the Yale Football Association, said in a statement. “For over 50 years, coach Cozza represented Yale football and his community with unmatched honor, dignity and class. Ferociously competitive, yet humble and unfailingly loyal, coach was once called Yale’s greatest teacher and was the ultimate role model to those young men fortunate enough to play for him.”
“I was blessed to stay involved with coach after my playing days as his team doctor, chauffeur and friend. I saw up close the real man, which is where his star shined even more bright. There was no finer human being who ever walked the sidelines or wore the Yale blue. We will miss you coach. You were loved.”
In 1976, Cozza was appointed Yale athletic director with the expectation that he would leave coaching after a few years. Instead, Cozza gave up the AD’s job in 1977 to remain as football coach. Since his retirement, with an office still at the Ray Tompkins House, Cozza served as special assistant to Beckett while handling the radio color commentary (1998-2016) for Yale football on the radio.
Before Cozza began his coaching career, he played quarterback at the Miami (Ohio) University under coach Ara Parseghian, who would later move to Notre Dame, and Woody Hayes, Ohio State’s Hall of Fame coach.
Cozza played minor league baseball for the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox and coached high school football before becoming an assistant coach at Miami from 1956-62 under John Pont, who was a former college teammate. Pont invited him to be Yale’s backfield coach.
When Pont resigned two years later in 1965, Cozza was named head coach. At the time of the announcement, Yale AD Delaney Kiphuth said, “The future of Yale football is in very capable hands.”
“I’ll be happy to be here all my life,” Cozza said on the day of his hiring.
Carmen Louis Cozza was born and raised in Parma, Ohio, the brother of four sisters, a dedicated Cleveland Indians fan. But it was Yale football that eventually consumed his life.
“I don’t go to Yale without Carm Cozza and I imagine there are 100 guys who would say the same thing,” former Yale quarterback Mike Luzzi, a high school all-state quarterback at East Haven High, said. “It was a different world back then, different admissions process and I am not ashamed to admit that. I was one of the players coach Cozza focused on. I met the criteria at the time. I used to kid with him that I caught lightning in a bottle and he was the wizard.”
Yale presented Cozza with a new tractor and 31 of his 32 team captains returned to be with him at his final home game at Yale Bowl in 1996.
Yale’s captain that season, Rob Masella, famously said: "He has the ability to stop rain."
Cozza not only coached NFL football players, but he tutored five Rhodes scholars and the former mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke.
As it turned out, Yale chose Cozza over Penn State assistant Joe Paterno, who turned down the job after the Nittany Lions agreed to make him their associate head coach under Rip Engle.
Cozza lost his first game to UConn on Sept. 25, 1965, and then a week later, 7-0 to Colgate. His first team finished the season 3-6. Yale lost to Harvard, 13-0, and the following year, with quarterback Brian Dowling sidelined with a knee injury, the Elis were 4–5.
Charley Loftus, who was then Yale’s sports information director, kidded the team’s beat writers that he had received a telegram from the alumni.
"There's a train leaving for New York at 4 o'clock. Be under it."
"It was devastating," Cozza said. "No one knew who I was. Here's a guy coming in, losing to Connecticut, and Yale's never lost to a school in the state. It was a hard thing. I was very worried, because football is important to a lot of people here. I didn't have any idea what was in store for me later on."
But in 1967, after losing the opener to Holy Cross, Yale started a 16-game winning streak. And by the time Cozza reached his final season there had been 40 coaching changes in the Ivy League and Cozza had worked with six Yale presidents and five athletic directors.
Before he coached against Harvard for the final time in 1996 he admitted that before coming to Yale he had considered the University of New Hampshire.
"I would have lost out on experiences I'll treasure all my life," Cozza said. "I can't believe there are better people on this Earth to work with."
Yale once estimated that of the 1,500 players he coached, only seven, who remained in his program, failed to graduate.
"Every guy I recruit I tell, 'If you don't have a thirst for knowledge, don't come here,' " Cozza said.
Without question, the most famous game Cozza ever coached was the 29-29 tie at Harvard on Nov. 23, 1968. Yale and Harvard were undefeated and with only 42 seconds to go Yale, led by Dowling and Calvin Hill, was ahead 29-13. Then Harvard charged back to score 16 points to even the score with no time on the clock, encouraging Crimson fans to think they had actually won.
Cozza served longer than any Yale coach except Bob Kiphuth, perhaps the most famous American swimming coach in history, who was at the school for 42 years. In his time Cozza won more games than Walter Camp, Yale’s first football coach, who is credited with designing the rules of the game.
Cozza often said that two of his greatest wins were against nonconference opponents. In 1980, Yale upset Air Force, 17-16, for Cozza’s 100th win. The following year, with Parseghian in the press for ABC, Yale beat Navy, 23-19.
Yale won three straight Ivy League titles from 1979 to 1981 and Cozza had a chance to leave for the University of Virginia, but he turned it down because his family wanted to stay put.
“When he [Cozza] walked into a room, he commanded everyone’s attention,” Luzzi said. “When he spoke, he had your complete attention.”