GRAHAM COUCH

Couch: Lester a smart choice as WMU football enters uncharted waters

Graham Couch
Lansing State Journal

New Western Michigan University new head coach, Tim Lester, fields questions from the media Saturday afternoon.

KALAMAZOO – When Tim Lester interviewed for the Western Michigan football coaching job four years ago, he had the same recruiting philosophy as P.J. Fleck. He just couldn’t articulate it as concisely.

“I told (athletic director) Kathy (Beauregard), ‘We need to focus here,’” Lester said Saturday, reenacting the scene, as if he were frantically pointing to different cities on a map. “Then (Fleck) got the job and called it a ‘six-hour radius,’ which is way cooler than I could come up with. It was the same thing. It just sounded cooler.”

Lester got the gig this time, a son of WMU coming home to a program figuring out life amid unprecedented success in a league whose harsh realities are known for killing dreams if they get too bold.

“Row The Boat” is likely headed to Minnesota with Fleck, who became the Gophers’ head coach last week. The word “great” will again be part of the Broncos’ vernacular, as “elite” is used when appropriate but not to describe every bowel movement.

It’s for the best that the Fleck-isms stay with Fleck. No coach sounds genuine using another coach’s sayings. Lester won’t succeed if he’s running onto the field with oars in hand. That’s not who he is. And the reason he’s the right hire for WMU right now is who he is, in resume, personality and doctrine.

Lester, 39, was WMU’s career passing leader when he left in the late 1990s. He served as the Broncos’ quarterbacks coach in 2005 and 2006 under Bill Cubit, spent five seasons as a Division-III head coach in suburban Chicago and, after not landing the WMU job in 2012, sought more Division-I experience — at Syracuse and, last season, Purdue.

Fleck, 31 when he was hired, was lightning in bottle, his last season in Kalamazoo a perfect storm. The undefeated regular season and national ranking left a segment of WMU fans hoping for a big-name hire like former LSU coach Les Miles, because of what they believe the Broncos have become as a program.

It reminds of 2008 when, after Ball State football started 12-0, The Star-Press in Muncie, Indiana, split up its football and basketball beats, because “Ball State football was getting too big.” The 2009 Cardinals, after losing their head coach and hiring within, went 2-10. That’s MAC football in a nutshell. You’re never too big.

Les Miles’ nickname in the South is appropriately “Les with more.” So how would he do with less? Finding the right football coach is about fit and timing. No one is a better fit at WMU at this time than Lester.

The national attention is leaving. It’ll be gone as soon as WMU, with a new quarterback and absent its NFL-bound receiver, gets thumped at USC to open next season. From there, WMU rejoins the MAC — fighting for championships in a smaller bubble.

Lester gets this. He knows exactly what he’s getting into. He was the quarterback of a WMU team 17 years ago that would have challenged the 2016 squad — and yet finished 7-5. That 1999 WMU team put a scare into both Florida and Missouri and lost in the final seconds to Chad Pennington and a ranked Marshall club in the MAC championship game, played at Marshall. That was a good WMU football season. Just not a charmed one.

New WMU football coach Tim Lester shares a moment with his family after after being introduced as the Broncos' coach Saturday.

In Lester’s first meeting with his new team Friday night, he spoke to them about culture and change. It’s easier for a coach to be able to sell a new culture — even if it’s not entirely needed — than to get players to trust you with their culture. Hired into a program that just won 13 games, you embrace the culture, even if you’re not wearing “RTB” on your lapel.

“We’ll do some things to make it our own. But that culture is a winning culture,” Lester said during his introduction Saturday. “Whether they do it because of this word or that word or whatever word, they’ve done a great job of buying into this culture. And I’m going to sit down and figure out what things they like, what things they don’t like, what they want changed.

“I let them know, coaches can come and go but culture wins. The same coach can be there, if the culture goes way, the same coach loses.”

This happened to Fleck’s three predecessors at WMU, Al Molde, Gary Darnell and Cubit. Lester played for all three.

Times have changed at WMU. Cubit made less than $170,000 annually when he was hired 12 years ago. Lester, like Fleck, with be the highest-paid coach in the MAC, signing a five-year deal worth $800,000 per year, with incentives that could reach $1.1 million. Only $225,000 of that is base salary paid by the school. At WMU, like most of college football and all of the MAC, the athletic department is not solvent, no matter how much winning occurs. The value is in being the front porch to the university.

In that regard, Fleck had great value. He knew how to be a frontman, a CEO, an amazing recruiter. He hired a good staff, set the tone and let it work. Lester’s football background is more full, however.

He’s already been a head coach, he’s called plays for an offense at the Division-I level, he’s been on three different staffs and he’s been fired twice. These are experiences that make for a good head football coach — a person who knows what they want and, more importantly, what they don’t.

“I lot of times when you’re coaching, you learn what you don’t want to know. I will not let that happen,” Lester said. “Sometimes you’re with a (head) guy and you’re like, ‘I want to do it just like him.’ But for the most part, you’re going, ‘OK, I want to make sure that never happens to me.’ And I’ve already thought about that 15 to 20 times in the last 24 hours.

“Like when it comes to the hiring process (with assistant coaches), I know what that (head) guy did, I know why he hired him, but he should have hired (another guy) and he knows he should have hired (the other guy) but he didn’t. And I’m going to make sure I hire the guys who are the best fit.”

Lester will have to do it quickly to salvage this recruiting class, which is already being picked over by Fleck at Minnesota. But he’s smart enough not to worry about what he can’t control. He doesn’t plan to fill every open spot just to fill it. In the long run, with the three classes Fleck just brought in, WMU will be OK if this is simply a solid group. If it’s not, the Broncos will probably have a rough season sometime in the next few years. It happens.

Lester’s biggest challenge is meeting soaring expectations and holding the school’s feet to the fire with its financial commitments to the program.

He knows football. People like him. He reads the room well. He wanted desperately to be at WMU. Whether he wins or not remains to be seen. But in replacing Fleck, WMU wasn’t going to get anyone else who checked so many boxes.

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.