New Haven Removes Interim Tag from Head Coach Mark Powell
Credit: Clarus Media
Just prior to hosting Merrimack for their tenth and final game of the season, word leaked out via Pete Thamel: New Haven had removed the interim tag from Then-Interim Head Coach Mark Powell, who would be tasked with moving forward as New Haven transitioned from D2 to the big leagues of Division I and the NEC. Even at the time, the move was applauded. That was before New Haven defended the Blue and won the first all-Division I game in New Haven’s history with a blistering 4th quarter attack on the Merrimack Warriors.
Since then, of course, the reviews have only been better. But let’s take in what this season was and what Coach Powell had to work through. I happen to be on the side that this extension was the right move.
When New Haven announced the move to Division I, there was generally very little surprise on the outside. It wasn’t that we knew New Haven was about to join the NEC- I had no indication, at any rate- it was that New Haven joining was never unexpected. When I’ve looked at who could be a candidate in Division II in the past, I’ve done so using New Haven as the model for what you could expect any transitioning school to look like.
These moves happen quickly, though- very quickly, and the sensitive nature of them means that it tends to be a very closed off decision making process. Famously, Jim Boeheim had no idea that Syracuse was joining the ACC. In the case of New Haven, AD Devin Crosby did describe a very quick process. The entire process took 14-16 days.
The outcome was ultimately positive for New Haven, but it did leave a brief time period where it wasn’t clear what the schedule would look like. That led to some instability and especially some transfer portal entries. It was with that backdrop that Coach Powell became the interim head coach.
It’s probably true that any new head coach has to begin his tenure by keeping players who might transfer in the fold in today’s game. Coach actually had a harder job. Many of those players had already entered the transfer portal prior to his even becoming HC. His first days as coach didn’t include the usual press conferences or pomp and circumstance that a coach might usually receive. Instead, he had to call his players who had entered the portal and ask them to consider returning to New Haven. According to Mr. Crosby, he immediately succeeded with 11 players who had entered the portal. This is something we can’t stress enough: they had left even before he was named interim coach.
At that point, the sources we spoke to indicated that the main reason players had left was to play a full season in 2025. The scheduling uncertainty was perhaps somewhat overstated at this point. It was true that New Haven didn’t have any games booked, but as we had seen from Mercyhurst the year prior, it’s not impossible to compile a near-complete schedule. We spoke to players entering the paper at that time who had told us that they simply didn’t know if they’d play 0 games, 4 games, or a full schedule. The connections in the athletic department and coaching staff allowed for a nearly full schedule- 10 games, to be put together. By the time we spoke to AD Crosby, there were a handful of prospective games already nearing completion including Albany. (I suspect that Saginaw Valley State and Sacred Heart were misnamed in our video interview, but you can’t blame him- I’m not sure anyone at New Haven was sleeping much at that point). What they were able to compile is roughly equivalent to what Mercyhurst was able to pull off the year prior, including a season concluding home game against a Division I opponent.
Coach Powell once told me that he went to school literally across the street from the University of New Haven. His grandfather, Carm Cozza, was the Head Coach at Yale- also in New Haven- for 32 seasons and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. I can’t imagine there’s too many candidates out there more familiar with the landscape of FCS football in the Northeast than Powell is. In that transition period, there’s a rebalancing of how recruiting should look and what your team’s pitch and attributes are. The school doesn’t change, but recruiting against Kent State is different from recruiting against Franklin Pierce. Having someone familiar with first and foremost what New Haven is- the city, certainly, but also what it can mean for your lifetime- is obviously an advantage.
When every other pitch changes, what’s a better anchor than showing recruits that New Haven is a place you return to? Or, in some cases, stay at for 32 years?
New Haven went 5-5 on the season and won every D2 and lower game. This was anything but trivial.
The Chargers were very successful in a 2024 campaign bookended by losses to perennial D2 power and AD Crosby’s alma mater Slippery Rock. They won the NE10, which is always a competitive conference, but when I began reviewing the roster information after the transition to Division I, all of the superlatives and all-conference names, save one, were conspicuously missing. (That one remaining player did later transfer). It seemed the Chargers were graduating a ton of talent and leadership. My first thought was that this was clearly a program built to succeed, but that they probably weren’t going to be favorites in the NE10 this season.
In addition to the transfer portal losses already mentioned, New Haven was already looking at somewhat of a rebuild in 2025 as a Division II school. They’re used to success these days in New Haven, but it was going to be a hard road to get there.
Couple that with injuries and a subsequent redshirt for Zaon Laney as well as a season ending injury for Josh Tracey, and the Chargers weren’t even lucky from an injury perspective in 2025. I think this kind of underscores how good of a performance it was to get to 5 wins. To get there, the Chargers won the lower division games, but they also upset Merrimack in a season ending victory on the Blue and beat CAA opponent Albany.
The Albany game was sort of emblematic for how New Haven was able to win games in 2025. They roared out to a fast start and the defense slowed the Great Danes down enough to hang on for the duration of 60 minutes. Despite the injuries, you saw a team that improved throughout the year. I don’t think New Haven could have beaten Albany in Week 1, but I sure bet they wished they had another crack at Marist around midseason one the kinks were worked out on a new staff and a new roster. The team was playing some of its best ball at the end of the season despite the injuries.
At a level where things like momentum still matter in recruiting, New Haven sure does enter the season with a lot of it- and a permanent head coach, to boot.
The nature of college football is ultimately like any other job. You have to prove it, over and over again. Coach Powell got the chance to do it for 2025 and succeeded by bringing the Chargers to .500. They’ll be anticipated to bring back top level talent again next season and the expectations are going to be high in New Haven. Coach Powell has a contract through 2028. He’ll have to keep proving it.
But he’s only got 31 years left to catch up with his grandfather.
