The man who draws plays in his notebook

The Alex Mortensen era at UAB officially opens tonight. No interim tag. No audition. His program. His team. His dream.

He has spent the past eight months remaking all of it — 41 transfer portal additions in January, a new defensive coordinator in Todd Grantham, a coaching staff built from the same tree where Mortensen spent nine years working under Nick Saban at Alabama. The culture overhaul that began the day he was named permanent head coach on Dec. 5 has not stopped.

But the roots of tonight go back further than December. Further than the Memphis upset that put him on the map. Further than Alabama.

They go back to a kid in Atlanta who drew football plays in his school notebooks.

"My parents would tell you that if you looked at my school notebooks next to some of the equations and some of the outlines in history, there was a football play drawn in there sometimes too," Mortensen said this week.

He knew by 13 or 14 that he wanted to coach. He played quarterback at Arkansas and Samford. He started his coaching career at a Division II school in New Mexico. He spent nine years at Alabama without a title on his door, working alongside the offensive coordinators who now run programs and NFL franchises — and developing Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones and Heisman Trophy winner Bryce Young. And nobody would hire him.

Ask anyone who has spent time around him — a player, an assistant coach, a staffer, even Saban himself — and the same theme surfaces. "Smart" does not cover it.

His starting quarterback, Ryder Burton, put it plainly this week: "We kind of make a joke — if Einstein were to be a football coach."

Mortensen has been competing since before he knew what to call it.

"I still remember how many pull-ups I did in second grade," he said this week. "And I remember who tied me to be the top in my class."

His father coached baseball. "A really good coach," Mortensen said. "We had a bunch of championship teams." But Alex didn't play football until seventh grade. When he did, something locked in.

"Something about the game of football combined like all the elements that I love," he said. "I loved the components of strategy that the game had. I loved the components of competing, which is something I would always love, and I loved being a part of a team."

Then he kept going.

"One of the beautiful things about football, even though people don't huddle as much as they used to, but just the figurative huddle," he said. "You get in the huddle, there's big people, there's small people, there's fast people, there's strong people. I think it brings all kinds of people together. I think it's like the ultimate game."

The plays in his school notebooks started around that time. By 13 or 14, he knew coaching was it.

Burton was not tossing out a compliment when he called Mortensen Einstein. He was describing what it has been like to study under him for an entire offseason as UAB's starting quarterback.

"The thing that separates him compared to other people is a lot of people understand football," Burton said. "But how well you can convey it to a player that doesn't understand it as well as you do is something completely different. Coach Mort does a fantastic job of taking really complex principles and making them simple so that when we get on the field, we can actually see them."

"Anybody can see them from that eagle's eye view you get when you're watching tape," Burton said. "It's really easy to see leverage when you're sitting on top of the stadium and you can see everything. But when you're behind five, 6'5", 300-plus-pound guys, and there's 65,000 people — how well can you see it then? So what Coach Mort does a great job of is simplifying the complicated."

What Burton is describing — the ability to translate elite-level concepts into something a player can execute at full speed behind a wall of 300-pound bodies — is what Mortensen has been doing for more than a decade. His title at Alabama was offensive analyst. No position on the official staff page. No recruiting territory. No press conference podium. But he spent nine years in the quarterback room, and four quarterbacks he helped develop — Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones and Heisman winner Bryce Young — all became NFL starters. Saban cycled through elite coordinators — Lane Kiffin, Steve Sarkisian, Mike Locksley, Bill O'Brien — and Mortensen was the constant in the room, translating all of it to the players who had to execute it on Saturday.

That QB development pedigree is what brought Trent Dilfer to hire him as UAB's offensive coordinator in December 2022. Dilfer praised Mortensen as one of the game's bright young minds and a sure-fire future head coach. The results were immediate. Jacob Zeno completed 73.6 percent of his passes in 2023 — a figure that ended his career ranked 10th all-time in NCAA history. Jalen Kitna threw for more than 2,200 yards and 17 touchdowns in eight games before injuries ended his 2024 season. Mortensen developed four different starting quarterbacks in three seasons as coordinator. The offense worked regardless of who was running it.

Burton came to UAB because of that track record. He is the latest in a lineage of quarterbacks Mortensen has developed — and the first to play for him as head coach.

Mortensen, asked about Burton this week, described what he values in a quarterback.

"One of the guys I used to work with, he used to say, 'You want a quarterback to have the game of a player, but the mind of a coach,'" Mortensen said. "And I think he really embodies that."

"He's very intense in his preparation," Mortensen said. "Going back from the way he approached spring football, I think he's wanted to own every aspect of the offense. Learning fronts, learning coverages, learning the run game, learning protections, understanding our passing game. He's really tried to master all of it."

Burton is not the same player who stepped in cold against Memphis last October. Mortensen has watched him change.

"I've even seen him develop physically in the last year. I think he's gotten more explosive," Mortensen said. "I think Lyle Henley, our strength staff, has done a great job. And I think Ryder's been very diligent in the way he's trained and the way he's prepared. So I think he's even a better athlete, a better thrower of the football, more skillful."

"When Ryder plays within himself, I think he's a great player."

The path from those school notebooks to tonight's sideline at Illinois ran through places ranging from a Division II school most football fans have never heard of, all the way to the NFL, to a spring league that didn't finish a season, and of course the time learning in the coaching laboratory that was Saban's staff in Tuscaloosa.

Mortensen played quarterback at Arkansas, transferred to Samford, then returned to Arkansas for his final year of eligibility. He earned his degree in communications in 2009. He was not a star player. But he was absorbing the game from inside the huddle — the formations, the reads, the way a play develops differently when you are behind center than when you are watching from a press box.

His first coaching job, in 2012, was at New Mexico Highlands — a Division II program in Las Vegas, New Mexico. He coached quarterbacks and the passing game. Under Mortensen, quarterback Emmanuel Lewis finished second in the country in Division II total offense, and the program won eight games for the first time since 1999.

That year, Bret Bielema had just taken the head coaching job at Arkansas. Mortensen, the D-II quarterback coach, asked if he could come watch.

"I actually remember when I was starting my coaching career at New Mexico Highlands, Division II program, he actually let me come visit a couple practices when they were at Arkansas," Mortensen said this week.

Tonight, they meet as head coaches.

After a season with the St. Louis Rams in 2013, Mortensen joined Nick Saban's staff at Alabama as a graduate assistant. He earned his master's in sport management. He was promoted to offensive analyst. He stayed for nine years.

The Crimson Tide went 115-12 during Mortensen's time in Tuscaloosa and won three national championships while Mortensen's mind soaked in all he could. Surrounded by some of the best coaches in football, his football education hit doctorate level.

Saban, who does not hand out praise carelessly, told ESPN after the Memphis upset that Mortensen was "one of the smartest people that ever was involved in our program. He really understood football, had great knowledge and good teaching progression."

Then Saban named the flaw he had spent years pushing Mortensen to fix: "He was a quiet guy, which is something that I always talked to him about. He needed to be more outgoing and more outspoken with players and with his colleagues."

But Saban said the part that matters: "He was just made out of the right stuff. He was not a big ego guy and never got affected by all that stuff. He was a really good teacher and helped develop a lot of good players."

The right stuff did not get him hired. Nobody in the coaching profession would give him a shot. Nine years, three national championships, four NFL-caliber quarterbacks — and the answer was always the same.

"He could never break through and get an opportunity because everybody would always say, 'Well, you need experience,'" Saban told ESPN. "But he's an example of a guy that had tremendous resiliency professionally to persevere through the ups and downs and stick with it and hang in there. He believed in himself and prepared himself so that when he did get an opportunity, he would be able to take advantage of it, and he certainly did that."

In 2019, Mortensen took a job as wide receivers coach for the Birmingham Iron of the Alliance of American Football — a spring league that folded after eight games. Three years later, Dilfer hired him at UAB. His offenses set school records and produced some of the most efficient quarterback play in the country. But the program around him did not work. Dilfer went 9-21 in two and a half seasons. He never won a road game. He never won two games in a row. The penalties were staggering — 13 for 110 yards in a loss at Tennessee, 11 for 73 against Army, 15 for 128 at Florida Atlantic.

On Oct. 12, 2025, then-athletic director Mark Ingram fired Dilfer and named Mortensen interim head coach.

Six days later, UAB hosted No. 22 Memphis.

Mortensen called Ingram on Thursday night before the game. "Memphis is really good," he told him.

Then he laid out his approach: "My plan is to try to slow the game down as best I can to mitigate what they're doing," Mortensen told Ingram, as reported by ESPN. "If they don't have the ball, then they can't score. And even if we don't score, we can hopefully keep it away from them. We can keep it close to where we're in the game, because if it's low-scoring enough, then we're never really out of the game."

He scrapped the frantic tempo Dilfer had championed. The Blazers still did not huddle most of the time, but they used more of the play clock. They breathed.

"When you go hurry-up, you better know what you're doing," Ingram said. "Your margin for error really shrinks. And by slowing down, I just think there was this, like, 'OK, everybody, deep breath.'"

Burton, making his first career start after Kitna went down with a shoulder injury, went 20-for-27 with 251 yards and three touchdowns. UAB put up 470 yards of offense and converted 9 of 13 third downs. The penalty count: six for 47 yards. UAB won 31-24 — the largest upset in a coach's first game since 1978, according to ESPN. The program's fifth victory over a Top 25 opponent in program history.

In the final two minutes, with UAB clinging to a seven-point lead, Memphis drove to the goal line. Then the Tigers imploded — two false starts, two incompletions, a delay of game — leaving them with fourth-and-goal from the 11 with 19 seconds left.

Mortensen's mind was already running scenarios.

"Do we need to or want to use a timeout in any of those situations? What will we do if we don't feel good about how we're aligned or maybe what set they come out in?" he said. "I'm thinking about, obviously, we've got to be prepared for them to run a 2-point play if they score. If they tie it, I'm also contemplating how maybe we want to handle overtime."

The pass fell incomplete. UAB had its upset.

The Memphis game earned the headlines. The Tulsa game earned him the job.

Hours before UAB's game against USF, a UAB player stabbed two teammates at the Football Operations Building. Roughly 40 players refused to suit up for the rest of the season. Two of Mortensen's players were recovering from stab wounds. The program was national news for the worst possible reasons.

With half his roster gone, Mortensen took what was left of his team to Tulsa for the final game of the season. Thanksgiving week. Every student on campus gone. Nothing to play for but pride and each other.

They won. UAB's first road victory in three years. The end of a 17-game road losing streak.

Ingram was in the locker room afterward.

"I've had the good fortune of being in the locker room after a national championship win," Ingram said. "I've had the good fortune of being in the locker room when a team has just won their sixth game and become eligible for the first time in a while. And then I was in that locker room at Tulsa. It's the same locker room. Just this pure joy and jubilation that as big of humans as they are, they're kids and they work incredibly hard with a lot of criticism."

Ingram saw something else, too.

"There was a clear passion that they had for playing for him."

During his interview for the permanent job, Mortensen told Ingram a story. His high school coach also taught his history class. Mortensen was doing fine in the class — he had big tests and small quizzes, and he could have skipped studying for the quizzes without it hurting his grade.

But he studied for them anyway. Because he respected the teacher, and he wanted to do well for him.

Ingram heard the story and thought about what he had already seen at Tulsa — the players competing for Mortensen the way Mortensen had studied for his teacher.

"That was where it started," Ingram said of his decision to hire Mortensen permanently. "Then every game and every week and the way he prepared and the way he managed the team was just really impressive."

The coaching search lasted two months. SMU offensive coordinator Casey Woods emerged as a top target. Western Michigan's Lance Taylor, Navy OC Drew Cronic, Presbyterian's Steve Englehart and Birmingham Stallion head coach Skip Holtz were all vetted.

None took the job.

Mortensen did not win a talent competition. Every other candidate either turned the job down or walked away. People in his life urged him to look for other opportunities. He was not interested.

He wanted to stay in Birmingham and fight for it.

On Dec. 5, 2025, UAB named him its eighth head football coach. The contract: $1 million per year over five years. A year earlier, he had been making $325,000 as an offensive coordinator. When Dilfer first hired him in 2022, $225,000.

He went to work. Forty-one players signed from the transfer portal in January. He hired Todd Grantham — who had worked for Saban twice, at Michigan State and Alabama — to run the defense. He brought in Kevin Garver and Gordon Steele, both former Saban offensive analysts, to round out his staff. They all speak the same language. The results have shown in camp — "There's really been some iron sharpening iron," Mortensen said of the daily competition between his offense and Grantham's defense. "It's been very competitive every day."

"The guy that you met at the podium is the same guy that he was on the field after a Gatorade bath after the Memphis win," Ingram said. "He's just steady, man."

His father was Chris Mortensen — the award-winning journalist who spent more than three decades at ESPN as one of the most trusted NFL insiders in the business. Before ESPN, Chris started in the business as a newspaper reporter. He became a regular on SportsCenter, NFL Countdown and every major NFL show the network produced. In 2016, he received the Pro Football Writers of America's Dick McCann Award and was honored during the Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinement ceremony.

Chris was diagnosed with Stage 4 throat cancer in 2016. He stepped away from ESPN in 2023 and died on March 3, 2024. He was 72.

Adam Schefter, who worked alongside Chris at ESPN for 15 years, delivered a eulogy at the funeral alongside Chris Berman. Schefter told ESPN he could barely hold himself together that day. Then Alex got up to speak.

"He got up there — and it's his father and the most important figure in his life — and he was as calm and composed as anybody could ever hope to be," Schefter said. "I never could be as calm and composed as he was that day."

That composure showed up everywhere — at his father's funeral, on the sideline with 19 seconds left against Memphis, through a two-month coaching search where everyone in his life told him to leave.

Schefter watched the Memphis game at home with his family and texted colleagues throughout. At one point, he wrote: "I can't believe how much I care about this game."

Someone replied: "That's what love does for you."

"We love Mort, and we love Alex," Schefter said. "We're very proud of him. And in a way, we feel like we're representing Mort, to look after Alex and cheer for him and support him from afar."

Chris scaled back from ESPN because he wanted to watch Alex coach. That was what he wanted to do with his free time. He did not get to see the Memphis game or the Tulsa game or the introductory press conference. He did not get to see tonight.

But Alex thinks about him every day.

"I think about my dad every single day and think about what he'd tell me to do," Mortensen said after the Memphis win. "I used to seek his counsel on a lot of things, and so I'm always wondering what he would tell me. Saturday was definitely no different."

After Burton took a knee in the victory formation to finish the Memphis upset, Schefter texted Chris's widow, Micki, to congratulate her and tell her how much it meant to so many of Chris's former colleagues.

Her reply: "Happy tears."

Mortensen was asked this week what he has learned about himself since getting the permanent job.

"I really love this job. Love being here at UAB, love being in Birmingham, love the group of players we have."

His message heading into tonight: "Make it about us."

"I can't say that I've had a lot of time for self-reflection either. So I haven't thought much beyond that."