BEAUMONT, Texas ­– Pete Rossomando was named Lamar's head football coach on Dec. 10, 2022 ­– 650 days ago. Rossomando, 52, made each of those days – and every relationship – count as he overhauled a program with three winning seasons since 1980.
 
Sure, the Cardinals' football program laid dormant for the entirety of the '90s and first decade of the 2000s, but winning has been evasive. Since the school brought football back for the 2010 season, there have been more head coaches than winning seasons. Now, Lamar is trending on the national landscape in football, vaulting into the Top 25 for the first time since the sport made its return.
 
Rossomando – and the Lamar leadership team – are being heaped with praise for the rapid turnaround. Jaime Taylor was hired as the school's 16th president in July 2021, and a year later he added Jeff O'Malley as the Vice President and Director of Athletics. Following a 1-10 football season, and just six months into the AD job, O'Malley made a change in football leadership and used his lengthy career as a college athletics administrator and the connections that come with it to unearth a gem in Rossomando.
 
Fourteen games later, the Cardinals are in the national conversation in football.
 
"They changed the culture internally," said Juan J. Zabala, Vice President and Executive Director of the Lamar University Foundation. "The rest of our universe was already aligned – the facilities; the support; the corporate relations. We're surrounded by some of the best high school football programs in the state. All that was missing was the culture internally and O'Malley and Rossomando have changed that to a winning mindset. Every bit of what they do is to give the student-athletes the student life they deserve."
 
O'Malley started his role as AD in July 2022. Including his first fall on campus, Lamar football compiled a 5-23 record across three seasons prior to Rossomando's arrival. It did not take O'Malley long to settle on Rossomando as the perfect complement to his own vision and the ideal fit to alter the course of the program.
 
"The entire culture on campus has changed," O'Malley said. "Many different departments have helped us build and the school and community are feeding off the success that our teams have had. You hear people in athletics talk about having alignment from campus leaders to the athletic department staff to the coaches. We have that here."
 
That journey started in 2010 when Lamar's decision-makers realized the value of football to the university and the community and reinstated the program.
 
"We are in Texas and a university without football in Texas is just weird," Zabala said. "We understand what football does for the university and when football left Lamar, we had a major gap and we had enrollment issues. We brought back students who are athletes and in the marching band and in cheerleading, all of the student life that surrounds football. We wanted to impact student life in a dramatic way. The infrastructure here is fantastic; the facilities are some of the best in FCS and certainly the best in the Southland Conference. The support here could not be more aligned with football."
 
That alignment piqued Rossomando's interest when Lamar came calling. The native of Staten Island, New York, had another head coaching offer on the table, but waited as the Lamar opportunity developed. He discussed the opening with Taylor and O'Malley on a Zoom call, and that is when Rossomando knew his heart belonged in Beaumont.
 
"I knew we were going to have the resources at Lamar to be successful," Rossomando said. "Plus, you can recruit from four hours in any direction and get a great football player, and I mean an elite football player. Once I saw the facilities, which are as good as any FCS place that I've been in, then I knew we would have the infrastructure in place to be successful."
 
So, Rossomando went to work. He noted three areas of focus, which have dovetailing aspects: he needed to change the culture; he needed to address the chemistry in the locker room; and he needed to nail the hiring of the program's strength and conditioning coach.
 
"It's hard to change the culture," Rossomando said. "I thought it would take a couple of years, and to be honest, we are still evolving. We are not where we need to be overall from the day-to-day process standpoint. I knew it would take incredible resolve on our coaching staff's part, so hiring guys who understood my philosophy was important."
 
In Rossomando's debut against the Idaho Vandals in 2023, Lamar fell behind 28-0 by halftime. The coach, in his home debut, could not reconcile how a one-win team played on its heels.
 
"We were 1-10," he said. "We have nothing to lose and they were playing so cautious and so tight to the vest."
 
It wasn't until Game 5, against Houston Christian, that the shift in culture started to emerge. Visiting Lamar led, 21-19, and Houston Christian's offense started its potential game-winning drive with 3:44 left of the fourth quarter on its own 20-yard line. A 19-yard run, a pair of completions, and two more positive running plays had the hosts in Cardinals' territory. But on fourth-and-2 at the 29-yard line, a pass to keep the drive alive was broken up by the Lamar defense.
 
"That was the point where our guys started to believe," Rossomando said.
 
Now, the rest of college football has taken notice. Lamar is ranked No. 22, its first appearance in the national rankings since the football program returned in 2010. Rossomando managed a 6-5 record in Year 1. With another winning season, it would be Lamar's first back-to-back campaigns above .500 since 1966-67.
"It felt like before we would easily quit," said Phillip Fuller, a longtime Lamar University supporter and athletics donor. "We would get off to a bad start and then quit. My major impression of Coach Pete's first year-and-a-half is I have not seen us quit one time. We have gotten beat, but we never quit.
 
"We've had a rough time for so long, but people are starting to realize we have something special here."
 
The Cardinals are off to a 2-1 start in 2024, with a narrow defeat to FBS and Sun Belt Conference program Texas State. Lamar debuted in the polls after defeating Weber State, ranked No. 20 in the Stats Perform poll and No. 25 in the AFCA Coaches poll, 17-16 last weekend. Although the culture is still a work in progress and results for the remainder of the season are uncertain, the university-wide shift is real and permanent.
 
"We figured out the right formula for Lamar," Zabala said. "We are winning one student-athlete at a time and giving those student-athletes the experience they deserve with organization, camaraderie and structure. We needed to do this for our students and our community and everyone wins."