The Short List: Tim Lester
After 90 days, Kirk Ferentz makes the least imaginative hire available.
"I'm really not worried about all the stats stuff. But what is important is wins per game. If you want to evaluate a coordinator in my opinion, check the wins per game the column."
— Kirk Ferentz, December 18
Ninety days after Beth Goetz announced that Brian Ferentz would not be returning as Iowa’s offensive coordinator, Tim Lester has been named as the next to take that job. This comes at the end of a process where the head coach, Brian’s dad Kirk, simply refused to acknowledge that he had to make a hire for something like sixty days. The elder Ferentz claimed he was too busy preparing for a bowl game that he lost by 35 points, in a second consecutive shutout, and that he was constrained by his failure to post the position as available until the last week of December. He reportedly offered the job to Paul Chryst, an out-of-work coach who was available throughout the search, only for Chryst to decline the offer. He met with Duke’s former coordinator, Kevin Johns, on Friday, and was either turned down again or likely declined to hire him when Johns indicated he’d like to throw passes past the line of scrimmage. And so we get this, a failed MAC head coach who posted that league’s worst offense in his last season in charge of that program.
Tim Lester is a product of suburban Chicago. He was a program legend at Western Michigan, throwing for more than 11,000 yards and 87 touchdowns over four seasons as the starting quarterback. Three of those teams won seven games. None of them won nine.
Lester parlayed that into a two-year career in the XFL and Arena League, working as a high school coach during the offseason. Lester took his first collegiate coaching position in 2002, as offensive coordinator at Division III Elmhurst College, just a few miles from where he played high school football. In 2004, he got the head coaching job at St. Joseph’s College, a Division II program in Indiana. They went 7-4, because Tim Lester!
After that one season, Lester made his first return to Western Michigan, to coach quarterbacks for Bill Cubit, who had been the coordinator at Western when Lester played. WMU shuffled quarterbacks in his first season, but eventually landed on freshman Tim Hiller, who threw 20 touchdowns on just 150 attempts that year before blowing out his knee in the final game of the season. Hiller would go on to be one of the greatest quarterbacks in MAC history. Lester wouldn’t be there for most of it; he left after two years to become the defensive coordinator at Division III North Central College. In his two seasons at Western, they won seven and eight games. Tim Lester does it again!
Lester spent a year at North Central before becoming the head coach back at Elmhurst. In his first four years in charge, Elmhurst went 23-17 and never won more than seven games. In 2012 — his final season with the school — Lester’s team went 10-21 and made the Division III playoffs for the first time. They beat Coe and lost to St. Thomas, which is pretty good.
It was good enough to get Lester a spot on Scott Shafer’s staff at Syracuse as quarterbacks coach in 2013. Shafer was defensive coordinator at WMU under Cubit, and Shafer’s offensive coordinator, George McDonald, had been the offensive coordinator at WMU at that time,2 so this was getting the band back together. During the 2014 season, Shafer demoted McDonald and promoted Lester to offensive coordinator, and Lester ran the offense for the next two years. Here’s how Lester’s three years at Syracuse looked:
That’s about as uninspiring as it gets, but there’s more! Lester was coaching the quarterbacks, too. During those three seasons, Syracuse had seven quarterbacks make starts, and a different starter each season. His 2014 offense used the same snap count for every play all season because they weren’t sure the offensive line could handle it3. And so Shafer was fired, and Lester with him.
Lester spent a year on Darrell Hazell’s staff at Purdue coaching quarterbacks. They went 3-9, Hazell got fired, and Lester was out of a job again. Somehow, he parlayed all this lack of recent success into the head coaching position at his alma mater, Western Michigan, as the replacement for the Minnesota-bound P.J. Fleck. The previous season, Fleck had taken Western to a perfect regular season record, MAC championship, and Cotton Bowl appearance. Lester promptly went 6-64.
Lester’s record at WMU was essentially that: He went 37-32, 26-20 in the MAC, never finished higher than second in his division, never won more than eight games. The Broncos went to three bowl games while Lester was in charge, and won one of them, beating Nevada in the 2021 Quick Lane Bowl.
Lester inherited quarterback Jon Wassink off Fleck’s squad and made him a three-year starter. His numbers were pretty good, and he posted over 3000 yards and a 20/8 touchdown/interception ratio as a senior in 2019. Kaleb Eleby took over in the shortened Covid season, and remained his starter through 2021, and that dude could play. In 19 games as a starter, Eleby completed 64% of his passes for 5,000 yards, 41 touchdowns and just 8 interceptions. His last quarterback at WMU, Jack Salopek, struggled in Lester’s final season at the helm, posting a Deacon-like 49% completion percentage, 1300 yards and 11 interceptions over seven games.
Lester replaced a coordinator after the 2020 season, and again the following year. The last hire, former North Central head coach Jeff Thorne,5 did not go well, especially when paired with the freshman quarterback Salopek. The drop-off in production cost the Broncos a winning season, and the goodwill from Lester’s playing days had been used up. Lester was fired at the end of the season.
Lester worked last year as a “senior analyst” with the Green Bay Packers under Matt LaFleur, who was his backup while at Western Michigan. And before you think that he was learning LaFleur’s version of the Shanahan offense, that wasn’t it: Lester was on the defensive staff.
Lester said his job is to "study the offense of each of the Packers opponents, and help the defense game plan."
There hasn’t been much news over the course of Kirk Ferentz’s 90-day offensive coordinator search. The only definitive statement he made was that “wins per game” was his most important metric, and things like offensive production didn’t much matter. That’s unquestionably a dumb way to measure someone who is only responsible for half of the team, but Kirk thinks those ten-win seasons are a really big deal.
However, if “wins per game” matters most and those ten-win seasons are so important, how do you finish your NINETY-DAY SEARCH FOR A COORDINATOR with the guy who went 37-32 at Western Michigan and, in a 22-year coaching career, has coached on a team that won ten or more games exactly once, and that one being in Division III? The two times Tim Lester has coached at the Power 5 level, the staff has gotten fired. That doesn’t happen to coaches excelling in “wins per game.” It doesn’t happen to coaches at Iowa.
Last year, Colorado hired the head coach at Kent State as an offensive coordinator. Alabama’s new staff hired a head coach for a coordinator position this year, and USC got the North Dakota State head coach as a position coach. The dynamics of high-level assistant coaching jobs has changed, to where a good MAC head coach is well within the realm of possibility for a job like Iowa’s. If Kirk Ferentz took 90 days and came up with Toledo’s Jason Candle, or even Eastern Michigan’s Chris Creighton, it would be consistent with current hiring practices and the standards Kirk set for the job. Those guys win, and have won for a long time, and Iowa would do well to add someone to the staff with their qualifications.
But this isn’t that. I’m willing to look past that last offense at Western Michigan as a bad hire and a new quarterback. I’m willing to consider that his other five offenses were productive, and showed the sort of balance that Ferentz loves. This might work out fine. But Tim Lester’s resume is the complete opposite of what Ferentz claimed he was doing, and is frankly insufficient to justify a Big Ten coordinator job. He’s been occasionally productive at the MAC level, but he hasn’t won anything more than a Quick Lane Bowl. His prior work at this level was an abject disaster. His hire, and the three-month process to get to it, reeks of complacency, of a belief that hiring a coordinator to fix the worst offense in the country really isn’t that important to Ferentz. And if you refuse to believe that, or that Ferentz is simply trying to troll the fanbase, there is only one other explanation: Nobody wants this job.
Ferentz said on December 18 that there was “strong interest from people that would make a lot of sense” in this job. He then waited 41 days before making his hire and telling us the opposite.
All 10 wins were eventually vacated for financial aid issues, but there was no indication Lester had anything to do with that.
He’s currently working as Bielema’s wide receivers coach at Illinois, so if you’re looking for a name for that job that isn’t missing a vowel, I’d start there.
You might want to stop and read that last sentence again.
Lester’s first offensive coordinator was Kevin Johns, who we thought was going to take this spot.
Thorne had been the starting quarterback at Lester’s high school before Lester, and his dad was Lester’s high school coach.
I don't know why I expected anything different
I'm disappointed, but not really surprised or angry, for the latter two emotions require hope for something better. And there has been nothing in this entire search "process" to engender that hope. From the beginning, it seems clear that Kirk didn't have his heart in it to actually "search" for a coach, the pool of those up for consideration was incredibly restricted to a small handful of candidates with whom Kirk already had significant familiarity. And even then, he couldn't be bothered to get around to doing anything about the search until after the bowl game, at which point a brutal reality struck: no one wanted the job. I was wrong in thinking that the end result of this would be George Barnett being elevated to the position, but right in my diagnosis that no one with career aspirations or legitimate prospects would take on the job. So instead, Kirk went with some random who was, at best, his *FOURTH CHOICE* for the role, and who hasn't been an actual OC in almost a decade.
Eat at Arby's