Buffalo will hire Wisconsin-Whitewater head coach Lance Leipold as its next head coach, according to a report from Thayer Evans and Pete Thamel at Sports Illustrated. The report was confirmed by FootballScoop and Bruce Feldman of Fox Sports.
If you’re not familiar with Liepold, you should be. In his eighth season at Whitewater, Leipold is 106-6 (you read that correctly) with five national championships and four perfect 15-0 seasons. Under Leipold’s direction, the Warhawks ripped off a 46-game winning streak from 2009-12 and are in the midst of a 29-game winning streak at the present.
Leipold, 50, played at Wisconsin-Whitewater and has spent the bulk of his career at his alma mater, but he also served as a graduate assistant at Wisconsin from 1991-93, and as an assistant at Nebraska from 2001-03.
Leaping from Division III to FBS is extremely rare, but if you’re looking for a comparison, Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly makes the most sense. Kelly bided his time as a successful (though not as successful as Leipold) coach at Division II Grand Valley State, posting a 118-35-2 mark with two national championships from 1991-03 before jumping into the Central Michigan job in 2004. He went 19-16 in three seasons there before getting the Cincinnati job after the 2006 season, and four years later he was the coach of the most visible college football program in America.
The major difference between the two, however, is that Kelly was eight years younger than Leipold when he broke into the big time.
However, Leipold’s ability to continue climbing is a worry for another day. For now, it’s an outside-the-box match at a program that needs to think that way after going 20-36 in five seasons under Jeff Quinn. Playing in the MAC East, Buffalo avoids conference powers Northern Illinois and Toledo and rising force Western Michigan, instead battling Bowling Green and a bunch of dwarves (Akron, Miami (Ohio), Kent State) on an annual basis.
“You can win there,” Leipold told SI.com last week. “That’s one of the special ones no matter if they’ve got seven feet or 11 feet of snow.”
There’s been no official word on whether or not Leipold will finish the season with Wisconsin-Whitewater or jump to Buffalo immediately, but the guess here is that he would remain with the Warhawks through their bid to repeat. Whitewater is 12-0 this season and has a quarterfinal match-up with Wartburg College on Saturday.
For what it’s worth, Craig Bohl was named Wyoming’s head coach on Dec. 8 of last year, but stayed with North Dakota State through their FCS national championship victory on Jan. 4.
We’ll find out for sure tomorrow, as Buffalo has called a 1 p.m. ET press conference to announce the hire.