POUGHKEEPSIE — Entering his third season at the helm of the Marist football program, coach Mike Willis has built year over year progress and improvements.
Despite finishing 5-7 in 2025, the Red Foxes look at three one-score losses as a reason to hold optimism. If certain moments had flipped the other way, the view of the season could’ve been far different.
With another year of molding the program in his vision and a reliable cast of impact players returning, including a highly-touted quarterback, Willis believes tangible results will follow this time around.
“Morale has been great, we’ve had by far our best spring ball since I’ve gotten here,” Willis said to the Poughkeepsie Journal. “While we’re still in the early days of preseason camp, I’m really enjoying the way we’re working every day.”
Tangible results must start with the quarterback, and Marist brings one back with a litany of experience and ample preseason hype. Coming off a year where he accounted for 17 touchdowns and just three interceptions while throwing for 1,818 yards, graduate student Sonny Mannino is undoubtedly the highlight of the returning starters.
An All-Pioneer Football League honorable mention each of the previous two seasons, the 6-foot-5 gunslinger was named the conference’s preseason Offensive Player of the Year by Phil Steele Publications for the 2026 season.
With more than two seasons of experience as the primary quarterback for the Red Foxes, Willis will be leaning heavily on Mannino’s abilities.
“He is tough, he’s very twitchy as an athlete, he’s very coordinated and he has a very notable arm strength,” the head coach said. “Where it’s been fun to see him take a step, he’s operating very well inside the offense … he’s becoming more decisive and processing every day.”
Willis hopes that Mannino can improve on what was a middle of the pack unit overall in the PFL last season. In 2025, Marist ranked seventh out of 11 teams in scoring offense and eighth in total yards per game.
Being more consistent with the ball is imperative for Willis, offensive coordinator TJ Weyl and the rest of the Red Foxes offensive staff.
“We need to improve in efficiency as an offense,” Willis said. “We proved plenty of times last year that we can be explosive. We need to do a great job of making routine plays, staying inside the structure of the offense and staying on schedule during drives.”
The Red Foxes must also improve on the road. In 2025, the Red Foxes finished 1-5 away from Tenney Stadium. All three of Marist’s one-score losses came on the road.
Willis mentioned that starting fast and playing complementary football away from home will be imperative to ultimately pulling out wins in those circumstances.
“Being able to be productive enough early to balance work-to-rest ratio so that nobody is exceedingly tired in the fourth quarter,” the head coach said when asked about what it will take to flip the narrative on the road. “You have to do a really good job of zeroing in on the technical details of football.”
In the same way, Willis is looking to continue to make Tenney Stadium a nightmare for opposing programs to enter after a 4-2 mark at home last season.
“It’s obviously on me, our staff and the players to create an excitement product that people want to see every week.” Willis said.
With what’s expected to be the most talented roster that Willis has assembled in his short time at Marist, he and the Red Foxes program look to finally eclipse a .500 record again and become a premier collegiate program in the Hudson Valley.
This article originally appeared on Poughkeepsie Journal: Marist football looking to build in year 3 under Mike Willis
Reporting by Eric Decker, Poughkeepsie Journal / Poughkeepsie Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Eric Decker, Poughkeepsie Journal | USA TODAY Network
