College Football Coach Hire Grades: Buffalo

Buffalo Bulls: Pete Lembo

Why the job was open: Maurice Linguist came in with the challenge of being the guy who replaced “the guy” and that is always a tough role to be in. A lot of players followed Lance Leipold to Kansas which made roster construction even tougher. They came from contending to MAC championships to just decent but last season things began to backslide. The pressure was going to be on, but Linguist got an offer he simply couldn’t refuse to be Alabama’s defensive coordinator…the Nick Saban domino gets another.

Coach Profile: Pete Lembo has a very interesting career arch. He became a head coach very quickly in his career at Lehigh where he was one of the youngest head coaches in FCS at the time. He compiled an incredible 44-14 record there with 2 FCS playoff appearances. Lembo would move on to Elon University in 2006 and found immediate success there as well. He led the Phoenix to their first ever FCS playoff appearance in 2009, he had a 35-22 record there overall. Lembo moved on to Ball State and helped get the Cardinals program on the right track. He led them to back to back bowls in 2012 and 2013, including a 10-3 record in 2013, they went 7-1 in MAC play that year only losing to a NIU team that went undefeated in the regular season. Lembo finished with a 33-29 record at Ball State, and grabbed some notable wins over Indiana (twice) and Virginia. Things dropped off a bit at the end of his tenure and he left to be the special teams coach at Maryland. This started a long stretch where he was an absolute weapon as a special teams coach for Maryland, Rice, Memphis, and South Carolina.

Why he will succeed: Lembo can coach, he’s won everywhere including in the MAC. What’s most notable is that he knows how to develop players and use special teams to his advantage, that’s going to be huge in the MAC. There’s bound to be some things he’s picked up from the staffs he was on to have further success at the FBS level this time around. It also helps that Buffalo has the biggest athletics budget in the conference.

What obstacles are in the way of success: Buffalo is one of the toughest places to recruit in the conference, most of the other programs are at least in close proximity to great talent but New York for whatever reason doesn’t have a deep talent base, it’s never made sense to me why such a big state doesn’t produce more great football players. Buffalo overall doesn’t have a great history of success, only 6 bowl appearances all time, and half of those came from Leipold. Is Lembo ready for the long haul this time around? Year 5 at Ball State was where things fell apart there.

Grade: A- – Buffalo had this opening happen pretty late in the cycle but I think they did a great job. This program is willing to invest to obtain results like they did with Leipold and they hired a coach who’s already proven he can succeed at arguably a tougher job within the same conference and is capable of doing it again.