Immediately, there’s a conundrum.
One of college football’s youngest NCAA Division I head coaches – 32-year-old Mike Willis of Football Championship Subdivision program Marist College – preternaturally has some of the deepest connections to a program for which Willis is still weeks away from leading into its season opener.
A late grandfather traces parts of five decades in Marist history from the school’s financial office; enough family members still reside in the area to assure a vocal, pro-Willis cheering section inside Tenney Stadium for home gamedays.
In sum, Willis is just the fifth head coach in Marist College history not because of his search to leave his role as assistant head coach and offensive coordinator for his alma mater, Ivy League icon Princeton, but because Marist resonates with the family even before the Sept. 7 opener against Georgetown.
“I’ve known about Marist College my whole life, to be quite honest,” Willis tells FootballScoop. “My grandfather (Anthony Campilii) was in the business office and eventually CFO, working at the school from 1963 to 2004. My grandmother, an aunt and uncle, four cousins, a cousin-in-law, they all still live in the area. I had been up there to that area a lot.”
Willis even acknowledges the positive influence of a former Princeton colleague.
“Brandon Cuevas, our offensive line coach at Princeton, had always shared with me his fond thoughts of Marist because he had coached there,” says Willis, owner of four Ivy League titles from his time as both player and coach at Princeton. “So, I just had a warmth for the institution and felt the job could be a winner, as it has been as recently as 2013 (an 8-3 campaign for the Red Foxes).”
What outsiders might perceive as an initially stubborn optimism from Willis already is being transformed via tangible advancements.
Willis points to school leaders for their ongoing and unprecedented investment into the Marist football program.
To wit:
“We’re working with Catapult video, and XOS, something not a lot of programs in FCS have,” Willis shares. “We ’re the only school in the Pioneer League who’s going to charter (flights) for all our road games. It’s about bringing the program up to a higher care-level for our players.
“We’re going to be first in class in football video, we’re going to have the nicest shoulder pads a team can have in college football and we’re going to be traveling like an NFL team.”
Though not with pro-style free agency but rather leaning on his vast connections throughout the sport as well as those of his assistant coaches, Marist is retooling a roster that returns close to 70 players but also is getting a transfusion of nearly 40 newcomers.
“I immediately went into both retain some coaches and to attract some top assistants throughout country, and the moment they would join me, I’d turn them loose in winter recruiting, player acquisition,” says Willis, part of a new wave in FCS with a youthful charge of new head coaches also including Stony Brook’s Billy Cosh, ETSU’s Tre Lamb and Austin Peay’s Jeff Faris – all under the age of 35. “We only had three commitments the day I arrived on campus, and I wanted to get to 27 incoming high schoolers.
“The next 27 days, we got up to 27. And I’ll tell you what it was: It was tremendous administrative support, top-notch visits and everyone working together.”
Those trips to the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., campus are borne of the approach and details now trickling down from Willis, quick to credit a bevy of coaching influences but most especially Princeton head man Bob Surace.
“Some players I’d recruited at Princeton, some our staff had been recruiting, some we just found,” says Willis, revealing his inaugural Marist coaching staff is made up almost entirely of coaches that Willis has been logging on his iPhone’s notes app for years. “We would do that all morning, and then from 3 p.m. to 9, 10, 11 p.m., we could make calls, have Zooms, FaceTimes, every half hour on the hour.
“Our strategy was a recruiting telethon each day, for lack of a better term. It’s powerful when we get people on campus and our conversion rate was pretty high when we did that. Concurrently, we don’t want the NCAA Transfer Portal to be the heart of how we build a roster; we want true four- and five-year players who develop in our program, but we would be naïve to ignore the Portal with how it can help or hurt you.”
Though a walk-on in the Southeastern Conference at LSU, a name to monitor for the Red Foxes in 2024 is quarterback Matt O’Dowd following his transfer earlier this year into the program.
More telling will be the developing culture that Willis envisions for his program as it seeks a first winning season in more than a decade.
The Red Foxes will play fast, but under control, with Willis at the helm -- a staple of his Princeton teams; chunk plays are virtually their own scoreboard within the program, and success means more plays of 20 or more yards for the Marist offense than what foes tax the defense; physicality is non-negotiable.
Empowerment, however, just might be the prevailing sentiment throughout every corner of the program as players report Aug. 5, open preseason camp Aug. 7 and then host the Hoyas exactly one month later.
“We tell our guys to make each day their masterpiece,” says Willis, a former offensive lineman at Princeton with a brief Wall Street career preceding his rapid ascent through the coaching ranks. “We don’t want our players anxious when they’re playing. If they feel any pressure, we want them to feel the pressure to prepare more, study more, feel better, sleep more, make good decisions on and off the football field.
“We want our guys excited to make plays and to have no fear of failure and to experience competitive joy. I want gamedays to be really fun and we’re going to celebrate micro-achievements; have a great day, a great week. That’s what is important to me and what I’m hoping to see from us in the fall.”
Free to succeed.
“A great team is built not around a playbook,” Willis says, “but a player-book.”
And if the coach’s family is there to see it develop, all the better.