IOWA CITY — The gears of college football’s coaching carousel had already been turning by the time Dave Clawson unexpectedly stepped down as Wake Forest’s head coach.
Purdue fired Ryan Walters on Dec. 1, 2024, and hired Barry Odom on Dec. 8. West Virginia fired Neal Brown on Dec. 1 and hired Rich Rodriguez on Dec. 12. UCF hired Scott Frost on Dec. 7. North Carolina hired Bill Belichick on Dec. 11.
It wasn’t until Dec. 16 that Clawson’s decision to step down was made public.
That put Wake Forest offensive coordinator Warren Ruggiero in a predicament.
Due to his belated entry into the job market, Ruggiero figured it would likely be challenging to secure a coordinator position or a similar role. So he thought his best bet would be to try to land somewhere as an analyst.
Ruggiero reached out to people he knew in the profession, including Iowa football offensive coordinator Tim Lester.
“Coach Ferentz is a legend and well-respected in the profession and Coach Lester is just a great person, a great coach,” Ruggiero said. “I’ve been in the profession for so long, I learned the hard way a couple of times that it’s not really where you are, it’s who you’re with, you know? So I wanted to make sure not only was I in a great program, one of the top college programs ideally, but it was really more about being with people whose goals that I felt like I aligned with.”
This offseason, the Hawkeyes brought Ruggiero on board as a senior football analyst.
The Hawkeyes might’ve struck gold with the hiring.
Ruggiero was a finalist for the Broyles Award in 2021, an honor given to college football’s top assistant. To provide a sense of the rare air that award demands: Iowa defensive coordinator Phil Parker was the winner in 2023. Ruggiero has extensive experience in college football, having served as offensive coordinator at a variety of stops, including Wake Forest, Bowling Green, Elon and Hofstra.
It’s not like there’s a surplus of coaches of Ruggiero’s caliber readily available, giving Iowa quite an asset.
“He’s been great,” true freshman quarterback Jimmy Sullivan said of Ruggiero. “Asking him questions is crazy because there’s not a question he doesn’t know. He’s one of the smartest football guys I’ve ever met. So he’s been great. He’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met and he’s just great to be around and have in the room.”
Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz described Ruggiero as “a football guy all the way.”
Lester noted that: “he’s a football junkie, which is great. So am I.”
Ruggiero laughed when that was relayed to him.
“I don’t have a lot of hobbies,” Ruggiero explained. “Football and my family has always kind of been my thing. I kind of gave up golf a long time ago. I love the game (of football).”
Ruggiero’s coaching ambitions were why he wound up at the University of Delaware, and the fact that he played in a Wing-T offense in high school made him a natural fit to be a quarterback for the Fightin’ Blue Hens, who also featured the unique system. The plan was that after Ruggiero’s playing career was over, Delaware would let him jumpstart his coaching career.
And that’s what happened. He served as a graduate assistant at Delaware before taking his first offensive coordinator job at Defiance College in Ohio.
Ruggiero has made numerous stops since then. But take a look at his resume and there’s one unlike all the others: Glenville State. In his more than three decades in the industry, a two-season stint at Glenville State was the only time Ruggiero served as a head coach.
“I think in the end, after doing that, more of my goal was to coach at a higher level than to be a head coach, if that makes sense,” Ruggiero said. “…And then as I got older, and you learn more of your strengths and weaknesses, I think my strength was not to be a head coach. That really wasn’t in my DNA. It’s not what I wanted to do. I really learned that that wasn’t my path. I really wanted to be more just on the offensive side of the ball.”
Ruggiero might be best known for creating an innovative style of modern offense.
When Clawson went from Bowling Green to Wake Forest, Ruggiero made the move with him. Ruggiero tried to implement that same offense at Wake Forest as he did at Bowling Green, but quickly realized that wasn’t going to work. As Ruggiero tells it, the talent gap between the Deamon Deacons and the rest of the ACC was much wider than what Bowling Green faced in the MAC.
Ruggiero wanted a way to generate explosive plays despite that.
That ultimately led to the creation of the “Slow Mesh,” which is essentially a first-of-its-kind run-pass-option with slower-paced decision-making.
“We had to find a way to be unique,” Ruggiero said, “probably similar to how Army and Navy at some point figured out ‘Boy, we’re not going to be able to do what everybody else does and to be competitive, so we got to do something different.’”
At Iowa, Ruggiero’s job is technically defined as advanced scouting. He has already been diving into the defenses of teams on the Hawkeyes’ 2025 schedule. The hope is that on the Sunday after a game, Ruggiero’s preparation will give Lester a head start on the next matchup.
But it’s clear Ruggiero’s impact goes beyond that.
Without Ruggiero, Iowa likely wouldn’t have landed transfer quarterback Jeremy Hecklinski. Ruggiero, who recruited and coached Hecklinski at Wake Forest, connected the dots for the Hawkeyes to bring in the signal caller who threw for more than 3,800 yards during his senior high school season.
If there’s a perception floating around that Iowa is still archaic in its offensive thinking, there is now rising evidence that suggests otherwise. Lester runs an NFL system. Ruggiero is the mastermind behind a novel offensive scheme.
The stars aligned for this partnership between Iowa and Ruggiero to happen. If Clawson had made his decision to step down a couple of weeks earlier, Iowa might not have been able to have Ruggiero on staff. But it did, and before Iowa even kicks off its 2025 season, Ruggiero has already made his mark.
“I think Iowa is just an amazing place,” Ruggiero said. “It’s an amazing culture coach (Kirk Ferentz) built here. In this day of college football, where there’s certainly some craziness, this place is about as pure as it gets and certainly, it hasn’t disappointed.”
Follow Tyler Tachman on X @Tyler_T15, contact via email at ttachman@gannett.com
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Why Iowa football might’ve struck gold with this staff addition: ‘A football junkie’
Reporting by Tyler Tachman, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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