PicoBlog

88 days. It’s the length of a year on Mercury. It’s one day longer than it took BP to cap the Deepwater Horizon oil leak. It’s eight days longer than it took the Allies to get from the beaches of Normandy to the Champs-Elysees.

And if the rumors are true, it’s the length of time it took Kirk Ferentz to settle on an offensive coordinator for the 2024 Iowa Hawkeyes. Longtime college quarterback guru and offensive coordinator Kevin Johns was spotted meeting with Kirk over continental breakfast this morning, and is widely considered the eventual choice for Iowa’s next offensive coordinator. Johns spent the last two years at Duke, working for Mike Elko; with Elko now in College Station and dating Collin Klein, he had some availability.

Let’s get into the background first: Johns grew up in Ohio and played quarterback at Dayton for the legendary Mike Kelly. His first coaching gig came in 1999, as a graduate assistant for Randy Walker at Northwestern. Johns camped out in Evanston for most of the next decade, with a two-year stint as a receivers coach at Richmond the only time away. He became the running backs coach in 2004, moved to receivers in 2006, and became passing game coordinator under Pat Fitzgerald in 2008. It’s Fitzgerard-era Northwestern, so Mick McCall was calling the plays, but Johns was considered by many to be the brains behind that spread passing attack that Norm Parker hated so much. The 2010 Iowa-Northwestern game, where Iowa led 17-7 at the end of three and blew it, and I drank a bottle of warm gas station riesling on the Purple Line back to my hotel to kill the pain? That was him!

In 2011, Johns left Northwestern to join the staff of newly-minted Indiana head coach Kevin Wilson as receivers coach and passing game coordinator. Wilson had been the offensive coordinator at Northwestern during Johns’ first stint as a grad assistant. He was supposed to work under Brent Pease, but Pease left after a couple of weeks for Boise State; Wilson brought in Rod Smith off the RichRod staff at Michigan and made the co-coordinators. Johns took over quarterbacks for the first time in 2012, and became the full-on offensive coordinator in 2014. He remained in that spot until 2016, when Wilson was fired.

It probably says something that Johns never went back to position coaching again, even though he was on two staffs where the head coach was axed. He spent a year with Tim Lester in the wake of P.J. Fleck’s boat at Western Michigan, then a year with Kliff Kingsbury (!!) at Texas Tech (!!!) right before Kingsbury somehow got fired AND promoted to an NFL spot, and then three seasons as offensive coordinator for two different coaches — Mike Norvell and Ryan Silverfield — at Memphis.

And then came Duke, where Johns was hired by Mike Elko. It was the first time that Johns had coached for a defensive-oriented head coach since Fitzgerald, and the first time he’d called plays for one ever. In his first season, Duke went an improbable 9-4, didn’t lose a game by double-digits all year, and broke 30 points nine times. The Blue Devils finished the season 32nd nationally in scoring offense, 44th in total offense, and 38th in yards per play; if anyone did that at Iowa, it would be the first time the offense rated that highly since 2008.

Last year wasn’t quite as prolific — 68th in scoring, 96th in yardage, 77th in yards per play — but Duke still went 8-5. There was a moment in September where Duke was 4-0, had stomped a hole in Dabo in the season opener, and had Notre Dame dead to rights. And then Riley Leonard, the quarterback who had led that insurgent 2022 campaign, came down with what eventually became a season-ending injury; he finished the game, but Notre Dame got the go-ahead score with 31 seconds left, and Leonard wasn’t the same over the next two weeks before calling it a year. The backup, Grayson Loftis, was a somewhat competent thrower, but nowhere near the threat as a runner and playmaker that Leonard was. Quarterbacks matter. Good quarterbacks matter a lot.

Let’s discuss the positives first: Johns represents a fairly clear departure from Iowa’s coordinators of the past. He doesn’t have background in the West Coast offense or any ties to the Shanahan/Gibbs zone run tree. Rather, he comes from the Randy Walker Northwestern spread and secondary branches of the Stoops/Leach air raid. He’s coached receivers and quarterbacks exclusively since 2006, and tutored such signalcallers as Indiana’s Nate Sudfeld (who threw for 3573 yards and a 27/7 TD/Int ratio as a senior), Memphis’ Brady White (62% comp., 7400 yards, 64/21 over two seasons), and the aforementioned Riley Leonard (64%, 3000 yards, 20/6 as a sophomore). He’s shown an aptitude for building an offensive system that quarterbacks can figure out fairly quickly, which is a stark departure from what we’ve been told about the dreck put forth by Greg Davis and Brian Ferentz. And he’s done it with lightly-recruited quarterbacks: Leonard was a three-star prospect whose other offers were Nebraska and Ole Miss, White was an Arizona State transfer who played in two games over three years in Tempe, and Sudfeld had three stars and two offers. Johns was able to coach them into capable quarterbacks, and even turned Leonard into a fleeting Heisman candidate. If the things holding back Iowa’s offense are quarterback development and passing game structure — and it’s hard to say otherwise at the moment — he’s a near-perfect fit.

He’s also not beholden to one iteration of offensive system, and has shown an ability to adapt those pass-happy systems to incorporate a running attack and protect a defense. In 2017 at Western Michigan, he coordinated an offense that finished 21st nationally in rushing yards per game and 115th in passing yards; the following year, at Texas Tech, his offense was third nationally in passing yards and 108th in rushing. Both teams finished in the national top 30 in scoring. In other words, he’s adaptable. Johns has ties to the Big Ten, and likely a seal of approval from former Northwestern coach and recent Iowa City fixture Pat Fitzgerald.

The negatives are easy to spot, though. Despite seventeen seasons as a coordinator in some capacity, Johns has actually called plays for just a handful of campaigns. Mick McCall drove the ship for Northwestern, and both Kevin Wilson and Mike Norvell called their own plays. That leaves Johns’ season at Western Michigan, two years at Memphis, and two years at Duke as the instances where we can definitively say he was running his own offense. And the results — both when he’s called the plays and not — have been mixed. Below are the national rankings of Johns’ offenses in scoring, yardage and yards per play.

While Johns’ offense at Western Michigan scored a lot, it didn’t produce much yardage. Memphis’ offense took a fairly significant drop in form when he took over playcalling from Norvell, and there is last year’s (explainable, but existing) dip from Duke.

There’s also this weird thing where the last two coaches he’s worked for have left for better jobs and not taken him along. Norvell opted to hire Kenny Dillingham, who had been his coordinator at Memphis before Johns; Elko opted for Collin Klein, who is a stark departure from Johns’ system, so both are understandable, but it’s still an unusual circumstance.

Back in 2012, Kirk Ferentz hired Greg Davis to “blend” Ferentz’s zone running scheme with Davis’ quick passing game, the derided “horizontal offense” from his last days at Texas. That Frankenstein was underperforming in good years and an unmitigated disaster in bad ones. Brian Ferentz, having studied for nearly his entire career in that system, didn’t ever seem to understand how to get out of it. As Iowa’s offense spiraled toward oblivion in the last four years, it was just Greg Davis, only more: More screen passes, more quick outs, more reliance on tight ends as the only big-play presence. Iowa was able to break out of Kirk’s reliance on the outside zone last year, but it didn’t matter. Any running game married to that offense was overmatched.

We’re likely to hear that Johns is also “blending” his offense with Ferentz’s running attack, but Iowa doesn’t need a simple tweak or an adjustment. It needs an exorcism from the entire Davis/Brian era, particularly in the passing game. And because it’s Kirk Ferentz at the helm, that exorcism has to look like the 1973 version of the film, not any of those newfangled remakes. Finding someone who can do that — who can deliver modern passing concepts with Kirk’s aesthetics — is a big part of what made this search so difficult.

If you look at his resume, his ability to adapt to a coach’s system, and his most recent work for a conservative, defense-first head coach, it looks like Kevin Johns could be the exorcist we need, but it remains to be seen whether Kirk Ferentz will let him use the big crucifix and vanquish those demons.

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