With the change over the offseason from offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz, many fans hoped that a change in offensive ideology was also coming to Iowa City.
For years, Iowa has been known as a team that loves to play smashmouth football. They dictate how the game is going to be played and make it so that you hate when Iowa is scheduled for your weekend. Unfortunately, in recent years, that label of being a smashmouth, run-first squad has given way to Iowa just simply being a bad team on offense that can’t move the ball.
Now that they got rid of Ferentz, they could finally go in a different direction. Right?
Some fans were not extremely happy with the hiring of former Western Michigan head coach Tim Lester over the offseason to be the next offensive coordinator. A lot of the criticisms do make a ton of sense.
Despite being a team that was just in the Big Ten Championship, Iowa spent a really long time on a coaching search to hire a guy who really doesn’t have any success as a play-caller at the Power Four level. No offense, but Western Michigan is not a program on Iowa’s level.
Lester’s offensive style on the surface is also not entirely far-removed from what Kirk Ferentz wants to do either. Lester certainly isn’t going to be mistaken for Lincoln Riley as a play-caller, however, we are already seeing ways this offseason that Iowa’s preferred style of play can be improved on.
In a column by Chad Leistikow for the Des Moines Register, current running backs coach Ladell Betts discussed the influence of Lester’s time recently in Green Bay.
“We’re running the Packers’ system. We’re running the Shanahan system,” Betts said as the Hawkeyes coaching staff visited the Packers practice a few weeks ago.
While Lester was only with the Packers for a year as an analyst, it’s obvious that he learned a lot in Green Bay. It seems Lester has learned a few tricks from Matt LaFleur to improve Iowa’s rushing attack.
“The bread and butter of it is the run game. It all centers around the run game… But, I think the biggest takeaway is how much consternation can we give the defense? How off-balance can we keep the defense? There’s going to be a lot of motions. A lot of shifts. A lot of pre-snap changes with the alignments.
“Because if you’re thinking about it from a defensive perspective, (they’re) trying to eliminate what you’re doing from a specific formation. … And the more they can eliminate, the better they’ll be. But when you’re changing that picture constantly, it’s hard for them to eliminate certain plays. You’re trying to… create doubt for the defense,” Betts said.
The implementation of motion is potentially huge for the Hawkeyes, as Tom Fornelli explains in his piece for CBS Sports.
Hearing that the Hawkeyes plan to use more pre-snap motion was a jolt to the system. Motion before the snap is not some newfangled discovery. It’s a basic concept teams have used for a long time to force a defense to declare itself and make life easier for the quarterback. How infrequently did Iowa use motion last season? According to TruMedia, only 22.9% of the time; it ranked No. 12 in the Big Ten and No. 112 nationally. – Fornelli, CBS Sports.
As Fornelli states in his article, motion is not the easy fix for offenses that some in the football world think it is. However, it is extremely useful for what the Hawkeyes want to do.
Under Brian Ferentz, Iowa made things far too easy for their opponents. They lined up in heavy formations and telegraphed exactly what they were going to do, opting to try and muscle through the opposition. Iowa’s offense was all about putting themselves at a disadvantage.
Smart teams use motion to help enhance the key points of their offense. We’ve seen this recently with the Packers head coach Matt LaFleur and his various colleagues under the Shanahan coaching tree.
This is something I legitimately have talked about before, referencing how the Los Angeles Rams under Sean McVay have used motion to perfection. Most recently, we’ve seen Michigan, another smashmouth team, carefully implement motion to enhance their powerful offense.
Smart teams do what they can to put themselves at an advantage, even when employing a run-first style offense where you look to play complementary football.
For a team like Iowa who doesn’t have an entire roster full of five-star recruits, the coaching staff doing what they can to put their players in the best positions possible to make plays is crucial.
We see Phil Parker do this time and time again on defense. Now, can we see Tim Lester be the change on offense?
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