'Like John Wayne': To succeed at Western Kentucky, Tyson Helton seeks gunslingers

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. -- When Tyson Helton evaluates a quarterback, the Western Kentucky head coach channels the Old West.

"There's not one damn great quarterback who don't walk up there like John Wayne," Helton said, his southern drawl stretching the Western star's name out an extra syllable.

To illustrate, Helton stands up from the chair in his office and shows his preferred quarterback look -- a deliberate head turn to bark concise instructions and intentional pointing to check plays. He wants a player completely unaffected by the moment.

Helton then parodies what he hates seeing, shaking his leg like he's got bees in his boxers, flailing his arms dramatically and whipping his head around as if he's expecting Myles Garrett to rush off the edge.

"It doesn't matter if it's Brandon Doughty here at Western, Sam Darnold at USC or Bailey Zappe or Austin Reed here," Helton said, rattling off quarterbacks he has coached. "All the good ones, when they walk to the line of scrimmage, it's damn John Wayne standing up there."

In a college football environment that's been labeled the wild, wild west for years, Helton has stayed relevant by exuding John Wayne-like calm in the head coaching chair. He's defied the sport's gravity -- power leagues poaching, the portal churn and limited NIL -- by finding gunslingers who can stay calm and spin the ball through all the headwinds.

The proof is on Helton's résumé: Western Kentucky is one of 11 FBS college football programs to play in a bowl in each of the past six years, and it's the only non-power league school to have a player picked in the first three rounds of the NFL draft in the past four years.

That kind of sustained success has made the Hilltoppers both an anomaly and a target. In an era when programs outside the power leagues have essentially turned into talent incubators for top-end conferences -- including WKU losing 10 players to power schools and close to 70 percent of its production this year alone -- Helton has kept Western Kentucky consistent during an era where inconsistency has become an expectation.

Helton has adapted unsentimentally to college football's seismic changes with the same flatlined vibes he seeks in a quarterback. "The minute you changed it to the portal and NIL, it became a transactional business," he said. "Right?"

He also has a simple transaction plan that's kept WKU ahead even as it brings in 60 new scholarship players this year: relentlessly seek a quarterback who can be the program's engine.

Helton's next quarterback, FCS transfer Maverick McIvor, grew up enamored with John Wayne and has deep ties to the actor. Wayne directed a movie, "The Alamo," on a ranch owned by McIvor's family.

"If you have a quarterback, you have a chance," Helton said. "And that's the No. 1 piece that's so important in today's game."

Helton has leaned in on early acceptance of college football as a year-to-year business. He tells players in the preseason that he, his staff and all the players will be evaluating their options at the end of the year. So he asks only for a year of dedication in the foxhole. He sums up the modern ethos this way: "You're going to have to look at people -- hey, this is not going to work out," Helton said. "The same way they're going to look at you and say, 'Hey coach, I'm going to have to move on.'"

Then he adjusts accordingly. Lose one quarterback who breaks the NCAA record for touchdowns and passing yards in a season? Helton will find another quarterback to lead the country in passing yards, as he did when the Hilltoppers transitioned from Zappe to Reed in 2021 and 2022.

A star offensive coordinator leaves for a Power Five gig? Helton will promote an unknown off-field assistant without a hitch. After Zach Kittley spent a year as the WKU offensive coordinator, he left for the same job at Texas Tech, then became the head coach at Florida Atlantic. His anonymous replacement, Ben Arbuckle, would also do the job for a year and is now the offensive coordinator at Oklahoma.

Now that the portal has become mainstream, Helton said he's seeing more value in high school recruiting and is making a shift back there. Last June, WKU barely did any high school official visits, but that's changed. He's got visits in three straight weeks this month. He needs to zig before others zag.

"At a place like Western Kentucky," Helton said, "the mindset is always to stay cutting edge and stay ahead of the game."

When last season's primary starter, Caden Veltkamp, left to play for Kittley at FAU, Helton executed the package deal maneuver he helped popularize. Helton helped usher the coordinator-quarterback package deal into the mainstream when he plucked Kittley and Zappe from Houston Christian in December of 2020.

This spin on the carousel, he snared Abilene Christian offensive coordinator Rick Bowie and McIvor, who was the No. 4 passer in the FCS last year for ACU.

They come with big expectations and goals, as Helton tells Bowie the same message he once relayed to Kittley: If you do your job, you should be "one-and-done here" and go call plays at a power school.

They are bringing the right perspective.

"You want to be like John Wayne, kicking the saloon doors open," McIvor said of playing the position. "That's why Coach Helton says that. It's relatable. It's so fitting."

That mindset will help Helton confront his next and biggest challenge -- replacing nearly 70 percent of his production from last year. He lost all four defensive linemen to Indiana, Auburn, Florida State and Wake Forest, as well as two quarterbacks -- Veltcamp to FAU and injured quarterback TJ Finley to Tulane.

Without them, Western Kentucky ranks No. 125 nationally in returning production rankings, per ESPN's Bill Connelly.

"I love it," Helton said. "I love the challenge of it. [But] do I want to be in this position? I do not."

He jokes that WKU should come up with a graphic to show recruits how much money former Hilltoppers have gone on to make elsewhere. It's estimated that they made more than $3 million in the last cycle. Western Kentucky has about $1 million to spend on its entire roster, per Helton, which is a fraction of what individual players make in the power conferences. "We've got a knife in a gun fight," Helton said with a laugh.

Still, Western Kentucky is one of only four non-power conference teams to reach a bowl in six straight seasons, dating back to the beginning of Helton's tenure. The Hilltoppers join Louisiana, Liberty and Marshall in that pint-sized fraternity of consistency as college football undergoes a tsunami of changes, from the portal to NIL to transfer rules -- all of which Helton embraces.

"When everyone was pushing back," he said in reference to NIL, "it was a way for me to say, 'Hey, I know the players are going to take full advantage of this. I know we can pick what we need to win that fits us.'"

The transaction most likely to become the bellwether to Western Kentucky's success in 2025 is the acquisition of McIvor from Abilene. McIvor threw for 8,012 yards and 63 touchdowns in three years there, including 506 yards in an overtime loss to Texas Tech to open the 2024 season.

That outburst put both him and Bowie on the radars of big schools, and they ended up at WKU together. McIvor picked WKU over schools like Wake Forest and Tulane.

McIvor will turn 25 before WKU opens against Sam Houston in Week 0, and he brings both a name out of "Friday Night Lights" and a demeanor that fits Helton's belief in a Wayne-like line of scrimmage.

McIvor said there's a ranch in his family called Quien Sabe in Midland County, Texas, where Wayne interacted with his relatives frequently over the years. Such lore meant that McIvor grew up a huge John Wayne fan, and he even has a picture of the famous actor in his apartment.

He loved that Helton references Wayne as a model for quarterback comportment. And he's not shy about what he's aiming to achieve.

"The perfect script would be, first and foremost, winning a championship in Conference USA," McIvor said. "I want that under our belt and throw for right next to 6,000 yards, complete 75 percent of my passes and less than five interceptions."

How has Helton, 47, built WKU to where those types of numbers are an expectation? The background starts with growing up in a football family, as he played quarterback in college for his father, Kim Helton, at the University of Houston.

Along his path, he has worked for everyone from June Jones at Hawaii to Jeff Brohm at WKU and his older brother, Clay Helton, at USC. He's picked and chosen from systems, melding his coordinators' strengths with his core beliefs.

The results of all that tinkering has yielded an incubator to tailor his background with the beliefs of the coordinators and, of course, tying them with the skill set of the quarterback and surrounding talent.

Over the past four years, with four different coordinators and three different quarterbacks, Western Kentucky has finished, on average, 10th nationally in passing offense. When asked to explain his success in that realm, Helton points to a never-ending search to find the next great quarterback.

"I look at pretty much every Division I quarterback every single year," he said. "I watch them through the season. I know who the backups are. We recruit these guys out of high school.

"I track the FCS guys. I track the Division II guys. I have a recruiting staff that helps me with all that. I am constantly watching those guys."

What does Helton value in quarterbacks to see what others have missed? "Forget about arm strength," Helton said, stressing the importance of pre-snap manipulation. "The anticipation with the accuracy piece is unstoppable."

Scouting quarterbacks doubles as a way to scout coordinators and playcallers. Watching McIvor introduced him to Bowie, who came from the Dana Holgorsen tree before calling plays at Valdosta State and Abilene Christian.

Bowie says the Air Raid is like a steak: Everyone seasons and garnishes it differently. Helton's flavor will be a form of what they call the Pro-Raid, marrying Air Raid passing with a pro-style run game. That's been built from five offensive coordinators in the past six years all bringing different concepts to poach, borrow and evolve WKU's wide-open scheme.

"It's more about space and numbers than just throwing the football," Bowie said. "I see it blending. There's a strong Air Raid component to it, but not being reckless, and doing what's best to win the game."

McIvor has been around long enough that he committed to Kliff Kingsbury at Texas Tech, a pledge made back in December of 2018. He jokes that he hopes the more apt word to describe him is mature, rather than old. His experience made the opportunity at WKU what he called a "no-brainer," as he calls it "the best decision I ever made" before even throwing a pass there.

There's been an urgency to accompany this final year. But McIvor plans to approach it the steady way his coach wants him to approach the line of scrimmage.

"This is my job, I'm going to be the best I can be at it," he said. "I think if I have the year that I have planned and, in my mind, I believe I can be a draft pick. And that's my goal."

And if McIvor achieves it, that would mean the pinball numbers and accompanying wins would continue for Helton, as he defies attrition and keeps hunting high-flying offenses one John Wayne behind center at a time.