Why Tim Lester, his Shanahan offense have been ‘major fit from the get-go’ for Iowa football

IOWA CITY — Tim Lester’s first chapter of designing football plays happened in a rather unceremonious location.

Well, not so unceremonious for him, but certainly for the others in the room at West Aurora High School in the western suburbs of Chicago. He was the in-school suspension coordinator.

“I sat in there with all the people that got in trouble,” Lester said. “And that’s when I bought my first — now this is old-school for any of you football junkies — PlayMaker Pro, which was like the very first playbook-making software there is.”

Lester already had finished his college playing career at Western Michigan, but his career in the short-lived XFL had not begun yet. So the former math major used the job as an opportunity to start “making my offense because I knew I was going to coach when I was done.”

Lester — now 48 years old and approaching his second season as Iowa’s offensive coordinator — has come a long way from his PlayMaker Pro days as his Shanahan-style system is coming off a resoundingly successful first year in Iowa City.

The Hawkeyes saw dramatic improvements from 2023 to 2024 in points per game (15.4 to 27.7), third down efficiency (29.4 percent to 41.3 percent), rushing yards per attempt (3.3 to 5.1) and many other metrics.

That success has been in a scheme that is simplified for the offense to understand, yet complex for opposing defenses.

“We run a couple plays a lot of ways,” Lester said last month on The Gazette’s Hawk Off the Press podcast. “So finding new ways to run plays to make them look different, but it’s the same play over and over again, I feel like. Same reads over and over again. But the defense — they need to think it’s a lot of different plays.”

For example, the Hawkeyes could be running the same inside zone running play several times in the same game, but different motions and other minor aspects can make the play look different to opposing defenses.

‘College twist’ to Shanahan offense

Most NFL teams at this point also run the Shanahan-style offense that Lester has brought to Iowa — or at least similar versions to it — but Iowa’s system is not necessarily a carbon copy of what fans may see on Sundays.

“We’ve had to make a lot of little adjustments because we’re on a different size football field than they do in the NFL,” Lester said, referencing the difference in hashmark locations. “Why that is, I don’t understand. It makes no sense. … And there’s a couple rule changes that are a little different, so we’ve had to make some changes. And we see some different defenses than they play in the NFL, too. So we’re constantly adding a college twist to it.”

Sometimes, those twists involve “spacing things that we need to fix and a couple more answers for certain pressures that they don’t run much in the NFL,” Lester said.

“But it’s great to have the foundation be the same,” Lester said. “When you’re looking for more ways of running a certain play, I got 5,000 different pictures of ways we’ve run these certain plays over the last five years, or at least the way they have in Green Bay.”

For as popular as Lester’s Shanahan-style system — or at least similar versions of it — has been at the NFL level, it has not yet taken hold at the college level. Well, aside from at Iowa.

“The coaches that implement it are the smartest, in my opinion, in the world,” Lester said, “and there’s a very small percentage of those guys that really want to coach college football. They want to coach the best players in the world, best athletes in the world, and they’re all in the NFL. … There’s just not a lot of people in the college game that know it forward and backward, to be honest with you.”

Iowa running backs coach Omar Young, who came from the NFL ranks to join the Hawkeyes’ staff earlier this year, would not be surprised if “the more success we have, the more people are going to go study what we do, study some of the other stuff from the NFL and try and steal some of it.”

Young considers the Shanahan system to be “offense-friendly” because of how it can help seemingly every position group in different ways. The quarterback, for example, does not need to have the “strongest arm.”

“He’s just got to be able to get us in the right play and be able to throw with accuracy,” Young said. “And that sounds like a lot, but when you don’t have to worry about a lot of different things, I think that alleviates the thought process for those guys.”

Lester attributes some of his system’s success to having enough flexibility that it “doesn’t matter what you have.”

“If you want to run it in San Francisco and you have (George) Kittle and (Kyle) Juszczyk — who’s the best fullback in the world — you can run it out of 21 personnel,” Lester said. “It works just fine. And if you go down to the Rams, then they’re in 11 personnel, and they run the same system, same calls. If you go to Cincinnati or Minnesota or Green Bay, they’re more 11 and 12. They run a little bit of both, but it’s all the same.”

In other words, it gives NFL general managers the “flexibility during the draft to take the best guy,” regardless of schematic fit. Or in Iowa’s case, it gives the Hawkeyes the ability to recruit the best player available rather than one with a skill set that fits specifically to Iowa’s scheme.

It also has worked in Iowa City in large part because of Lester’s own skill set as a coordinator.

“Tim has done a great job of finding a way to take this offense, dummy it down even more to where now a college kid can go out there and do it,” Young said, “because it can be a lot, and it’s a lot up front.”

DeAndre Smith — the current running backs coach for the Indianapolis Colts and a former colleague of Lester at Syracuse and then Purdue — described Iowa’s offensive coordinator as “one of the smartest coaches I’ve ever coached with.”

“He was always calm and cool,” Smith said. “Never seen him get rattled. Always stayed even-keel. And I always appreciated that about him. But just being a smart (coach), being able to communicate with the players, get the best out of them — that was probably the two things more than anything that stood out to me.”

Lester’s connection to Shanahan offense

The Shanahan system has “always been my favorite,” Lester said. He learned it when his former Western Michigan teammate and longtime friend Matt LaFleur was on Gary Kubiak’s Houston Texans staff in the late 2000s.

“It took us a while to learn it, but once we learned it, it was my favorite system that I’ve ever run,” Lester said.

The only issue then was having an opportunity to run it. After he learned it at Elmhurst, and his only chance to be an offensive coordinator (until getting to Iowa) was when he earned the role midway through the Syracuse’s tumultuous 2014 season.

“I went from there to Syracuse, and I was the quarterback coach, so I ran whatever the coach wanted,” Lester said. “And then I went to Purdue and ran whatever the coordinator wanted. Then I became a head coach, and I hired an offensive coordinator and let him run his system. … I knew wherever I ended up going, this is the system I wanted to run.”

Advantage for NFL-aspiring players?

As Iowa uses an offensive system that is so similar to what many NFL teams currently use, it could be a valuable benefit for NFL-bound Iowa offensive players.

That schematic familiarity, in Smith’s eyes as an NFL assistant coach, “makes all the difference in the world.”

Lester already has seen the benefits himself as running back Kaleb Johnson, tight end Luke Lachey and offensive linemen Mason Richman and Connor Colby went through the predraft process (and each ended up getting drafted).

“They went in to do all these 30-for-30 meetings with these teams, and they talk about our protection, which is the same,” Lester said. “And I get calls like, ‘You guys are running jet protection?’ Like, ‘Yeah, we’re running jet the same way. We’re wrapping the ‘A’ gap, we’re anchoring it, we’re doing exactly what you guys do.’ They just haven’t heard a lot of people come into those meetings and say the same words that they use. It’s a huge benefit for those guys.“

Lester’s journey to Iowa

Lester’s own time at the NFL level — a year as an analyst with the Green Bay Packers after getting fired from Western Michigan and before getting the Iowa job — was “huge for me.” He studied opposing quarterbacks and offenses as a whole.

“So I sat with the defense,” Lester said. “If you ever watch any of those games and they pan up to the booth, I sat right next to the D-coordinator.”

That involved studying how the Lions’ Jared Goff played in the Shanahan offense. Or the Vikings’ Kirk Cousins (before his move to Atlanta). Or the Rams’ Matthew Stafford.

“Luckily, he hurt his thumb and didn’t play against us because that would have been maybe a longer day,” Lester said of Stafford.

Overall, it meant an entire season of being “totally immersed” in his favorite offensive scheme.

“I hadn’t run it since 2012, and it’s ever-evolving,” Lester said while referencing as an example the “couple new motions” that the Miami Dolphins have recently added.

Lester heard about Iowa’s offensive coordinator vacancy at some point during his season in Green Bay, but “we don’t spend time paying attention at all to what’s going on, other than the season you’re in.” He also did not want to leave before the Packers’ postseason run.

By the time Lester got the call from his agent after the Packers’ loss to the 49ers, he assumed Iowa had already hired someone or “maybe hired a non-quarterback coach and they had a quarterback coach job open.” But Ferentz’s slowness making a decision was Lester’s gain.

“The timing was very unique in that I didn’t even think it was a possibility until I got that one phone call that morning,” Lester said. “And by that night, I was on the phone with Coach (Ferentz). … It became a real serious thing quickly, and I think our beliefs in how to run an offense and the things we need to do to win were perfectly in line.”

The Lester hire became official on Jan. 31, 2024 in what was a “major fit from the get-go.” It was almost exactly 14 months after the end of his last college job — head coach at his alma mater, Western Michigan.

Lester only had one losing season in his six years leading the Broncos, and now he also has Iowa’s offensive rebuild on his resume. He is not ruling out a return to being a head coach again at some point in his career.

“If the situation was right, yeah,” Lester told The Gazette. “It has to be where I can still coach football. That’s what I love to do. … If it was a situation like that where you had an operations staff and an unbelievable staff that can run a lot of the organizational parts and do a great job of it so you could spend a little bit more time in football, I would be 100 percent interested in it.”

He also is “extremely happy doing what I’m doing” for the Hawkeyes, though, and is “not yearning for” a head-coaching opportunity.

“I like what I’m doing,” Lester said. “I like who I’m doing it for."

Either way, Lester’s current and future coaching situations are surely better than being the in-school suspension coordinator in a high school (although the ever-optimistic Lester did find a silver lining from the experience).

“It gave me time to work on the playbook,” Lester said.

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