The path to becoming one of NCAA Division I college football’s youngest coaches traces its origin point to Cosh being the elder statesmen in his alma mater’s quarterbacks room.
“I love the game, competing, being in it, but really in college, at Houston, I knew that I wanted to coach,” Cosh tells FootballScoop. “I was the oldest quarterback on the roster. I wasn’t the best, but I was oldest. Greg Ward was coming along as our quarterback, and I couldn’t do it, but I could help tell him how to do it.
“That process as a player showed me that I knew I wanted to coach.”
After being hired three months before his 32nd birthday, Cosh is head coach at FCS program Stony Brook. Members of the Colonial Athletic Association, the Seawolves are in the hands of Cosh seeking their first conference title since joining the league in 2013 and first winning season since 2018.
Building upon a lifetime around the game – his father, Chris, is a former veteran college assistant coach to the likes of Lou Holtz and Bill Snyder, among others – Billy Cosh’s depth of understanding beyond his 32 years flashes in an element of the interview process to land the job in mid-December 2023.
Just finishing his first year as first-year Western Michigan head coach Lance Taylor’s offensive coordinator, Cosh carries with him to meet with Stony Brook executives his vision for the program.
In the form an entire year-long calendar that serves as roadmap for the Seawolves.
“What I did when I first heard about job and was interviewing, I made a year calendar,” says Cosh, his coaching stops also including Indiana, Richmond and VMI, where he helped guide the Keydets to their only Southern Conference championship in program history. “So, I had the calendar prepared, presented it in the interview and I had what we planned to do each day, each month, how we would assemble a staff and prepare players. Danny Rocco was the first coach I’d seen do that, and Scott Wachenheim did it for us at VMI. I loved it as an assistant because you could prepare and be ready.”
In many ways, Stony Brook still is reeling from the COVID pandemic. In the program’s past four years, it has eight wins and 28 losses.
The four seasons prior to COVID? Twenty-seven wins against 21 losses.
Cosh’s first-year program still features a nucleus of players from last season’s 0-10 squad.
With a staff that includes one of the sport’s promising young coaches in offensive coordinator Anthony Davis II, a former Indiana Hoosiers running back, and defensive coordinator Scott Lewis, a former FCS head coach at Saint Francis.
He remembers building a staff and also being a bit behind in overhauling the roster stemming from his mid-December hire, but Cosh notes the program does have a transfer-quarterback from January – former Georgetown signal-caller Tyler Knoop – and following high school signings, as well as the spring NCAA Transfer Portal period, almost 25 newcomers.
Everyone, however, is buying into the new program culture.
“I had a team meeting right before I got introduced as head coach, a 30-minute meeting, and I told them exactly what we were going to do in our program, how we were going to train and how we were going to be accountable for things,” says Cosh, noting less than five players departed the program after last season. “We gave them the vision for what we are going to be and how it’s gonna be.
“If you want to be a part of it, come on; if not, I get that. But I just told them the honest truth. And I think a lot of guys wanted that accountability and detail and discipline. Our culture is better. Our accountability is better.”
The Seawolves are 46 days from opening the Cosh era on the road against Marshall, a program seeking a fourth-straight bowl appearance under coach Charles Huff.
The one-time old man of the Houston Cougars quarterback room now is the youngster in college coaching.
But his players are wearing their coach’s approach.
“On the backs of our shirts, we have, ‘No Excuses,’” says Cosh, also a new father after welcoming with wife, Kelsey, their first child, daughter, Charli, during the 2023 season. “We just eliminated excuses in our program, and our guys are buying into it. They’re continue to be learning to practice and play hard, to take care of each other and like each other. The biggest thing is, we’re growing now. We’re growing and winning together, all three phases are coming together as one and trying to win. Our mentality and toughness is improved. In spring ball practices, we saw it; we tackled in practice a few different times in our spring. That doesn’t always happen in FCS, but we said, ‘If we don’t tackle in practice, we’re not going to tackle in games.’
“We have two goals going into Marshall. We want to become toughest team, mentally and physically, that we can be and then become the best team. And that’s from the coaches to the players to the support staff to everyone in our program. Find ways to win. Treat every game different, but find ways to win. We’ve got to find a way to do that.”
(Editor's note: This story is in the second in FootballScoop's exclusive Fresh Faces, FCS Places series, which debuted Monday with this overview of the sport's new era of coaches -- 30 among the division's 129 programs.)