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Carm’s Last Call
When he retires as Yale’s head football coach at the end of this season, Carmen Cozza will leave behind a record distinguished as much by personal mentorship as by gridiron victories.
November 1996
by Randall Beach
Randall Beach, who reported on the renovation of Yale Field for the Yale Alumni Magazine in 1994, is a former editor of Remember magazine.
The headline in the November 23, 1968, special issue of the Harvard Crimson crowed: “Harvard Beats Yale 29–29.” Painful as it was for Eli fans to accept, the judgment was right on target, describing the results of an athletic event that remains seared into the memories of both teams. Going into the 85th edition of The Game, both Yale and Harvard were undefeated, and with only 42 seconds to go, Yale, led by the legendary duo of Brian Dowling and Calvin Hill, was ahead 29–13. The Eli seats were already awash in white handkerchiefs when Harvard charged back with almost incredible force, scoring 16 points to even the score with no time on the clock. To the great majority of the stunned onlookers, the tie was indeed a Crimson victory.
But to Hill and Dowling, arguably two of Yale’s greatest players ever, the real winner was Carmen Cozza. In the dizzying final moments of that ill-fated game, the two offensive stars had begged the coach to send them in on defense. As they saw it, the reversal of fortune being played out on the field called for a reversal of roles—anything to stop the Harvard counterattack.
“We’ll shut them down!” they pleaded.
Cozza refused.
According to Dowling and Hill, the coach didn’t want the defensive players they would have replaced to end their college careers in disgrace, bumped by offensive standouts who weren’t even trained for the job. Cozza said to them: “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Think of what it would do to those young men who have played those positions all year long.” It was a hard call, perhaps the hardest Cozza has made in his 34 years at Yale.
But it was very much in character. Cozza has served longer than any Yale coach of any sport except Bob Kiphuth, who dominated American swimming for 42 seasons. Cozza is the winningest coach in Yale football history, having surpassed even Walter Camp, the first Yale football coach, who was instrumental in creating the rules of the game. By the start of the 1996 season, Cozza’s teams had registered 177 wins against 111 losses and five ties. He had won ten Ivy League titles, picked up a slew of awards and sent nearly two dozen players off to play professional football and five to Oxford as Rhodes Scholars. (Only seven of his players have failed to graduate.) But for all the athletic laurels, Carmen Cozza will be remembered by many of his players as much for his personal and moral strength as for his skill at coaching football. Recalling the 1968 game, Hill said recently: “Coach had a commitment to the total young person, to everyone on the team—as personified by what he said to us that day.” Speaking for legions of other athletes who have played for Cozza, former tailback Rich Diana ’82 said: “He is kind, he is generous, he’s a noble person. He’s got a good soul. This is a coach you wanted to play for and grow up to be like.”
At the conclusion of the 113rd edition of The Game in Cambridge this month, Cozza’s records will be available for breaking. On September 7, the 66-year-old veteran addressed a news conference at the Joel E. Smilow Field Center to confirm what had been rumored for weeks, that his 32nd season as head coach would be his last. President Richard C. Levin, who spoke following the announcement, recalled that during his years of teaching economics at Yale, he would occasionally ask some of the football players among his students what they thought of their coach. According to President Levin, a common reply was: “He’s the greatest coach I’ve ever had.” Many of them also remarked: “He’s the greatest man I’ve ever known.”
Anecdotes about Cozza’s performance on the job are legion. Typical is one from former star halfback Dick Jauron ’73: “In my senior year I ran 87 yards against Columbia for a touchdown, and Coach ran alongside down the sidelines and hugged me in the end zone. He was such a great athlete, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d beaten me!” John Spagnola ’79, who played tight end for Cozza, was especially impressed by his willingness to take cues from his staff, and even his players. “My senior year,” recalls Spagnola, “we were getting ready for Harvard, and at practice we came up with this play where the quarterback—Pat O’Brien—would lateral to me, and I’d throw it downfield. Coach was watching us, and he said, ‘We’re gonna practice that. I’m gonna call that in the game.’ We didn’t think he was serious, but in the second quarter we heard him call ‘Downtown Left,’ which was what we had named the play. I was shocked. I took the lateral and threw it to Bob Krystyniak for a 77-yard touchdown! It was the only pass I ever threw in a game, and we went on to beat Harvard 35–28.”
Cozza is no less admired for the way he rose to the occasion when a personal problem came up, often something that had nothing to do with football. “Coach and I went to the Blue-Gray game in Alabama, where he was one of the coordinating coaches and I had been picked to be a player,” remembers Rich Diana. “Three days into practice, they had a big luau, and I ate everything. I caught a ‘bug’ and Carm, his wife Jean, their daughter Chris, and her husband took me to the emergency room. I remember Coach standing next to me when they were putting the IV needle into me; I’d never liked needles, but he said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”
Sometimes Cozza’s work seemed akin to that of the ministry. Late one Saturday night in October 1966, word came to senior Yale officials that Brian Dowling’s father had died. Earlier that day, Dowling had injured his knee in a game against Rutgers, and he was resting up in bed. As soon as Cozza heard the news, he was on his way to Dowling’s room. A few days later, Cozza was in Cleveland to attend the funeral. “His presence had a big impact on me and my family,” says Dowling. “My dad’s funeral was right in the middle of the week, during preparation for the next game. It just showed the kind of person he is.”
Although Cozza is now a certified Yale institution, he got his start in a very different environment. When he was born, on June 10, 1930, in the Cleveland suburb of Parma, Ohio, the Depression was making it difficult for many families to get by, especially Italian immigrants such as the Cozzas. Recounting his upbringing, Cozza says, “I was raised with my four sisters, when not many people had anything, literally. I was the only one in the family who went to college; if it hadn’t been for an athletic scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.” Cozza enrolled at Miami University of Ohio, where he excelled in football and baseball while earning a bachelor of science degree. His football coaches were the esteemed Ara Parseghian and Woody Hayes. Cozza observed them carefully, storing up the experience for future reference. But for the moment, at least, baseball came first. He played professionally for the minor league teams of the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox. In search of a more stable career, he went on to coach football at a succession of Ohio high schools, and in 1956 was named head freshman football coach at Miami. Later he was elevated to the varsity football staff. “When Ara Parseghian invited me back to Miami University, that’s when it all started,” Cozza says. “I knew then that this was something I truly wanted to do.”
In 1963, Cozza got a phone call from a former college teammate, John Pont, who was by then the head football coach at Yale. Would Carm consider coming east to be Yale’s backfield coach? Cozza, who had never been east of Pittsburgh, arrived in New Haven on a dreary gray day, asking himself, “What am I doing here?” But so many people made him and Jean feel welcome that any disorientation quickly faded.
Two years later, when Pont departed to become head coach at Indiana University, Cozza assumed that he, too, would have to find a new job. As it happened, he was offered the post of head football coach at the University of New Hampshire—and he was all set to accept it. But when Cozza told Yale’s director of athletics, Delaney Kiphuth, about his plans, Kiphuth asked him to hold on for 48 hours. During that time, a delegation of Yale players urged Kiphuth to offer the head coaching job to Cozza. Kiphuth agreed with them that Yale would be making a big mistake if it let Cozza get away. The next day, Cozza was offered the job, and he accepted. Kiphuth declared, “The future of Yale football is in very capable hands.” Cozza replied, “I’ll be happy to be here all my life.”
At another institution, Cozza’s first year as head coach might well have been his last. In his first game, Cozza became the first Yale football coach ever to lose to the University of Connecticut, a team that had traditionally been a warmup for the Bulldogs. Walking off the field afterward, Cozza wondered whether he had the stuff to be a college football head coach. Over the next week, he recalls, “We got enough angry letters to wallpaper a dining room.” The following Saturday against Colgate was no better, ending in a 7–0 win for the visitors. In the third game of the season, against Brown in Providence, Yale placekicker Dan Begel booted a field goal late in the game for the only score of the afternoon. But the alumni, temporarily quieted in their calls for Cozza’s head, resumed their chorus of complaint when Yale lost to Harvard, 13–0, finishing the season with a bleak record of 3–6. The following year (1966), with Dowling sidelined by that knee injury, the Elis were 4–5, and still Cozza’s job was not secure.
The breakthrough came in 1967, when, after dropping the opener to Holy Cross, the Bulldogs got both Dowling and Hill onto the field and embarked on a binge of 16 successive wins that would span two seasons. Dowling recalls that, “after that first loss in 1967, we started scoring a lot of points. Coach was flabbergasted. It was very special, because it was a young coaching staff and so we all started together. We were able to turn things around after those two losing seasons.”
Despite the social and political turmoil of the late 1960s, Yale students still felt passionately about their football team. “I remember the day we left for Princeton with a chance to clinch the Ivy League championship,” Cozza said recently. “I thought the students were going to tip our bus over. They were rocking it back and forth, so I told the bus driver, ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here before we get dumped!’ There were impromptu pep rallies every week. We’d get 47,000 people for the Cornell game, 56,000 for Dartmouth. ‘B.D.’ of ‘Doonesbury,’ Calvin Hill and company—it was an unbelievable offensive team. But the one game that nobody will let me forget is ‘The Tie.’” Cozza can’t forget it either, noting, “It’s very hard on me when we’re not winning. It stays with me day-in and day-out.”
Cozza wishes that the sportswriters and fans would also ask him about the Yale-Harvard game of 1967. “We were losing 20–17 in the Bowl, with only a minute or two left,” he remembers. “Dowling threw 50 yards downfield to Del Marting, and he ran it into the end zone. Harvard came back, but they fumbled on the 20-yard line. Maybe we shouldn’t have won that game. If you’re in this long enough, you find the pendulum swings both ways.”
Two of Cozza’s most satisfying wins were against non-Ivy League opponents. In 1980 the Elis upset Air Force, 17–16, for Cozza’s 100th win. “We were close at halftime and we knew we had a chance to win,” recalls team captain John Nitti ’81. “The feeling in the locker room was that we were all trying to win that game for Carm.” The following year, led by Rich Diana, Yale knocked off Navy, 23–19. “It was especially thrilling for me,” says Cozza, “because my former coach Ara Parseghian was in the press box doing the game for ABC.”
After Yale’s three straight Ivy League titles, from 1979 to 1981, the wins and championships would never again come so frequently for Cozza. Forces beyond his control began to make recruiting and winning increasingly difficult. In 1981, the Ivy League instituted the Academic Index, a complex formula that sets minimum admission standards based on grades and test scores for players in football, men’s basketball, and men’s hockey. The index reflects each school’s academic standing, which means that Yale, along with Harvard and Princeton, often has a relatively harder time admitting top athletes. This system, as well as the league’s longstanding ban on athletic scholarships, cutbacks in the number of football recruits allowed per year (now 35), and the escalating cost of tuition all have conspired to reduce the pool of football talent.
Nevertheless, Cozza continues to be a firm advocate of the Ivy League’s academic standards. “I don’t feel you should ever jeopardize the integrity of the academics,” he says. “Once you do that, you’ll be like any other university.” But he is angry about what he considers the “discriminatory” aspects of the Academic Index. “I think it should be abolished,” he says. “Before we had it, if the admissions office wanted to take a chance on a guy who didn’t score too well on the SATs, but was a real achiever and maybe Yale could really help him, they would take a shot. Now, we can’t do it. I think it’s wrong.”
Despite the index, Director of Athletics Tom Beckett thinks Yale can regain its standing among its peers. “Whatever the sport, it is my belief that Yale can be champion of champions in the Ivy League,” he says. “That’s our quest; that’s our goal. And we will continue to carry the message that academic and athletic excellence need not be mutually exclusive.” He cites Cozza as a symbol of that commitment. “We don’t find legends in this business very often,” Beckett said at the September 7 news conference. “You hear of transgressions at university athletic departments daily. It never happened the last 32 years here.”
Why is Cozza retiring now? He said at the news conference that he didn’t have a compelling reason. “I was appointed Yale’s 32nd head football coach, and this happens to be my 32nd year,” he said. In a subsequent interview, Cozza elaborated: “I just felt—and I think the University also felt—that maybe it’s time for me to step back. I don’t want them to put a gun to my head and say, ‘Hey Coach, you get out of here!’ If you take the win-loss record of the past few years, I stayed on too long. But if I’d left, I would have missed the privilege of working with some of the finest people this country has to offer.”
Cozza says he made his decision with his family last December, and thought it would be best to break the news to his team at the start of this season. “I wanted everyone to know, especially my players, in case we should have a rough year, so they wouldn’t feel it was their fault, that that was the reason I retired.” Cozza told his players about his decision two days before meeting with the press. “That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” he said during the news conference, pausing to compose himself as his players struggled to do the same. “It’s really like having two families. I told the team that it’s like having sons. I told them that we’ll all be better off for having known each other. I also told them that having dreams is a wonderful thing—and I’m proof of that.” Asked how he would like to be remembered, Cozza does not talk about coaching football. “I would hope that I’ve gained the respect of the players, and that I’ve helped them have four of the best years of their lives here,” he says. “Hopefully I’ve helped them in the foundation of their careers.”
Beckett has already begun the search for Cozza’s successor, and hopes to have a new coach in place by January. But the years ahead may still find Cozza involved in Yale athletics. Beckett has offered him the position of assistant to the director of athletics, working on such projects as improving Yale’s sports facilities. Cozza has said he will decide after the season ends whether to accept the offer.
No account of Cozza’s career would be complete without one of Brian Dowling’s favorite anecdotes. The story is about an event that happened in 1968, a year that many remember as one of the greatest in Yale football history. But on a very hot afternoon during the preseason, things were not going well. “We were just dragging ourselves through practice, and Carm seemed to get very upset,” recalls Dowling. “We were all waiting to hear the signal for us to run sprints, but he just took off somewhere. A few minutes later, Carm comes back, riding shotgun on an ice cream truck that comes right onto the field. He gave all of us free ice cream bars!”
No “father figure” ever did more for his kids.  |
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