Is Tim Lester making progress with Iowa's offense?

Tim Lester had his hands full when he arrived in Iowa City. He had to install a new offense that was more effective than the last one and give the Hawkeye offense some level of confidence heading in to the 2024 season.

Speaking with Lester on Thursday, so far, so good. He has 80 to 85% of the offense installed and they are having some level of success during spring ball.

TIM LESTER OPENING STATEMENT

I would like to lead off by saying that I am excited about the last couple weeks of work. It has been a joy to coach the group. They have been working hard and learning a lot of new. I say we got about 85% of the playbook in. Now we are working on perfecting it. What to do is different than how to do it.

We are stacking reps. It has been a fun group to coach. They have been working hard getting better. A lot to get better at. It’s a marathon and a sprint at the same time. Every time we can get out there and get another rep of executing a play with an adjustment as Coach Parker has brought a lot of different things and adjustments we are going to have to make quickly.

It has been fun to watch our team get better. We have one more opportunity to get better before summer hits.

Q. You guys are using the comm system now. Have you been able to work in Kinnick, up in the booth? How do you address that this spring?

TIM LESTER: It’s been great. Coming from Green Bay, I have a lot of experience with it, so it isn’t anything new to me, but it’s new to everybody else. It’s new to the quarterbacks, figuring out volumes, but we’ve been able to use it at the stadium.

It allows me to talk to them as they get to the line of scrimmage, communicate the plays with them, and hopefully be more efficient.

I think it’s going to be a good thing for college football. It seems to be a good thing for offensive college football because there’s going to be a lot more detail, a lot more things you can do offensively when you can talk directly to the quarterback because you don’t have to have 10,000 signals.

I do think when they passed it, I didn’t know it was going to happen this fast, to be honest, but happy about it, and it’s been a pretty smooth transition that way.

Q. You were mentioning having the 85 percent of the playbook in. What’s been the process of figuring out which things you wanted to implement? I remember you said last year you had 600 pages of pass plays.

TIM LESTER: Yeah, we have it done. There’s still a couple that I’d like to put in. I want to get good at the ones we’re doing first. I think that’s going to be the biggest thing. We’re still in the process of figuring out — each play has five routes in it, and it’s my job to figure out who runs that route the best to make sure that in the fall that I have the right person running that route.

We’ve rotated through with different formations and letting everybody have a shot at running a scar route or a skinner route or all the different routes that there are, and we’re still learning about them and giving them chances. Because their first time they’re not going to be great at it. It’s banking reps and watching the tight ends run the different routes. We’re trying to get good at learning what we can do to be successful in the fall and not so much trying to alter our system to try to go against our defense.

The hardest thing to do is to not try to game plan your own defense as opposed to getting the things in that you know you’re going to need in the fall. That’s been hard because there are times where, man, I want to make this adjustment. We haven’t even run the original yet before we start making adjustments.

It’s been hard. I’ve game planned a couple things but not many. We’re trying to stick true to the system and having the guys learn, but it’s been fun.

I think we installed the plays we knew we needed, and then we’ve started to add a couple of the wrinkles, and it’s easier to learn. You learn the alphabet — you can write a novel, but you have to learn the alphabet first, and they’re getting there.

Q. Now that you’ve had the personnel out on the field for a while, do you feel you have what you need at receiver right now, or do you guys have to be active in the portal this spring and summer?

TIM LESTER: Well, I think you’re always looking. I don’t think anyone ever turns a blind eye to that at any position. I think everyone has plans, and Coach and Tyler will figure out which ones as we move on.

But we’re always actively looking everywhere. But I’ve been happy with our guys. There’s some speed there. We have a little bit of size there. We’re young but getting better. Kaleb has been impressive, Wetjen has been extremely explosive. Jarriett Bowie has been doing a great job.

I do think we have some talent there, albeit young talent. I’ve had young wide receivers everywhere I’ve been. At Green Bay I think we were the youngest receiving corps in the history — it was all rookies and a couple sophomores. We didn’t have a tight end on our team that wasn’t a rookie.

I’m not afraid of that, as long as they work and they have been. A long way to go, but it’s there, we have to continue to bring it out of them.

Q. I wanted to ask you about quarterback. Obviously the No. 1 quarterback is only able to do limited — not drop-backs. How has that impacted what you’re trying to do knowing that right now the No. 1 starter isn’t able to go through a full practice physically?

TIM LESTER: Yeah, it’s been hard on Cade. He wants to go so bad. He’ll get cleared here in the next couple months and be on his plan that he needs to be on. It’s been fun to do a couple individual drills with him, and he’s fighting through all the frustration of wanting to be out there.

But with the rest of them, we have to get all 11 players ready to go, so I am calling plays that we’re going to call in the fall, and Deac and Marco, whether they’re ready for those plays or not, that’s what practice is for.

I put them in some tough spots. We’ve done a ton of two-minute drills, a ton of 3rd downs. Those are the things that come along: red zone offense, 3rd downs, and two minute, they take months. Even when you have veteran players, even when they know what we’re doing, and they don’t know yet, right?

And we’ve done a ton of them, so we’ve put those guys in some tough situations and it’s the best way to learn, learn in the fire.

So they’ve had some rough days; they’ve had some good days. If we can stay in 1st and 10 and stay ahead of the chains, it’s a lot easier to play quarterback. But the receivers, the O-line, they need the reps.

Whoever was going to go in there was going to be by the plan for moving this offense forward and trying to develop them at the fastest pace we can.

I called it as if Cade was in there, really because of the other 10 guys in there. If I was calling a game with each and every guy as I’m learning about them, I would probably call certain situations differently, but that doesn’t help the other 10 guys in the fall.

We’re going to have to be aggressive at times. So that was kind of the plan, the mindset going in.

Q. Following up on the question about the QBs, it sounds like Deacon from our interviews was getting most of the one reps; is that accurate?

TIM LESTER: Yeah.

Q. What did you see from both he and Marco? You may not be aware of this, but a lot of outside hope that Iowa brings in a quarterback from the portal. What did you see enough to feel good about the 2 spot on your QB line from both of those guys and maybe give me your reflections there.

TIM LESTER: It’s early to tell. I think the plan going in, Deacon has more experience, and so he can go through a progression a little bit more comfortably right now than Marco can. Marco needs more reps. He’s a young kid, and he’s got talent. So Marco is taking all the 2s and the 3s. He’s gotten more reps. For his own development, I know it’s like drinking through a firehose, but I put him out there on purpose, and I told him — we had a talk about it beforehand, that this is my plan for you, and it’s going to be tough at times.

There’s more people sometimes going the wrong direction with his huddle, and he has to deal with the ramifications of a guard going the wrong way and a 3 technique in the backfield all of a sudden.

So it’s been good for him. I said, I know it’s going to be hard, but you need the reps.

I think it’s been good. They’ve been playing good. They have a long way to go. This is a totally new system. Mentally we have to be sharper. Our feet need to be better. I do think we’ve improved. But we’re not even close to where we need to be there, and I’m always going to be hard on them that way.

But we do, we have a long way to go, but I do think they’ve been working hard at it, and I think the game with this offense is slowing down a little bit for both of them, and it’s going to give them a chance to have more success.

Q. Curious your approach when you got the job, did you watch film of the guys on the roster? Did you look into their background, or did you approach it as hey, I don’t want any preconceived notions, and whatever you chose, how has it unfolded?

TIM LESTER: Yeah, I really didn’t. I watched some practices from last year. Well, last year’s spring ball practices because I had never been in a practice here so I wanted to see what the drills looked like, what they felt like.

But I really didn’t watch a ton of the games. Our system is nothing like what’s been done here in the past. I wanted to give everybody a clean slate. It’s been good.

The guys, I have a lot of opinions — everyone has an opinion, right? So a lot of the coaches are saying, this guy is our best at this and I had the coaches kind of write up a report on each of their players.

They’ve pretty much been dead on. A lot of guys, it all depends on how long it takes for the game to slow down for them. I heard a ton about Luke. Luke was coming back from an injury and all that stuff, so he didn’t do much early.

But here in the last couple weeks he looks like everything they told me he would look like. He’s made some huge plays and elevates and catches the ball, and I think the first one was last week, and he elevated, and I was like, that’s what they’ve been talking about.

It’s been fun. We’re still learning a ton. But what we’ve seen — especially that whole group, that tight end group, they play hard. Addy and Scuz, Large and all of them. They fly around. It’s been fun. There’s a lot of stuff you can do when you have big, long, fast guys that can catch and they’re also willing to get their hands dirty in the box.

So it’s been a lot of fun because we’re going to need them. That part has been good.

Q. When you’re trying to install this new offense, how do you balance between holding guys accountable for certain things and also making sure that — knowing that you can be patient with them and how do you balance the accountability versus patience?

TIM LESTER: True, it’s hard, right? I purposely said it’s a marathon and a sprint, and I do have the numbers of the plays we’ve run so I know every time I call a play I know how many times we’ve run it, I know how many times that guy has run it.

That’s what’s going to happen here in the next three, four months, is we see people starting to change the learning curve and they start making adjustments and seeing it the next time.

You have to give them some bandwidth to make mistakes, and there’s been plenty of them made.

But some guys, a lot of guys are already starting to pick it up, are starting to see the adjustments and see the blocking adjustments and the route adjustments and the timing changes, and those are the guys that are going to play. Everyone else we’ve just got to keep encouraging them to come along.

But that comes with stacking reps, right. So that’s the hardest thing, is we can’t get enough reps every single day. The answer is always yes when Coach says do you want more team or — yes, let’s just keep going. Let’s just keep running plays.

Individual is really good, and we need a lot of individual to get our techniques down, but we’re dealing with having to get better at a lot of things.

But as we stack reps, you get less and less patient, and you start getting — it becomes more clear who needs to be out there at that point. And we’re way far away from having to make that decision. There’s no depth chart, nothing right now.

It’s about getting the collective group to play the way we want, to play as hard as we want them to do, and to learn what we’re doing and what’s supposed to happen on each play, and we’re getting closer and closer every time we’re out there.

Q. What are some of the ways that you’ve seen Deacon in particular make some of those strides and improvements this spring as he adjusts to your system?

TIM LESTER: I think his feet have gotten better. I always give my quarterbacks multiple options when it comes to full works because I think there’s a lot of ways to do it. I’ve done it multiple ways as a quarterback in my career.

So he’s kind of honed in on a certain way of dropping that I think makes him more comfortable. I think it’s allowed him to get through reads better. Still needs to be more accurate with the ball. I still think he has a long way to go, but when I got here that was something I noticed with him, that his balance — when his balance was off, the ball was all over the place.

I do think that’s improved. I think he’s starting to get to know the offense.

Now, some of the different systems within the offense, we’ve got a long way to go with. He’s got a natural arm. He can throw the ball. But you have to know where it’s going. So when we get his feet right, the feet tell the ball where to go. He’s gotten better there. A long way to go, but I’ve been proud of that part. He’s been working hard at it.

Q. Tim, I wanted to ask about the offensive line and how things are going. Of course you have a lot of guys back, but it is different, and like with the RPOs and such I know that can be difficult for offensive linemen. How are they taking to the new system, and has having that veteran presence been helpful?

TIM LESTER: They are a veteran — them and our tight ends, and really running backs, too. We have a couple really veteran groups and then we have a couple really young groups. It’s an interesting dynamic.

But the O-line has been great. We have I don’t know how many combinations. I don’t know how many combinations we’ve played. It’s moving everybody around. I can’t wait to get Jones and Dunker back and put them in the mix and Tyler has been playing center.

We’ve been moving everybody around to see who can do what, and as we get everybody healthy, we’ll start solidifying roles and banking reps at certain roles. I think the biggest thing they need to learn is how to run off the ball.

It’s a different pace of a run game that we’ve been trying to install, and really in the past week and a half I’d say — the front side of it at least is starting to — we still have some things to clean up on the backside, but the front side, they’re coming.

They’re running off the ball. It’s looking like I want it to look. I think Coach Ferentz is enjoying coaching it and seeing our guys just get better at it as we come rolling off the ball and the pace of the way the ball hits the line of scrimmage and where it’s supposed to.

As we’ve been tinkering with different ways to block it, which some have worked, some haven’t, but those guys are — they’re the glue, man. We have to get them going. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a great football team that doesn’t have a good one, and we have a huge number of guys that are veteran that have played a ton of ball.

They’re excited about what we’re doing, and they show up and they work every day. It’s a physical practice. We get after it. You can’t not if you’re going against Phil. They’re coming. So you either take it or you have to come off the ball.

It has been fun. The only reason we’ve had some success this spring is those guys up front and those tight ends we’ve been able to move the ball a little bit, and we’re going to need them. We’re going to count on them. I’m not going to shy away from that. It makes playing quarterback easier, makes playing wide out easier, makes playing everything easier when you have guys up front like that.

It’ll be interesting to see when we finally get them slotted in their spots and see who our swing guys are, but at least all our swing guys have experience because we’ve moved a lot of people around.

It has been good for us because that was the plan going in, is we don’t have to make any decisions for a while, so let’s figure out who we have. Let’s give them some banked reps different places. We’ll solidify in the fall where guys are going to end up. It’s a good group and there’s a lot of them.

Q. Not asking you to give away trade secrets or anything here, but two common themes we’ve heard from the players. The offensive side more movement, especially with the tight ends, more motion, and the defensive players have said they’re trying to confuse our eyes more. Can you kind of explain —

TIM LESTER: The word I like to use is consternation, and really hard to spell, but there’s spell check, thank God.

The biggest thing is if you ever let a great defense like the one we face every single day, you’re either going fast and then you don’t have to move a lot, or you’re going slow and you’ve got to change the picture on them because if you let them pin their ears back, it’s going to be a long day.

We have tried to move their eyes around a little bit and switch up their fits, pre-snap, post-snap, because a lot of times if you talk to defensive guys, which I have been one and I’ve worked with a couple defensive staffs last year, they never say — you’re never going to beat the defense, you’re just going to get them to misfit something.

That is part of the goal of any offense is whether it’s through an RPO, whether it’s through a motion, whether it’s through a shift, whether it’s through a post-snap sift, just continue and make sure that they have to be perfect in their fits. We are probably going to try to change their fits two or three times before the snap, and one might be post-snap or they better all be on the same page or we might hit one on them.

That’s a huge part of what we do. We don’t motion every play, but we’ve been using it as a way to hopefully lighten the load a little bit to the guys up front.

The other thing that you do when you do that is you stop linebackers from just coming downhill and blowing up the line of scrimmage. They end up starting laterally, and when they are lateral, if you get to them you already gain four.

It has been good, but sometimes it confuses O-linemen because they’re moving around. We’ve had linebackers run into each other because one thinks they’re supposed to go that way and the other one — you know, and sometimes that helps us, sometimes that hurts us.

It has been a lot of fun for those guys to learn and see it again and again and again, what we think they’re going to — now, once you play somebody, you watch the film, you see their fits, and then you can hopefully find a way to mess with it as much as possible.

But the O-line has to be comfortable with the movement, and that’s why — I think probably why the players brought that up. We are trying to get them comfortable with that. Not a guy just standing there, but he is going to have to figure out a lot of the other stuff going on while we run a normal play that everybody runs. We’re just trying to make it be as effective as humanly possible.

Q. Kind of a two-parter, but a lot of what Tom asked there, is the RPO and the motion kind of designed to create conflict more at the second level to enable your line to be able to get to where it needs to like on a stretch play, versus last year a lot of times without the cut blocks, the linebackers were completely free-flowing to that spot and try to create a little bit more room there? Secondly, at quarterback with RPOs, it’s not necessarily designed run, but you do want a quarterback who can run more out of that a lot of the time. Do you have a quarterback that’s capable of running more frequently than on staff? Do you have one right now?

TIM LESTER: Well, Marco. Marco can run. Every practice I’ve had a couple Marco plays in. With our terms and what we can do, we can easily turn any play into a zone read type world.

In my mind, when I say RPO, it’s less having the quarterback involved. When I’m flowing the ball sideways, this is just a personal opinion, when you’re throwing bubbles and slants and reading ends and running out and running triple option, tight football, the new spread, I call those bail-outs. If we get out numbered we have a play to get the ball where there’s less people.

RPOs, I’m throwing it down the field. I’m trying to score when I run a run-pass option.

So the motions and the shifts and the RPOs — we didn’t run one for at least a week or two because we had to get everything in, and then we started putting a couple in and we hit them early and our guys — they’ve got to throw them a million times so they can do it until their blue in the face, until they can’t screw it up.

We’re still getting better at executing them. Hardest thing was — I had to learn the defense to figure out where it would even give us a chance, where would it lighten the load. It has helped our run game. Now that — any team that knows that you’re an RPO team, those safeties and the second and third level guys have to figure out if I take off to fill right now, then I could get thrown over the head or do I just sit here and wait.

We have done a little bit of that, not a ton. But yeah, it’s really more second and third level. And then when you want to get into the zone read world, now you’re talking first level. We’ve done a little bit of that, too. Not a ton, but just a little. With Marco.

Q. We’ve been hearing about Washington moving from backfield to working at receiver in the spring. What was kind of the genesis of that idea and what’s stood out to you from that spot?

TIM LESTER: Well, he’s a great athlete. He threw the ball to me the other day, and the thing was spinning. And he can throw it, as well.

You know, the biggest thing is we have a couple guys banged up and that were out for a short amount of time, so it just made sense to put him in there. He still played running back. He carried the ball today. So he’s still in the running back room, but he has a skill set that we figured would be great for him to learn out there.

He has gotten a ton of reps at our slot position. Done a good job getting better. Sometimes he runs a route and he still looks like a running back running a route, and then sometimes he looks great.

It’s been a very great — we have a good stack of running backs, and we felt like that was going to be the way that he’d get the most reps and be out there playing football, and then we’d still at the end throw him in for a couple running back reps.

It’s been fun. I think we’re just trying to increase the amount of people that can help us in the fall, and with the amount of reps he got with the 1s this year due to little, he’s going to miss two days, going to miss a day, he’ll be back next week, all at that 1 position, he was able to hop in there and get a ton of valuable reps. Hopefully it’ll pay off for him in the fall.

It definitely will. He learned maybe more than anybody having to switch. Three days in I think he switched positions, but still giving him a couple running back reps every day, too.

I’m happy about — young and super talented, and he just shows up and works, and that’s the best guys to coach.

Q. Saturday will be our last chance to see the team, fans’ last chance to see the team until at least August probably. How it works is we all make big conclusions about what we see —

TIM LESTER: After the spring game, or is it a game?

Q. Anyway, to help us in our coverage, what do you want to see Saturday, and what do you want fans to be able to see Saturday about whatever, progress you’ve made or — what should we expect to see?

TIM LESTER: Yeah, I just want to be efficient. I want to be able to stay on-sides, all the pre-snap, all the logistical part of running a system like this. Getting in and out of the huddle. Getting the shifts, motions, cadence, and coming off the ball.

If we can do that — I’m sure he’s going to put us in some situations — you really don’t know. You just sit there and Coach decides, this is what we’re doing, and we roll. I am sure there will be some two-minute situations and some 3rd and long situations which will be tough for us this early, but we’re going to go out there and swing when we get into some of those situations.

But I’m hoping when we — he’ll put the ball down at some point, and It’ll be 1st and 10 and hopefully we can drive the ball.

We had one last Saturday, I want to say it was 12 plays. We moved the ball down the field really well and they had one today that we scored on.

Just having some success just grinding out 1st downs, which there’s going to be a lot of 3rd downs in there. Hopefully they’re 3rd and shorts and not 3rd and 10s. I just want to see them continue doing what they’ve been doing, because they have continued to show up because we’ve had some rough days, we’ve had some really good days. They always respond.

We watch the film together. We talk about the — the one thing about offense, if one guy screws up, the play is done. So it’s not like — defense sometimes — the left corner can fall down, but if the quarterback throws to the right, you throw a pick six, it’s the greatest play ever, right?

So we need to all be on the same page. We’re not going to put a lot of crazy new plays in or anything like that. I don’t have anything to add from what we put in the last week. We just want to see them go out there and execute this time.

Really we talk about banked reps again and stacking them. Whether there’s 20,000 people there or in Kinnick on the practice field in the indoor, we need them. And I want to see the kids. The guys respond to having people there.

I was worried last Saturday because we were in the stadium. There’s no one there, but it was just different. This time there will be some people there cheering for them.

The ability to stay focused and keep playing the same way no matter what, trying to keep them so busy, working, thinking, and trying to execute, they should hopefully not hear anyone there. We’ve got a ways to go to get there.

But it’s going to be fun. It’ll be fun for everyone to watch kind of our plan and what we’re doing and who’s having success and who’s not. It’ll be competitive because the defense plays hard.

It’ll be fun to see which guys can step up to the occasion. But yeah, I just want to see us get a little bit better at being efficient, taking care of the ball, getting out of the huddle, no penalties, because that takes time.

We’ve done a pretty good job of that, but there will be — I don’t know how many people will be there. I’m the new guy, so a lot of times they answer and they’re like, we’re going to do it like we did last year. I’ll be like, oh, how’s that? Every day at practice like, hey, how does this drill go, just like last year. Oh, how’s that?

So I don’t know what tomorrow is — or Saturday? Saturday is. But we’re going to see. Whatever Coach tells us to do, we’re going to show up and try to get better, and the guys really have been doing a good job of that. So it’s been a lot of fun. Long way to go, but it’s been a good start.