Kansas quarterbacks coach Jim Zebrowski wants the reporter to ask his son, Zach, a question. Zach, a redshirt junior at Central Missouri, leads Division II in pretty much every major passing category. Passing yards, touchdowns, completions. You name it. But Jim, with an amusement that bursts through the phone, wants someone to ask Zach how much pops coached him growing up.
“Not too much, to be honest,” Zach said with a chuckle when 247Sports asked the question. “I picked up the ball. I threw it pretty well, and he was like, ‘Alright, have fun. Throw it to the right people and you’ll be good.’”
It’s almost the exact answer Jim predicted. It’s a running joke between the two.
Jim is among the most respected quarterback coaches in college football, helping to transform those like Jalon Daniels and Jason Bean once he began working with them in Lawrence. Zach might be the leading passer in college football regardless of level. But dad largely let son find his own path to stardom after he quickly identified that Zach had all the intangibles. Zach went on a challenging journey that began with a walk-on stint at FCS Southern Illinois despite D-II offers elsewhere. Zach is now one of the favorite for the Harlon Hill Award, which is given to the nation’s top overall players in Division II. The incredible job Jim has done at Kansas has him being mentioned for several OC jobs this offseason, including Iowa.
Their parallel stories reveal a shared mentality— one that values people over football.
“He cares more about the people than football itself,” Zach said. “He creates relationships. Whenever I was around his teams the players would always say, ‘Coach Z is the man, I can talk to him about anything.”
“He has more fun than anyone I’ve ever seen play,” Jim said. “I believe that in my heart of hearts.”
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Jim is a 32-year coaching veteran, but he’d be quick to tell you that his background is in teaching. He worked as a high school football coach from 1991 to 1996. He taught math, too. It’s in those classrooms where Jim said he learned how to instruct, lead and inspire.
“I would love for every coach in college to have been a teacher or a high school coach at a school you can’t recruit,” Jim said. “Math isn’t a subject people are excited about. You get it or you don’t. Then you have to work hard with a kid. You have to be patient. I always think about that. The best coaches are the best teachers.”
That’s a viewpoint Jim’s carried with him in a career that’s spanned from D-III to the FBS. He’s coached pretty much everywhere, including a 28-12 record as the head coach at Lakeland University from 2003-07. He’s been in the FBS every year but one since 2010 and worked for either Lance Leipold (Wisconsin-Whitewater, Buffalo, Kansas) or Jerry Kill (Northern Illinois, Minnesota) 16 of the last 17 years.
Jim’s coached program record-setters and all-conference players in every stop of his FBS run. Tyree Jackson became Buffalo’s first MAC Offensive Player of the Year in 2019. Kansas’ Jalon Daniels was legitimately in the Heisman Trophy discussion last year before a season-ending injury.
When it comes to teaching his QBs, Jim said two things are critical: Being loose and sudden.
Jim wants quarterbacks who are loose enough and natural enough throwers to make off-platform throws with velocity. Suddenness is the ability to make quick decisions and to get the ball out quickly.
“Not too many swing thoughts,” Jim said.
There is no set prototype for a quarterback to have success under Jim, at least not physically. Daniels is 6-foot, 215 pounds with an arm that can make any throw from any angle. Bean, the backup who will finish 2023 as the starter because of Daniels’ injury, is built like a receiver at 6-foot-3, 195 pounds with the speed to hit 22-plus mph on the GPS. Even former walk-on QB Cole Ballard has excelled when thrown into the fire; the true freshman nearly led KU to its first win over Kansas State in 15 years last week.
When Jim started to work with Daniels, he was coming off a 2020 season in which he completed 50% of his passes and threw quadruple the number of interceptions to touchdowns. Three years later, Daniels is one of the top players in college football.
“It’s a confidence level,” Jim said. “Jalon his freshman year, they ran a lot of empty pro and put a lot on a 17-year-old. He got sacked a lot, hit a lot. We strive on protections and make sure kids understand it. I think that’s what helped him go, the system and how we coach our pass game and run game. We’re not always on the same spot all the time. Moving around, changing launch points. The creativity fits who he is.
“The mental aspect we’ve connected well. He can just go play. Make plays. That’s who he is. I’ve tried to let him go, and that’s been fun.”
Bean arrived at Kansas from UNT having completed just 54.5% of his passes. He struggled to complete short throws due to an elongated throwing motion and often held onto the ball for too long. This year? He’s a 60% passer who’s averaging 9.3 yards per attempt with 10 touchdowns against 4 interceptions.
Jim’s heard from multiple of Bean’s former coaches telling him how remarkable Bean’s growth has been.
“That’s a testament to him,” Jim said. “We work on getting the ball out of his hand quickly. It’s clicked for him. He got his release point down and gets his front foot down faster. He had trouble with the short throws. We worked so hard on it. He did it.”
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Zach can only describe his Oct. 21 game against No. 23 Emporia State as a blur. He set Mid-America conference records for passing yards that day (615) to go along with eight passing touchdowns.
As Zach told some of his friends after it happened, he’s not even sure if he could’ve replicated that in Madden.
“It felt like you can’t do anything wrong,” Zach said.
That effort is the highlight of a season in which he’s thrown for 4,732 yards and 56 touchdowns against five interceptions while completing 68.6 percent of his passes for a Central Missouri team that plays in the second round of the D-II playoffs this week.
It’s also a high point of a journey that looked like it might never occur back in high school. Zach was not much of a prospect entering his senior year. He was a bit undersized – a sub-6-foot QB who’d eventually hit 6-foot-2 in college – and played in a run-first offense that didn’t ask him to throw the ball much.
That changed his senior year. Jim remembers getting the night off while at Buffalo to watch a game early in Zach’s season at East Ridge High School in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Jim showed up and almost couldn’t believe what he saw: An offense that threw it maybe 15 times a game the year prior was chucking the ball all over the field with Zach making play after play. Zach would go on to set the state record for single-game completions.
“It was hilarious,” Jim said. “I was like, ‘That dude is pretty good.”
Zach passed on some scholarship offers to walk on at Southern Illinois, where his mom Heather was a star volleyball player. He stayed for four years, earned the backup job and eventually a scholarship. But when Southern Illinois starting QB Nick Baker took a sixth year following the 2022 season, Zach felt he had to move on and look for a place he could play. He knew he could help a team after years on the bench. He just had to go do it.
Jim has watched his son live three times this season. When he scouts Zach, he sees a quarterback who naturally understands the mental side of the game. Zach processes quickly and picks up offenses with ease. Put in a system that requires tempo and relies on the quarterback to make quick decisions, and Zach has thrived.
“He couldn’t have found a better match with his skillset and that offense,” Jim said.
The journey hasn’t been easy for Zach. He’s a self-described late-bloomer who’s had to fight for reps and fill in the holes in his game knowing nothing would ever be given to him as a walk-on.
Now, there’s a real chance Zach is named the best overall player in D-II football.
“I’m not thinking about it too much,” Zach said of the Harlon Hill Award. But just seeing your name in that conversation is a cool feeling. It’s something that shows the hard work. It feels like I’m getting rewarded for years of work that went unnoticed.”
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Jim and Zach don’t get to play catch as much these days, but they do share a very similar Saturday routine.
Both will have their games and then, at some point, one will call the other to see how things went. Usually, Zach makes the call. But if Kansas is coming off a loss, he’ll often wait for Jim to dial. Usually, Zach likes to ask Jim about how Kansas did. But it doesn’t take dad long to steer the conversation toward Central Missouri. Heather attends all of Zach’s games, and Jim wants to know all the details.
“It’s a cool feeling to talk with somebody who knows just as much as you do about the game,” Zach said.
As for their pre-game communication, it tends to be pretty light. Zach will text his mom about needing an oil change or more monotonous tasks. Communication with dad, at least during the fall, is usually reserved for Saturday night.
But Jim will text him a variation of the same message every Saturday morning: “Good luck. Best day of the week. Have more fun than anybody else.”
