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Is Tre Lamb a Rising Star or Fraud?
Has there ever been a head football coach receive more praise for doing less than former East Tennessee State head football coach Tre Lamb?
He has a career record of 27–25; not bad, but not outstanding. He’s 24–25 lifetime against Division I competition. Take away the losses to FBS teams on his record and he averages 6–4 annually against FCS competition.
True, he won two conference titles at Gardner-Webb, a traditional loser in FCS competition, with modest seven victory seasons. He even took the Bulldogs from last place in 2021 to first the following season.
But he did it after four teams left the Big South Conference, winning a significantly weakened Ohio Valley Conference-Big South consolidation.
And, yes, in his sole season at ETSU he took advantage of the new transfer rules and took 23 players with him from Gardner-Webb to Johnson City. And that resulted in the Buccaneers posting a 7–5 record, 6–4 against the FCS, up from the back-to-back 3–8 records the Bucs had posted before.
But ETSU was 3–8 those seasons because they hired an incompetent head coach to lead them after posting a combined 16–4 record in 2021 and 2020. The Southern Conference was, for all intents and purposes, down in 2024 with more than half the teams finishing with losing records and only one winning more…
