Top Three Coaches of Buffalo’s First Era

With kickoff just 76 days away and Buffalo Coach Maurice Linguist about to complete his first calendar year at Buffalo, I thought it would be neat to take a look back at some other UB coaches.

Let’s start with the “First Era” of UB football which covered from 1894 to 1903. In this era there were three “official coaches” and some player coaches for the Buffalo football team.

#1 Bemus Pierce

Bemus Pierce came to Buffalo a year after C.W. Dibble left and the school was looking for a replacement.

Pierce played for the great Carlisle Indian School teams from 1894-1898 and would later play professional football for the championship teams from the Homestead Library & Athletic Club of 1900 and 1901.

In his single season at the helm at Buffalo he topped the went 8-0, in those games Buffalo outscored their opponents 121-0. Far and away the best season Buffalo has ever had.

#2 C.W. Dibble

C.W. Dibble came to Buffalo after his playing career was suddenly ended in 1896.

Dibble was the left half back for Williams College and was considered one of the most promising backs in the country, you can see from the picture that dibble towered above most college football players of the day.

But his career would effectively end early in his first season when Dibble suffered a serious head injury that caused an Abscess on the Brain.

He came to Buffalo and coached the team to a 7-0 record, one of only two undefeated seasons in school history.

#3 Turk Gordon

Gordon was never an official “coach”, he was a player-coach. And though his tenure at Buffalo included the school's biggest ever loss (a 128-0 drubbing at the hands of Michigan) the school was still 4-2 on the year including impressive wins over ivy league powerhouse Columbia.