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Stony Brook Announces Billy Cosh as New Head Football Coach

Following an 0-10 season, the Stony Brook Seawolves are parting ways with long-time head coach Chuck Priore and hiring Western Michigan offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Billy Cosh to lead the team into the future in a coaching carousel no one saw coming. 

This will be the 31-year-old’s first opportunity to lead a program, and he will be only the third head coach in the 40-year history of Stony Brook football. 

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Now, on to Billy. He comes from a coaching family. He’s the son of Chris Cosh, a long-time coach and coordinator at multiple levels of college football, serving stints at major schools, including Michigan State, Kansas State, and Maryland.

Before starting his career as a coach, Cosh was a college quarterback at multiple programs, most notably at the University of Houston and at the Junior College level, where he led Butler Community College to the 2012 NJCCA National Championship.

Despite this being his first stint as Head Coach, Cosh has already made a name for himself at the FBS and FCS levels as a talented offensive mind. Starting as a Wide Receivers Coach at the Virginia Military Institute from 2018-2019 following a stint as a graduate assistant at Indiana, the former Houston quarterback coached multiple 1,000-yard receivers and four All-Conference players. 

This successful tenure was enough to earn him a promotion to the position of offensive coordinator at VMI, where he’d be a major factor in the 2020 Keydets making their only FCS playoff appearance to date while winning their first conference championship in over 40 years. VMI would post another winning season in 2021 with Cosh as a coordinator, finishing top 20 in the FCS in scoring offense and passing efficiency in both seasons.

Cosh also played a major role in the development of current Montreal Alouettes quarterback Reece Udinski, who was one of the best quarterbacks at the FCS level during his tenure at VMI.

This would be enough to earn him the offensive coordinator position at the University of Richmond for the 2022 season. 

Cosh would convince Udinski to transfer from Maryland and join him, where the two would combine to form one of the most formidable FCS offenses in the country. The Spiders would finish with a 9-4 record, while scoring 31.3 points per game and finishing top-25 nationally in 10 different offensive categories. =

This was enough to earn Richmond their first berth to the FCS playoffs since 2016, where they’d demolish Davidson 41-0 in the first round before losing a close contest to top-five ranked Sacramento State. 

After a stellar season, Cosh finally started to attract the attention of FBS programs, eventually joining Lance Taylor’s staff at Western Michigan in 2023. While the team went just 4-8, Cosh still managed to lead one of the most potent offenses in the MAC, finishing third in yards per game (365.0) and first downs (19.8) while finishing second in passing offense (211.2). Quarterback Hayden Wolff also led the conference in completion percentage at nearly 66%.

After a strong season at the FBS level, Cosh was bought out by the Seawolves to become their first new head coach in 19 years. As per Overtime Heroics, massive coach buyouts have been surging in college football, even creeping down into the lower levels of the game. 

With such an impressive offensive pedigree, Stony Brook will be looking for Cosh to turn their struggling program around, which has finished with a losing record in each of the past five seasons and hasn’t scored more than 30 points in 21 straight games.