Coach Lance Leipold - He's good

[admin]

Lance Leipold was hired by Danny White.  See my other post.

We were all somewhat disappointed in season 1 when he went 5-7.  Somehow, we all though this guy wouldn't lose.  Well when he lost 7 games, we realized that he's human after all.  So we cut him some slack.

In year 2, the bottom fell out and we finished the season 2-10.  We even lost to lowly Albany and it seemed like Buffalo had made a huge mistake in hiring this DIII coach.  It looked like he was in over his head.

Well in year 3, we saw things turn around.  It was a mediocre 6-6 season, but we saw things we hadn't seen in years.  A competitive team.  A fun team with a high scoring offense.  A bright future with a young stud QB.  A team that fought all season and finished strong winning 3 games in a row.

Here we are in year 4 and the team dare I say it looks great.  This offense matches the team that went to the International Bowl that featured Drew Willy, Naaman Roosevelt and James Starks.  Perhaps that team with Starks had a more balanced attack.  Starks was a HR threat when he touched the ball.  Naaman was also a threat to take it any time he touched the ball.

I think LL has made some nice adjustments along the way.  The hiring of coach Zebrowski was a key ingredient in turning this around.  He's done a great job in developing Tyree and serving as the co-offensive coordinator to Kotelnicki who does not have as much experience and perhaps was not ready to be the sole OC for a D1 program.

It's still early, but I hope we can lock up LL for many years.  I suspect that he will stay for a bit from looking at his history at Wisc-WW.  Alnutt will probably need to raise some funds and redo LL's and the Assistant salaries at this rate.

[zigo230]

Yep. LL is doing a great job here.  Looking back, it's almost better that he started out slowly. I mean he inherited a team and had to assemble his staff, recruit his style of players and get them up to speed.  As coach says, it takes time to build a program and there are many ups and downs along the way until you get there.  Now hopefully we keep seeing more ups.

I noticed on one of the Rutgers message boards there's a thread about Coach Leipold.   Those fans are envious.  He's certainly getting noticed by others.  Coach seems like a stable guy that will stick around a while once he gets his program up to speed.  I hope that's the case at UB.