Some deaths stop you in your tracks and leave you asking questions nobody can answer.
Why him? Why now? Why so young?
The passing of former Yale football coach Tony Reno is one of those.
Reno died Friday at just 52 after battling Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD. Before this, I had never heard of it. It is a rare, devastating brain disease that progresses rapidly and has no cure. Even knowing its name and what it does doesn’t make what happened to him any easier to comprehend. Yahoo Sports
How does a man with so much life ahead of him get dealt something so cruel?
His son was his quarterback, for God’s sake.
Think about that. Think about all the years that lead to an opportunity like that. The backyard throws. The conversations on the ride home. The little boy watching his father coach, growing up and eventually pulling on that same school’s uniform. Oh by the way, that school was Yale!
Dante began his college career at South Carolina before transferring to Yale in 2025 to play for his dad—a season that would ultimately be Tony Reno’s last on the Bulldogs’ sideline.
What an incredible chapter they had reached together. How much more there should have been.
Instead, a family is grieving. A football program is hurting. And a young man is learning how to live in a world without his father.
The day after Tony died, Dante Reno threw for 298 yards and four touchdowns in Yale’s 41–24 victory over Merrimack.
I keep coming back to that.
A young man waking up that morning with a loss most of us can barely imagine, then putting on his uniform and taking the field with his teammates.
There is no score that makes something like this okay. Four touchdown passes cannot fix a broken heart. We can admire what Dante did while remembering how much he is carrying.
But there was something deeply moving about seeing him play the game he shared with his dad, surrounded by the program his dad helped build.
For a few hours, football gave him somewhere to put all that love. Honestly, that is some powerful, get all in your feelings kind of stuff. The stuff that makes grown men cry, like the ending of Field of Dreams.
I don’t follow Yale every Saturday. But through my friendship with Jack Ford, who is pretty much Mr. Yale Football, and Barton Simmons, my former colleague at Rivals.com and a former Bulldog, I feel a connection to that program that I don’t have with most of the other Ivy League schools.
Friends of Full Ride should be very familiar with Jack, as he has made many guest appearances on our show to discuss complicated legal issues.
When I reached out to Jack, I wanted to understand Tony beyond the record book.
Jack had served on the committee that recommended hiring him. Over the years, he became close with Tony and his wife.
His reply was beautiful. And heartbreaking.
“He was diagnosed with a rapid on-set, always fatal neuro-degenerative disease last fall and his decline was predictably swift,” Jack wrote. “I visited with him at home in August but he wasn’t capable of speech or recognition by then. It was heartbreaking!”
Read that, and the football results can wait a minute.
A friend goes to visit a man he loves, and the familiar conversation is no longer possible. There are things he wants to say, memories he wants to share, and a disease has taken away the ability to meet each other in the way they always had. I mean, what the heck is life sometimes, guys. Makes no sense why a person like Reno had to suffer so much.
That is the part of these stories we don’t see in the tributes or the final scores. The months families endure. The helplessness of friends. The grief that begins long before the goodbye.
Jack knew that pain. He also knew the man who came before it.
“He was driven as a coach—but in the best possible way,” he wrote. “He was intent on not only winning football games … but, more important, on using success on the field to prepare his young men for success in life, on using this greatest of all games to transform the lives of young men.”
Then Jack added a sentence that tells you why Tony mattered:
“Many coaches will say that—but Tony lived that.”
Reno’s football résumé was outstanding: five Ivy League championships, victories over Harvard in seven of his final nine meetings, and a final season in 2025 that brought a conference title and Yale’s first FCS playoff appearance.
Even the casual football fan understands that Harvard-Yale matters. The setting and traditions may look different from those in Tuscaloosa or Knoxville, but nobody involved needs an explanation of what beating the other side means. The atmosphere is certainly less burgers and beer and more caviar and quail eggs!
Tony understood winning. He also understood what he wanted those victories to make possible.
Jack told me Tony believed leadership could be taught, and that the lessons his players learned through football could serve them wherever life took them. Along with retired four-star Army general Stanley McChrystal, who taught a leadership seminar at Yale, Tony took the team to Gettysburg each year to study leadership and loss.
Those experiences stay with a person.
So do the moments when a coach shows you who he is.
Jack shared one memory I haven’t been able to shake.
A Yale quarterback had overthrown a wide-open receiver in the end zone on the final play. A completion would have provided the winning points in a game that ultimately decided the Ivy League title.
Everything a coach had worked toward was sitting there in that missed opportunity.
Tony was the first to reach his quarterback.
He embraced him, Jack recalled, “in a shared tearful hug.”
That young man knew what the miss had cost. He didn’t need someone to explain it. He needed someone to stand with him while it hurt.
His coach got there first.
I wonder how often that player has thought about that hug over the years. I wonder how it shaped the way he has responded to someone else’s mistake.
That is how a coach’s influence keeps moving through the world. Those moments matter. They are real, and they shape lives.
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Back to the story…
The father-and-son part of this story hits me especially hard because of Rick and Jerry Neuheisel.
Working alongside Rick, I understand what it meant to him to have Jerry at UCLA. Their opportunity to share the program ended when Rick was dismissed and Jim Mora took over.
Jerry stayed. And in 2014, he had his unforgettable moment, coming off the bench to lead UCLA to a victory over Texas.
Rick wasn’t his coach that night. But he was still his dad, able to watch and celebrate his son’s big moment.
There is something wonderful about that. A father spends years watching his child grow, knowing the work, the disappointment and the waiting that others never see. Then the moment arrives.
Tony deserved more of those Saturdays.
He deserved to see what came next for Dante. He deserved more ordinary days with his wife and children, too.
Jack had seen what coaching Dante meant to him.
“After the first game of the 2025 season,” he wrote, “his joy at seeing his son start for him in a Yale uniform was transcendent.”
By then, Jack said, Tony’s symptoms were just becoming somewhat apparent to those who knew him best.
Knowing that makes the memory even more tender. There was a father experiencing something extraordinary with his son, as an illness was beginning to threaten the future they imagined.
“Seeing Dante perform as he did last Saturday—and dedicate the game to his father—made you believe in that extraordinary, unbreakable bond that some blessed fathers and sons are so very fortunate to share,” Jack wrote.
“And if you believe in an afterlife, you can be sure that Tony’s joy in his son was once again transcendent.”
I won’t pretend to know the answers to what happens after we die. But I understand why that thought brings comfort.
A dad watching his boy.
Still proud.
Tony was 52. I am 44.
That distance feels awfully small.
We talk about the fragility of life after something terrible happens. We mean it. We promise ourselves we will remember. Then the calendar fills up again, something aggravates us, and we start acting as though all the important things can safely wait.
Another phone call. Another visit. Another chance to tell someone what they mean to us.
I catch myself doing it, too.
There is no lesson that justifies what happened to Tony Reno. His family shouldn’t have had to lose him for the rest of us to remember what matters.
But we can listen to the people who knew him. We can pay attention to how he lived.
Jack closed his email this way:
“For the Yale football family—which is extraordinarily close—this is a time of deep sorrow—and of great joy for having known and loved such a man.”
That is a beautiful thing to be able to say about somebody.
The sorrow is enormous because the love was enormous. Because he gave people something they will carry. Because, in a moment when a young quarterback felt he had let everyone down, Tony Reno reached him and put his arms around him.
On Saturday, Tony’s own son took the field with a heartbreak no teammate or coach could take away.
I hope he felt them reaching for him.
I hope, in the place his father loved, among the people his father helped bring together, Dante felt surrounded by that same care.
And I hope that long after the touchdowns fade from memory, he can return to the moment Jack described: his dad on the sideline, watching him start in a Yale uniform.
The joy on his father’s face.
The pride that was already his.
The love he will never have to earn again.
Great read Chris. Blessings to the Reno family and friends, and the Yale team.