Staff Updates: Football
Before we fully launch into the offseason, I thought we’d take a look at the coaching staff changes in three of Iowa’s biggest sports (I don’t pretend to understand wrestling). Up first: Football!
Kirk Ferentz notoriously doesn’t change his coaching staff unless he has to. It’s far more often that an assistant leaves for a better position than gets fired. As a result, most of Iowa’s football staff remains intact from 2024 to 2025. The only change in the nine-man main staff comes at running backs, where Ladell Betts left to take a job in the NFL.
We had previously speculated that Betts’ replacement would signal whether Ferentz was still primarily dictating the members of his coaching staff or had ceded control to offensive coordinator Tim Lester. What we got appears to be a compromise: Omar Young, an experienced assistant coach with stops everywhere from junior college to the NFL. Young previously served as an off-field assistant at San Jose State, Colorado and South Carolina. He then served in quality control roles with the Cleveland Browns and Green Bay Packers from 2015 through 2018, which put him on Joe Philbin’s interim staff.
Young got his first on-field assistant job with Eastern Illinois as a running backs coach from 2019-21. Eastern was pretty horrible over that period of time, going 3-26 over those three seasons, and head coach Adam Cushing was fired after posting a third consecutive one-win record. Young jumped back to the NFL, as an offensive and special teams assistant with the Bears for two years. When running backs coach David Walker was fired midway through the 2023 season, Young filled in as running backs coach for the remainder of the season. He then spent last year at Ferentz’s preferred finishing school: as an offensive assistant with the New England Patriots.
Young doesn’t have any direct ties to Ferentz or Lester, at least not from his resume. What ties he has to Ferentz’s usual touchstones are strained; he didn’t work for Belichick at New England, and his time with Joe Philbin at Green Bay was limited. Cushing, his boss at Eastern Illinois, was a longtime Pat Fitzgerald assistant at Northwestern before taking the EIU job, and we’re well aware of Fitzgerald’s newfound love of Iowa, but even that connection is three degrees removed from any direct contact with Ferentz. As such, it’s not easy to pigeonhole Young as a Ferentz or Lester hire.
It’s also a big step up for Young, who hasn’t been an on-field assistant at the FBS level before. He’ll have to find his sea legs in recruiting, as well, especially since he doesn’t have a built-in base to work from. Ladell Betts leaves big shoes to fill on all of those fronts; in his brief time with the program, Betts boosted running back recruiting considerably and produced one of the best backs in the history of Iowa football. Omar Young will have to fill those shoes as best as possible.
The more interesting hire comes at the analyst level, and is likely more indicative of where Lester is taking Iowa’s offense going forward: Longtime Wake Forest offensive coordinator Warren Ruggiero was brought in as an offensive assistant. Ruggiero has a resume that Kirk Ferentz would love, with stops at Defiance College, Clarion College, William & Mary, Hofstra and Elon over his first twenty years in coaching. Ruggiero coached quarterbacks at Kansas State during Ron Prince’s final season at the school in 2008, then joined Dave Clawson at Bowling Green in 2009. He stayed with Clawson for the next fifteen years at BGSU and Wake Forest.
Clawson and Ruggiero developed the “Slow Mesh” offense at Wake Forest. I won’t pretend to be an expert, but the Slow Mesh essentially functions as a run-pass option where the quarterback and running back “mesh” post-snap on a potential handoff while the quarterback surveys the defense’s response. If done correctly, it allows the quarterback more time to make a decision to run, handoff or pass.
This is exactly the kind of offense that could turn Mark Gronowski into an unstoppable wildebeest. On top of that, Ruggiero is bringing quarterback Jeremy Hecklinski with him from Wake Forest, with four seasons of eligibility remaining.
Ruggiero, of course, is not the offensive coordinator. This is still Tim Lester’s offense, and while Iowa exhibited far more RPO looks and quarterback zone options than usual at last week’s spring scrimmage, there wasn’t much in the way of “Slow Mesh” visible. The role of an analyst is always up to the staff; many times, an analyst evaluates opposing defenses, rather than actively build the offensive system. It’s not a certainty, by any measure, that Iowa is going to install Ruggiero’s system. But it also seems unlikely that Iowa would hire a coach so synonymous with such a system without the expectation that it would be incorporated in some way into Iowa’s offense going forward. The hires might be Ferentz’s, but the offense is clearly moving toward Lester with each passing season.
Lester spoke to the 'slow mesh' in one of his interviews this Spring. Essentially said it was an 'all or nothing' type of system, though interesting. I didn't get the feeling he intended it to be used much at Iowa.
It sounds like the goal is to have Ruggiero (and the other recent hire at analyst) do advance work on the game plan. I think they are supposed to come up with new wrinkles every week.