Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 1-0
2022Camellia BowlW 23-21
Poach watch
Every coordinator →Alabama co-defensive coordinator, 2026
This winter
Our poach model, on his team’s results so far, how his unit compares with the FBS average this season and last, his program’s standing and his role. Ranked against the 329 FBS coordinators with 3+ games this season. The zone words describe the market’s interest; none of them says he is leaving.
What drives his number
The biggest factors, each against the typical FBS coordinator today.
- ▼ LowerA co-coordinator, on defense
- ▲ HigherHis defense allows 3.1 points a game fewer than the FBS average · last season his defense allowed 8.6 fewer
- ▼ LowerA Power Four program · 99th percentile of FBS in program stature last season
- ▲ HigherHis team is 6-2, outscoring opponents by 17.0 points a game · AP-ranked
How good is this number? It ranks a coordinator who moves up ahead of one who stays 71 to 73% of the time, and its average matches the share who actually move. What it can’t do
Tested on every FBS coordinator from 2018 through 2025, each season scored by a model fit only on the seasons before it: from three games on, given one coordinator who moved up and one who didn’t, it ranked the one who moved ahead 71 to 73% of the time, and its average chance came within a tenth of a point of the share who actually moved.
- Counting a coordinator who follows his hired-away head coach as moving up was decided after the model’s first results were seen.
- Much of the signal comes through his head coach: coordinators often move because their boss is hired away. This site’s number for head coaches is now live, on each head coach’s page, but this number doesn’t use it.
- Moves to NFL coordinator jobs are undercounted in the history it learned from; they were found mainly for coordinators with Wikipedia pages.
- On its own it is weak at picking which coordinator lands a head-coaching job (about 60% on the same test). The number is about moving up by any route.
- It is frozen: it learns nothing from 2026 until a deliberate refit.
Report card
Below the median on both sides of the ball — 47th percentile offense, 26th percentile defense.
Buffalo, every completed season graded against the whole field, then averaged.
Offense
Defense
Each season is his team’s percentile among every team with that stat (the share it beat), averaged over his completed seasons here; a mid-season takeover year and the season in progress aren’t graded. Letters: A+ 90th percentile and up, A 80, B+ 70, B 60, B− 50, C+ 45, C 40, C− 30, D 15, F below.
Fans
No fan talk about him on our list yet. His record is on Career.
Stats
Big games
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
3-0 against his rivals. Winless in 3 tries against Jamey Chadwell.
ATS is his record against the spread: did his team beat the closing betting line, winning by more than it or losing by less? Lines start in 2013; a dash means fewer than 6 of those games had one. One-score games carry no spread record: a big favorite that wins a close game has almost always failed to cover, so that number would say nothing about the coach.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Ran more than the situation called for under Montgomery.
2,690 run and pass snaps at Buffalo, 2021–2023, his own games, one row per offensive coordinator. Each cell is how much more often he passed than the rest of FBS did in the same situation (field zone, down, distance, score, quarter, same season), in percentage points.
Pass rate, stint by stint
Where each stint’s offense sat between run-first and pass-first, and how far it moved from one season to the next, against the FBS-wide average of 41% pass. The band is that stint’s real season-to-season range, not a fixed-width box.
Season-to-season pass-rate range for all 449 FBS coaching stints with at least three covered seasons, 2004–2025.
Building the roster
Four numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His 3 ranked Buffalo classes of his own have averaged #87 nationally — best #81, worst #97.
His class — he had the full signing cycle
Rank is each signing class’s national recruiting rank (#1 is best). Only a class he had a full signing cycle to build counts as his.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2024 roster arrived on his watch — 59 of 119 players. The other 60 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 22% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2021–2024Counting players who have since left: 18% of the 136 arrivals we can classify came through the portal.
“His own” means the player arrived while he was head coach; “inherited” means a predecessor brought him in.
Size up front
Size up front
Offensive linemen on his Buffalo rosters have averaged 6 lb lighter than the FBS average (2021–2023) — lighter than 86% of FBS coaching runs since 2010. In the three seasons before he arrived, Buffalo’s line averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average.
Average listed weight of every offensive lineman on each season’s roster, holdovers included, against every FBS roster that season (2010 on; a program needs 3+ seasons under him to appear). Weights are the ones programs publish, and programs list differently. This describes size only — not scheme, and not quality.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 12 of 87 signees (14%) across his 2021–2024 tenure, drawn from 28 states in all. Next: GA (11).
22% of his signees come from NY and its 5 border states (PA 4, NJ 2, MA 1).
Off this map: 5 signees to the west (CA 5).
- median hometown distance
- 289 mi
- within 100 mi
- 22%
- within 500 mi
- 68%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 15%
The map counts signed recruits across his tenure; the distance figures cover his current roster, transfers and walk-ons included. Two different groups, kept separate on purpose.
News
No outlet on our list has written about him by name yet. His record is on Career.
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
8th-best Buffalo tenure of 11 by the numbers.
Followed Lance Leipold (2015–2020) · succeeded by Pete Lembo (2024–now).
| Season | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||||
| Record | 4-8 | 7-6 | 3-9 | 0-0 | |
| Postseason | — | W bowl | — | — | |
| Coordinators | |||||
| OC | Shane Montgomery | Shane Montgomery | DJ Mangas | — | |
| DC | Joe Cauthen | Brandon Bailey | Robert Wright | — | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||||
| Offense | 24 | 34 | 8 | — | |
| Defense | 20 | 50 | 70 | — | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||||
| 1st-down pass% | 36.3 | 43.8 | 46.1 | — | |
| Red-zone pass% | 25.0 | 33.1 | 33.3 | — | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 47.2 | 40.4 | 52.3 | — | |
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
Typical size for position, once adjusted for position mix.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
Was he good?
The data leans negative, where the data can separate from zero: every conclusive reading points the same way.
-5.5 pts at Buffalo · #1030 of 1290 · bottom quarter