He’s making history in college football. His coaching roots are deep in Georgia.
In front of 3,000 fans on a Wednesday night in February, Tre Lamb called his shot.
The Tulsa head football coach was handed the microphone during a basketball game as he and his players were introduced on the hardwood. Lamb was gearing up for his second spring practice with the Golden Hurricane.
He urged the fans to be sure to support the football team in the fall and did his best to keep the crowd excited for a critical conference game.
Then he mentioned the season opener against Oklahoma State.
Lamb and Tulsa had beaten the Cowboys several months prior for the first win in the historic series since 1998.
Oklahoma State, with a new coach and new roster, were certainly going to be the favorites when the season rolled round six months later. Still, Lamb was confident in his team.
“We’ll beat their ass again,” Lamb said. The crowd erupted and he couldn’t help but smile with his players.
Saturday, Lamb and his team did just that. They handily defeated Oklahoma State for the second straight time, something that hadn’t happened since the early 1950s.
“I was just trying to build confidence with our players and our university,” Lamb told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week. “Like I want this program to be a championship caliber program. When you talk the talk, you have to walk the walk, and they backed me up, man. The players back me up this week.”
Last year when Tulsa went to Stillwater for a big program win against their in-state foe, players were celebrating in the locker room after. Some of them were in tears and the result was unexpected, even for Lamb.
With the game being played at home to begin this season, Lamb felt like he had the ability to do it again.
His dad, Hal Lamb, was on the sideline for the 14-point upset.
“Most of the time I’ll be in the stands, but I just stood on the sideline for the entire game,” Hal said. “I just felt like I was in the game. I was yelling at the referees and was all into it.”
Hal has had his fair share of yelling at referees and being the coach on the sideline.
Winning was the expectation
Hal brought Calhoun High School three state championships and 18 region titles in 20 seasons with the Yellow Jackets from 1999 to 2019. He was 238-52 at Calhoun and won 118 straight region games.
Tre had a front row seat to seeing that success, essentially from birth.
At halftime of an annual rivalry game between Cartersville and Cass 37 years ago, Hal got a phone call. He took his headset off and got in his car to drive to the hospital.
The then-Cartersville assistant coach’s wife, Kim, was going into labor with their first son, Tre. The oldest Lamb son was born one day after the Purple Hurricanes defeated their rivals 29-8.
Tre attended his first football practice when he was just 1 year old. Hal got his first head coaching job in 1997 at Upson-Lee before taking the helm at Calhoun in 2000. Tre hung around his dad at Calhoun for much of Hal’s tenure with the Yellow Jackets. He played quarterback for his dad before being a three-year starter at Tennessee Tech.
“I didn’t realize it then, but the most unique part was just how consistent he was,” Tre said. “It was really, really, really rare to deal with a loss. We didn’t lose much, and he didn’t lose much in his career. Kind of dominated that northwest portion of the state for the better part of 10, 12 years, and it was just really weird to lose a game. So I grew up around winning, and it was the expectation that we were going to win.”
After his playing career wrapped up in 2013, Tre started to rise up the coaching ranks. He spent a couple years at Tennessee Tech, then went to work with his uncle Bobby Lamb at Mercer before returning to serve as offensive coordinator at Tennessee Tech in 2018 and ’19. The next year he earned his first head coaching gig at Gardner-Webb where he would spend four years. He was head coach at East Tennessee State for a season prior to taking the job at Tulsa in December 2024.
It took him just 12 years to go from a position coach at his college alma mater to an FBS head football coach.
“(Coaching football) is just kind of what I’ve always wanted to do,” Tre said. “I love it. I love the locker room. I love being around the players. I love the Xs and Os. It’s just been awesome. I’ve taken a little bit from everybody I’ve worked for and everybody I’ve worked with.”
Lamb’s first season as a head coach was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and his first true season was shortened to just four games. He followed that up with a 4-7 year.
In Year Three with Gardner-Webb, Lamb went 5-0 in conference play to send the Bulldogs to the FCS playoffs for the first time 1992. He reached the postseason again in 2023 as he started to figure things out.
“I made a lot of mistakes, and I probably wasn’t ready for the job by any means,” Tre said. “I hired some of the wrong people. I emphasized too many things and had to worry about the wrong stuff. I wasn’t as good with the media as I am now, and as good a recruiter as I am now, and a good leader as I am now. You learn as you grow, and you’re learning every year.”
Now, he has Tulsa — a program that has had just 11 winning seasons since 2000 — believing they can go far. It’s expected for them to hang around Power Four teams like Oklahoma State. A team that wasn’t predicted to win six games is now a road favorite against a solid Sam Houston this weekend.
Tre welcomes being a target and understands that every game is the biggest game now.
“He’s always been a confident person,” Hal said of his son. “He’s only 5-8, 5-9, and not many people gave him a chance to be a Division I quarterback. But he was a great FCS quarterback, and nobody gave him that chance. So he’s always been a confident person and you can feel it even when he’s coaching.”
And that confidence stems back from Tre standing on the sidelines of his dad’s games at Phil Reeve Stadium 20 years ago. He made regular visits to the Georgia Dome in December to see Calhoun play in the state championship game.
A coaching family
Tre hasn’t been to a game in Calhoun for a couple years, but he still uses his connections, and his namesake, as a recruiting tool. Tulsa has 10 players from Georgia on the 2026 roster.
He said behind Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana, he thinks Georgia is the fourth-most important recruiting state for him and his staff.
“Those relationships are deep,” Tre said. “I know most of the coaches in the state. I’ve recruited that state for a long time, and you know it carries some weight when your dad’s Hal and your granddad’s Ray, who were great coaches in that state.”
Ray Lamb was a longtime coach at Commerce, Warren County and Monroe Area, winning three state titles from 1965 to 1981. He also served as the high school relations coordinator for the University of Georgia football program from 1993-2011.
Hal retired from coaching after the 2019 season and now serves as the executive director of athletic programs and leadership development for Calhoun City Schools.
This role allows him to attend his son’s games, which are now a plane ride away as opposed to a couple hours’ drive.
“I kind of mentor coaches and try to help our ADs as much as possible, and I’m glad to still be a part of athletics. It also gives me the leeway that if I needed to go to a game to watch Tre’s games, I can do that. So it’s the best of both worlds.”
Now, he gets to see his son stress on the sidelines, labor over the right play call and take in the glory after wins. Tre calls his dad and his uncle to get advice, though he’ll still try to put his own spin on it.
And that’s just how the Lambs like it.
“I think I was basically just growing up a winner and understanding what it took to win and building a culture like he built,” Tre said. “All my family members approach the game differently. They’re all in coaching, but I’ve kind of developed my own system and my own way of doing things and taking the best from the people I’ve been around and I’ve learned from.”