The A-Train's last stop

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — It was 5:20 in the morning, summer 2021, and Adam Lepkowski was standing outside UAB’s weight room with nowhere to go.

Freshman lift started at 6:30. He’d arrived more than an hour early. He called his position coach. The coach wasn’t awake yet. Then Matt McCants, a volunteer assistant at the time, walked up and opened the door.

“Literally day one, coach Matt and I have been together,” Lepkowski said on the Inferno podcast.

Five years later, that hasn’t changed. McCants is now the offensive line coach. Lepkowski is still showing up early. The difference is what happened in between — and what’s riding on the season ahead.

Lepkowski enters 2026 as a graduate student, a sixth-year player and UAB’s most experienced offensive lineman. He started all 12 games at center last season and was graded as the best center in the American Athletic Conference by PFSN College. Pro Football Focus listed him among the top 50 centers nationally.

None of that was supposed to happen.

No offers, no problem

Lepkowski played at Hoover High School, one of Alabama’s marquee programs, but he didn’t get recruited the way Hoover linemen usually do. He was 6-2, 245 pounds and listed as a tackle — undersized for the position at the college level.

“I wouldn’t say offers,” Lepkowski said on the Inferno podcast last season. He had interest — D3 schools, a couple of visits.

A graduate assistant at Tulane asked if he wanted to walk on. He never heard from the guy again. Samford had no scholarship spots open. Columbia told him he wasn’t the right size for a tackle.

“I was like, well, I play offensive line. I don’t play tackle,” Lepkowski told the Inferno last season. “I mean, I might — I like tackle because I felt more of like a skinnier guy. I feel like, oh, those the middle three are the fat ones — and look at me now.”

He chose UAB over a walk-on spot at Samford. The reason was practical.

“UAB was a little bit cheaper for my parents, so — division one,” he said.

He arrived unable to bench 225 pounds. He spent two years on the developmental lift, eating Oreos and whole milk and PB&Js, trying to gain weight. Most of it came on wrong.

“I knew I was going to play D1 football. And so I just gained a bunch of weight,” he said. “Not the right weight.”

He didn’t play a snap in 2021 or 2022. Two full seasons of scout team reps, crossover work against UAB’s best defenders and grinding through a body transformation that took years to show results.

“I didn’t want to be known as just a walk-on,” he said. He wanted to prove he was more than a practice squad body. “I’m going to use this time here. I’m going to get better.”

The scholarship call

By 2023, Lepkowski had reshaped his body and earned time at center. He started five games and helped UAB set a single-season school record with 450.0 yards per game.

Then the coaching staff turned over. Bill Clark had retired in 2022, Bryant Vincent served as interim that season and Trent Dilfer arrived as the new head coach in 2023 with his own staff. Lepkowski’s offensive line coach was gone. Two years of building trust — gone with him.

“I was just talking really negative,” Lepkowski recalled on the Inferno last season. “My mom and my dad just told me to pray about it. They said, ‘You know what? Just stick it out for another year.’”

He did. And after the fall camp scrimmage, Dilfer stood in front of the team and started talking about the transfer portal.

“There’s however many people in the portal right now,” Dilfer said, as Lepkowski recalled. “And I told the recruiting guys, stop looking, cuz I have three people on the team that are better than anybody in the portal.”

Then Dilfer said his name.

“I immediately started crying,” he said. “… I called my mom, my dad, and as soon as I heard my mom’s voice, she started crying too. It was the most joyful and most fulfilling moment that I’ve experienced in my life.”

He paused.

“You’re putting in so many deposits in the bank,” he told the Inferno. “At some point you got to be able to take it out, and I was getting frustrated — like, when am I going to be able to take some money out and withdraw?”

Two injuries, one decision

The 2024 season was supposed to be his arrival. Instead, a training camp injury — stepped on during a goal-line drill — sidelined him for six weeks. He fought back. The last play of practice before UAB’s bye week, he re-injured the same foot.

He had a choice: surgery and miss spring ball, or rehab and fight for his starting spot.

“I decided not to get the surgery and battled pretty hard in the spring,” he said on the Inferno last season. “Thankfully, nothing happened.”

It paid off. In 2025, Lepkowski started every game and earned all-conference recognition. Then in January 2026, another injury hit. He spent the spring fighting back again.

“I’m close,” he said on the Inferno podcast in May. “Very close.”

The last go-round

Alex Mortensen took over as head coach before the 2026 season, but the transition didn’t disrupt the offensive line. McCants stayed. The scheme stayed. What changed, according to Lepkowski, was the intensity.

“We would be at that same level of intensity in the past, but it wouldn’t be for as long,” he said on the Inferno this month. “So we start out, you know, get your pee hot, and we finish with team. So it’s just the full — the entire practice is super intense. Boom, boom, boom.”

The spring also forged something deeper within the unit. Lepkowski rigged a TV to a roller at his apartment complex so the linemen could watch film on the patio after practice.

“I think my biggest takeaway from our offensive line in general is just the connectivity that we got, especially going through the ringer,” he said. “We were definitely really close before we started spring ball, but afterward, I felt like we started hanging out a lot more.”

That connectivity is the thing Lepkowski wants to leave behind — a culture that outlasts him.

“UAB took care of me and I would love to do my best to repay that debt and try to take care of the program for years to come,” he told the Inferno this month. “Bringing all the freshmen along, the young guys, the transfers — bring them into this culture and try to develop them how I was developed.”

Mortensen sees it working.

“He’s exemplified good leadership through having a positive attitude, work ethic and bringing energy to practice and games,” Mortensen said in a UAB Athletics feature. “He’s an intelligent player who makes the guys around him better.”

Lepkowski has logged more than 100 hours of community service in Birmingham over the past three years, working with Bundles of Hope, Food for Our Journey and Habitat for Humanity. It tracks with the way he approaches everything — steady, selfless, team-first.

“I’m not the tallest. I’m not the strongest. I’m not the fastest, but I’m going to try to outwork you,” he said on the Inferno. “And I think that’s kind of just been my mindset and just having the chip on my shoulder.”

He knows this is the end. He’s thought about it.

“I’ve always been nostalgic and I’ve always thought about what my time — my last go-around would be like,” he said. “I think really it’s just trying to leave this place better than I found it.”

A-Train, dependable

Ask Lepkowski’s teammates about him and they don’t talk about his technique or his PFF grade. They talk about trust.

“Man, I look at [him] as a captain,” guard Barry Walker said on the Inferno this month. “He been here. I feel like anytime I need something, anything happen, I can call A-Train. A-Train going to be there. A-Train dependable. And on the field he is like a second quarterback.”

There’s a scar on Lepkowski’s left thumb from a plastic lightsaber that went wrong the summer before his freshman year. He can’t feel the inside of it anymore. The ER staff kept coming into the room to hear the story.

“This is the first time anybody’s ever been cut by a lightsaber,” they told him, as Lepkowski recounted on the Inferno.

He was in show choir through senior year of high school. He listens to John Denver before games. He graduated with an engineering degree and wants to start a product development company someday.

But that’s later. Right now, he’s got one more season, one more offensive line room to lead and one more chance to prove what he’s been proving since he showed up at 5:20 in the morning six years ago.

“I know that I’m not the best,” Lepkowski said on the Inferno this month, “but I’m still going to try to work to be that and work like I am the best.”