Iowa football is taking Tim Lester’s ‘playbook material and going with it’

IOWA CITY — Looking back at when Greg Davis took over as Iowa’s offensive coordinator in 2012, Kirk Ferentz called it a “cooperative effort” to install a new system.

“We all sat down and visited — we being the offensive coaches, and I sat in the meetings, too — but we just kind of worked through it and in a nutshell basically with Greg,” Ferentz said 12 years later. “We kept a lot of the passing terminology that he was familiar with.”

Iowa kept “some of the running game stuff” in its existing language, but Ferentz said Davis “was comfortable with that.”

“The bottom line is the guy who's going to call the plays has to be really comfortable with what the terminology is going to be because it has to come out, it's got to come out pretty quick and naturally,” Ferentz said.

Now, Iowa is going through a similar transition — a transition that Ferentz said is “going really smoothly” — with new offensive coordinator Tim Lester as the former Western Michigan coach (and Packers analyst after that) replaces Brian Ferentz.

“Whether it was Tim or whomever we hired this year, it was going to be the same thing, same discussion,” Ferentz said at a news conference on Tuesday. “Basically, we're just taking his playbook material and going with it.”

Lester has worked in several different offensive schemes — everything from the “Shanahan system” at Division III-level Elmhurst College to Syracuse’s spread offense “that didn't even have a tight end,” he noted in his introductory news conference last month.

That leaves him with “600 pages of pass plays” to look through as he decides what works best for the Hawkeyes in 2024 as they look to rebound from finishing dead-last in the country in yards per game and yards per play last season.

“There's a lot to choose from, and I hate to keep going back to this, but I can't wait to see what we have,” Lester said on Feb. 6. “But I definitely know how to tie them together, and a lot of the formationally and how we're going to build it, what gets called will be dependent on kind of what we see in the spring and what we see as the guys move around here in the next couple months.”

Iowa’s final spring practice on April 20 will presumably offer fans the first glance of what the Lester-led offense could look like.

“It's going to look different, but I think philosophically we're in line,” Ferentz said.

That shared philosophy includes the value of “playing complementary football and not being reckless with the football.” The Hawkeyes have gone 9-1 since the start of the 2022 season when not turning the ball over.

It also means Iowa’s offense still is unlikely to be overly aggressive with a lead in the fourth quarter.

“If you coach offense sometimes you may pay a price because maybe we're not going to throw it out there when we're just trying to win the game the last quarter, play it smartly that way,” Ferentz said. “Stats are great and all that, but the most important stat is winning games.”

After visiting with Lester, Ferentz is confident “that's where he's at, too.”

“He thinks the same way, and he gets it,” Ferentz said. “He gets how things work together.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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