Maurice Linguist

Football coach Maurice Linguist serves as the University at Buffalo’s head coach. Texas native Linguist played football for the state-winning Mesquite High School team in 2001 and for Baylor in college as a defensive back. He earned honourable mention on the All-Big 12 Team as a senior. He graduated from Baylor with a bachelor’s in communication and a master’s in sports management. Linguist spent a season working with the Bears as a graduate assistant after playing at Baylor. The next year, he was Valdosta State’s defensive backs and special teams coach. At James Madison, he was the safeties coach from 2009 to 2011.

He first joined the Buffalo coaching staff in 2012 as the defensive backs coach. In 2013, he served as the team’s co-defensive coordinator and recruiting coordinator. He was appointed secondary coach at Iowa State in 2014. He was appointed safeties coach at Mississippi State in 2016. Linguist spent the 2017 campaign as defensive backs coach at Minnesota. He was appointed P J Fleck’s assistant head coach after the campaign. However, he left the Golden Gophers less than a month later, in January 2018, to join the coaching staff at Texas A&M.

In 2020, Mike McCarthy hired him as the secondary coach of the Dallas Cowboys, his first position in the National Football League, after he spent two years as the cornerbacks coach at Texas A&M. After the 2020 NFL season, Linguist accepted a position with Michigan as co-defensive coordinator. However, on May 7, 2021, he accepted a position with the University at Buffalo as head coach. Despite Buffalo’s underwhelming performance in 2021, Sports Illustrated rated Linguist’s recruiting class for 2022 as the second-best in the Mid-American Conference.