Tim Lester's Not Brian Ferentz 2.0, and That's a Good Start
IOWA CITY — There can't be many tougher assignments in college football than replacing a head coach's son. And though Brian Ferentz remained the proverbial elephant in the room Tuesday afternoon, Iowa's new offensive coordinator Tim Lester won his introductory press conference — as much as one can be won nearly seven months before the first snap of the season.
Most importantly, Lester accomplished that feat by proving himself to be two things:
1) The right fit at the right time for the Iowa program;
2) Not Brian Ferentz.
Number one was never in doubt; head coach Kirk Ferentz has been consistent about needing a program fit ever since the coaching search began over three months ago. "In my mind he's a good fit for us, and that's first and foremost," Ferentz said Tuesday. "Similar in a lot of ways to the way we've operated, yet a lot of different perspectives, too."
Number two was squarely on Lester's shoulders, by comparison. Not only because he's the new guy in general, but most Iowa fans had frankly heard enough of Kirk's praise for the offense while it slumbered outside the top-100 in most meaningful statistics nationally.
Fans wanted to hear some semblance of autonomy for Lester, from Lester, and — as much as a new OC can have that from a coach infamous for his doctrinaire tendencies — fans got exactly that Tuesday.
Of course, Lester couldn't draw direct comparisons between himself and the ousted playcaller; not only was Kirk Ferentz looming stone-faced in the wings 10 feet to Lester's side, but trashing the old guy on the way in wouldn't have been the most gracious look regardless.
Instead, Lester remained focused on his own history, his own strengths, and his own ideas, right from the first words out of his mouth.
"The one thing I know everybody wants to know is what we're going to be about," Lester said Tuesday. "I can tell you right now that we're going to be a physical football team. We're going to be disciplined, and we're going to be aggressive in everything we do, from run game to pass game to keepers to RPOs to tempos."
Aggressive. From run to pass to keepers to RPOs to tempo. That sounds like a lot of things; the old regime's not one of them.
Past the buzzwords, though, the meat and potatoes of Lester's appearance Tuesday focused on his ability to tailor the offense to his personnel's strengths — an approach that seemed to encounter lip service if not outright derision from either generation of Ferentz earlier.
"When it comes to route concepts, you've got to understand the timing of the quarterback's footwork," Lester said at one point, an ordinarily mundane detail evincing a level of expertise that seems positively foreign to Iowa's recent offenses. "We like these two or three things against this coverage, and we like this on the backside against this coverage, and you can mix and match them and you get five on the front, five on the back, and the iterations of those two."
Sound good? Lester was still rolling. "And then you add shifts and motion to it, you can really put a [quarterback] in a comfortable situation where he knows what's going on," Lester continued. "It might not look like that to the defense — that's the plan. But it all starts with what we're getting [at quarterback] and what he's comfortable with."
Perhaps Brian Ferentz knew that connection between dropback technique and route timing too (there weren't exactly many opportunities to ask him last season). Regardless of Ferentz's own expertise, did Iowa's quarterbacks ever look like they were running an offense that played to their strengths? Did it ever look like the coaches knew or cared what those strengths even were?
In fact, in the press conference after Brian Ferentz's announced departure, we asked Kirk Ferentz in late October whether he thought Hill was in position to succeed for the rest of the season.
"Famous words: we'll see," Ferentz responded at the time. "I don't know the answers. I think he's got a lot of really good qualities. [...] We as coaches have seen plenty to be encouraged about and plenty that we feel good about. If he's persistent and he keeps working hard, some better days are ahead for him. He's already done some good things. We'll try to build off of that just like we would with every player on our team."
With the benefit of hindsight, Ferentz's answer is... not antagonistic, at least. It also gives zero indication that the staff feels a particular need to put this young player, in the offense's most important position, in an easier position to succeed. For a coach so monomaniacally focused on winning by any means necessary, the (outward) indifference to adaptation looks worse and worse.
Ferentz, to his credit, sounded much more open to the wide-scale modernization of his offense this time around.
"I'm open to anything right now, any ideas," Ferentz said Tuesday, widening eyes around the All-American Room at the Hansen Football Performance Center. "The whole idea is advance the ball and help yourself, and hopefully in theory there you're helping yourself in the running game. You're also helping yourself in the passing game."
The more aerial-minded fans may balk at Ferentz citing the run game first, but remember that Michigan just won a national championship with a quarterback that threw just 22 passes per game on average, and only threw 18 in the title game.
Those were extremely efficient passes, of course — J.J. McCarthy led all qualified Big Ten QBs in passer efficiency and completion percentage — but nobody in Ann Arbor was complaining about the Wolverine offense's 61/39 pass/run split this season when the team was holding up the Golden Parentheses.
It should be said that there's more to succeeding as a coach than who you're not. There are a lot of ways for an offense to fail, and Brian's way was his own. Lester has experienced a few ways of his own too — and that too became a learning experience.
"I hired a new offensive coordinator [at Western Michigan in 2022]," Lester said Tuesday. "I took over the last three or four games; we were struggling, weren't playing complementary football. We were turning the ball over."
Lester said taking over the offense meant learning his coordinator's play-calling terminology on the fly, often needing his play sheet for reference during games.
"So I think we won three of our last four," Lester continued. "It wasn't pretty. It was what we had to do. I played a true freshman quarterback and two freshman wide receivers, and we kept ourselves in games, let our defense play great. We found a way to win those games when that's what we had."
Of course, Iowa got a 10-4 season out of 2023's cursed melange of McNamara and Deacon Hill — neither of whom could be described as "in position to succeed" — so in a roundabout way this anecdote brings Lester closer to the Brian Ferentz Experience, but with Iowa staring down a second-straight season of missing its (presumptive) starting quarterback until fall practice, adapting an offense to its available talent is in fact a prerequisite for the job in Year 1.
"Whenever Cade [McNamara] is ready to go, I'm looking forward to working with him," Lester said. "But he's got to get healthy and be good to go when he gets his chance, and he'll be out there every single day we're out there whether he can throw it or not. He'll get a lot of learning in."
And with that, Lester's message was clear: he's a teacher of quarterbacks, and he's eager to get started. That, if nothing else, feels like a long-overdue first step in the right direction.