Troy’s Gerad Parker ‘couldn’t think more of’ Iowa’s Tim Lester from time together at Purdue

IOWA CITY — Gerad Parker has a challenge this week as his Troy football team visits Iowa on Saturday that goes beyond the Kinnick Stadium crowd noise, Kaleb Johnson’s big-play potential or Iowa’s stout defense.

It’s a more familiar challenge for the first-year Troy head coach.

“Oddly enough, when you face friends in this profession, it’s hard because you root against them once and that’s it,” Parker said.

The “good friend” in this case is Iowa offensive coordinator Tim Lester.

“You guys got your hands on a great one up there,” Parker told The Gazette on the Sun Belt Conference’s Monday media call. “I couldn’t think more of him and his wife Dawn.”

Parker and Lester were on the staff at Purdue in 2016. Lester was the quarterbacks coach, and Parker was the wide receivers coach (and then interim head coach after Darrell Hazell’s firing). That was enough time for Parker to see Lester is a “special football coach” who “sees it the right way and communicates very well.”

“He’s somebody that I admire for who he is as a father and husband, first, and then who he is as a football coach,” Parker said. “We developed a lot of respect for each other and developed such a great relationship.”

Parker and Lester’s year together at Purdue did not entail much on-field success. Purdue went 3-9 overall and 1-8 in Big Ten play. The Boilermakers lost all six games with Parker as interim head coach and were outscored, 253-130.

But Parker and Lester each found varying degrees of success in the eight years since they left West Lafayette.

Lester spent the next six years as the head coach at Western Michigan and had only one losing season. His 2021 Quick Lane Bowl victory was Western Michigan’s second-ever bowl win in program history.

Parker, meanwhile, has worked on the football staffs at Duke, Penn State, West Virginia and Notre Dame since his time at Purdue. He was the offensive coordinator at Notre Dame when the Fighting Irish won 10 games last year, and he was the passing game coordinator at Penn State in 2019 when the Nittany Lions went 11-2 and won the Cotton Bowl.

Looking ahead to Saturday’s Lester-Parker reunion, Parker believes Lester and the Hawkeyes “have done a nice job celebrating who they are in their past and what their identity is.”

“They just got a great identity of running it first, and then they have everything packaged with those schemes,” Parker said. “Meaning if they have stretch, they’ve got half-roll shots off of their stretch play actions. If they have stretch, they have the stretch shot. Now they’ve got nakeds off of it.

“Every run game they have is built to have everything off of it — a play-action pass, a naked throw or an RPO out of the gun.”

Essentially, Iowa still looks stylistically like Iowa, albeit with some different ways of executing its run-first philosophy that set up other aspects of the offense.

“Their personality has remained them,” Parker said. “They’re physical, they’re big and they’re a run-first to set up everything else. And they’ve got a special back, so it’s a big task for us.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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