Buffalo's hire of Pete Lembo isn't flashy, but it is exciting
Don't overlook this low-key hire amid turnover at the sport's biggest jobs.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
“Pete Lembo to Buffalo” feels like an iconic entry in the class of FBS hires that barely even get a second thought in a busy coaching carousel. The biggest part of the story here is really Maurice Linguist leaving to become co–defensive coordinator at Alabama, and that’s really just a footnote in the cascade of events surrounding Nick Saban’s retirement and Kalen DeBoer’s arrival at Alabama. There are much bigger hires to focus on than this one, and it largely fell through the cracks when it was announced in late January.
That’s a shame, because Lembo’s hire is a rather fascinating one on somewhat closer inspection. Despite arriving after bouncing around between a series of assistant HC roles at Maryland, Rice, Memphis, and South Carolina, he has a long history as a head coach—three five-year stints between 2001 and 2015, first at Lehigh, then at Elon, and most recently at Ball State. He departed from his last job of his own volition to take the assistant role at Maryland, which raises the question: why, after all this time, is he back in the MAC?
The Buffalo side of the equation makes a certain amount of sense. Linguist and his predecessor, Lance Leipold, both left the Bulls in the lurch in recent years, with the former taking most of the roster with him to Kansas and the latter bailing after a dip from seven wins to three. Lembo’s been around the block and, if we’re being honest, is probably not going to earn himself a P5 job with his performance here; as Alex Kirshner wrote for Split Zone Duo, Buffalo probably hired him “because they don’t think he’ll leave“.
Okay, fair enough. The Bulls are tired of having to completely rebuild every few years, and they like the upside Lembo showed at BSU (9-4 and 10-3 seasons in 2012 and 2013) enough to settle for the downside (an 8-16 finish in 2014 and 2015) as insurance that he’s less likely to jump ship without warning. It’s a sensible, if somewhat unexciting, move for a program that needs stability amid realignment.
But why does Lembo want to be here?
Well, coaches do typically want to take HC jobs. But this is a rather unusual case because Lembo previously left a job very much like this one, which raises the question: what’s changed since 2015? Is it something about Buffalo in particular that appeals to him, being a Staten Island native? Or does he see opportunity here that wasn’t present at Ball State a decade ago?
Well, why don’t we ask him?
This is, and can be, a very, very special place…far more important than any of those things, it’s the people here, on this campus and in this community, that have me so fired up about this opportunity. When you go through a search process as a candidate, and now on my first two days on the job, you find out a lot about people…I can’t tell you how impressed I am with everyone I’ve met—their passion for UB, their willingness to help me, to help [his wife] Jen, to help us get started—it’s just been tremendous.
Sure, that quote (from Lembo’s introduction in January) is, to a certain extent, just new-hire boilerplate. But you can learn more than you might expect from what a coach emphasizes in their first press conference at a new program, and Lembo made a point of this more than most coaches do: despite recent appearances, Buffalo genuinely is a pretty attractive job. The Bulls outspend every other program in the MAC, and Leipold’s tenure demonstrated that they have a very high ceiling if they can capitalize on the investment the university has in football.
Lembo wants to be the one to make that happen, and Buffalo hopes he’ll stay around if he does. He’s been making all the right moves so far—most notably poaching defensive coordinator Joe Bowen from Miami-Ohio, where he oversaw a top-ten unit last year. There are still plenty of unknowns, sure; I’m less bullish about the decision to retain Linguist’s recent hire of Dave Patenaude as offensive coordinator, and the returns (or lack thereof) going into 2024 suggest it’ll be a rough rebuilding year, but no MAC job is ever going to be easy, even with the resources Buffalo has.
It’s been a good start, and Lembo seems excited about the possibilities here. Whether that means he’ll have the energy to drag the Bulls back to the top of the league, and whether it means he’ll stick around if P5 or high-level G5 offers do open up to him, well…there’s really no way of knowing until we see how it plays out. But it’s not hard to get excited about this hire if you know the story, and the Bulls sound just as optimistic about the future as Lembo does. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Buffalo quietly build into a consistently strong program under his leadership; as much as this hire flew under the radar, it could easily become one of the best of the 2024 cycle.
The Last Five Years
The ceiling and the floor at Buffalo have both been made very clear in recent years. In 2020, they went 6-1, finished ranked for the first time in program history, and had one of the most impressive individual rushing performances ever by junior Jaret Patterson (409 yards, 8 touchdowns against Kent State). Two years later, they lost to FCS Holy Cross. That team pulled off a remarkable turnaround to finish 7-6, but the Bulls cratered again in 2023, taking another FCS loss against Fordham and closing out the year at 3-9.
It’s gonna be bad again in 2024. 29% of Buffalo’s production is back, the third-lowest mark in FBS, leaving them with an inexperienced roster that isn’t getting any help from a transition-year recruiting class. Most of the attention will be on how well the Bulls can improve on their roster for 2025; don’t expect to see anything near a finished product on the field this season. The core of this team might play a part in Buffalo’s future success, but we’d be lucky to get more than glimmers of their potential in a clear Year Zero.
The Next Five Years
Part of the reason it’s so hard to form a firm opinion about this hire is that…honestly, it really does feel like it could go any number of ways. Maybe Lembo can’t recapture his early success in his previous MAC stint, and the Bulls fire him in a few years’ time. Maybe he can, and he ends up parlaying it into a bigger job elsewhere after all. Or maybe Buffalo has struck gold, landing on a coach good enough that they can battle for conference titles, without being so good that P5 teams come calling to send them back to square one.
It’s a tough balance to strike. This program has seen glorious highs and depressing lows with a dizzying frequency over the last twenty years or so, and trying to build a reliably strong team in this conference feels like a bit of a fool’s errand. But it’s not a bad target to aim for, even if they aren’t likely to hit it perfectly; if nothing else, they can try to make it a little less of an uphill struggle just to have a competent football program.
Sure, “Pete Lembo to Buffalo” is an easy storyline to overlook. But there’s a remarkable complexity to this choice for both coach and team, one which you couldn’t be blamed for missing if you don’t take a much closer look at what’s going on here, at a subtly fascinating program in one of FBS’s worst conferences. As is ever the case in college football, nothing is ever quite as simple or unimportant as it seems at first glance, and the Bulls have put a lot of thought into their pursuit of a consistent contender in the MAC.