Building on strength

Dan Renzetti

Kevin Cahill speaks at the announcement of his appointment as the Joel E. Smilow ’54 Head Coach of Football. View full image

Soon after the football team’s thrilling 2025 season, which included a first-ever win in the FCS tournament, Yale Athletics made a stunning announcement: Head coach Tony Reno would be taking a medical leave to address an unspecified health issue.
What initially appeared to be a temporary absence became permanent on February 17, when Reno announced he would step down. He departs Yale as one of the most successful coaches in the program’s history, with 83 total wins in 14 seasons, trailing only Carm Cozza, whose teams won 179 games over 32 seasons.

“I am incredibly proud of the foundation we laid and confident in the future of Yale football,” Reno said in a statement issued by the athletics department. “Serving as the head coach of this program has been the greatest honor of my life.”

Just six days later, Yale announced that a familiar face would become the Bulldogs’ 35th head coach: Kevin Cahill, who served on Yale’s coaching staff for ten seasons before departing for his own head coaching opportunity at Lehigh in 2022. There, Cahill led the Mountain Hawks out of a slump that had lasted several losing seasons; after a rebuilding year, his teams went to the FCS playoffs in both 2024 and 2025. Last year, the team went a perfect 12–0 in the regular season, earning Cahill the honor of national FCS Coach of the Year. 

As his profile grew, the idea of coming home to New Haven wasn’t on the radar; in fact, Cahill had just signed a multi-year contract extension at Lehigh. “It was not an immediate yes, to be honest with you,” says Cahill, a native of upstate New York who played quarterback at Springfield College. “I was able to do it my own way at Lehigh, and I was very proud of that, and we had a lot of good things going.
There’s a lot of things that have to fit for me.”

What convinced Cahill was that the move back to Yale was right for his family. “My family was excited to move back to Connecticut. It is a place where my kids grew up,” he says. “That’s when it became a yes. It was a yes career-wise, and a yes family-wise. And a lot of it had to do with my relationship with Tony and the Reno family.” 

Cahill has been coaching since he graduated from college in 2001, including stints at Maine Maritime Academy, Springfield College, the University of Tennessee–Martin, Murray State, and the University of Maine before first coming to Yale in 2012. This time, as head coach, he steps into a program in an unusual position—not a team in need of change, but a team looking to build on more than a decade of success under Reno. He takes over a group that made FCS playoff history and returns its starting quarterback, Dante Reno ’28, the former coach’s son. 

“A lot of what we were doing at Lehigh had a lot to do with what I learned at Yale with Tony. So a lot of that will look very, very similar,” says Cahill, who was the offensive coordinator at Yale before leading the Mountain Hawks. “But as I told the team, I said, ‘Listen, I have a lot of love and respect for Tony Reno. I’m also not Tony Reno. I can’t be him. I’m going to be who I am, and that’s who I was hired to be.’”

Cahill just wants to get to know his team before spring practice—and it didn’t help that students went on spring break two weeks after his mid-semester hire. “It was just long enough to get to know their names and faces, and then spring break is just long enough to forget. So I’ve been studying,” he says. “It’ll be interesting, because when they get back, they’ll be putting helmets on. I won’t be able to look at their faces.”

As for what comes next, Cahill wants Yale to think big. The Ivy League allowed its football teams to participate in postseason play for the first time in 2025, making its teams eligible to compete for a national championship in the FCS, the second tier of Division I college football. “How can we not think so small?” Cahill says. “How do we become a national power coming out of the Ivy League? I think we can, and I think we’ve got the pieces in place to do it.”