Now
Career arc
Report card
Offense carries it: 76th percentile offense, bottom-quarter defense at 3rd.
UAB, every completed season graded against the whole field, then averaged.
Offense
Defense
Each season is his team’s percentile among every team with that stat (the share it beat), averaged over his completed seasons here; a mid-season takeover year and the season in progress aren’t graded. Letters: A+ 90th percentile and up, A 80, B+ 70, B 60, B− 50, C+ 45, C 40, C− 30, D 15, F below.
Fans
No fan talk about him on our list yet. His record is on Career.
Stats
Big games
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
ATS is his record against the spread: did his team beat the closing betting line, winning by more than it or losing by less? Lines start in 2013; a dash means fewer than 6 of those games had one. One-score games carry no spread record: a big favorite that wins a close game has almost always failed to cover, so that number would say nothing about the coach.
Signature games






Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Passed more than the situation called for under Mortensen.
1,671 run and pass snaps at UAB, 2023–2024, his own games, one row per offensive coordinator. Each cell is how much more often he passed than the rest of FBS did in the same situation (field zone, down, distance, score, quarter, same season), in percentage points.
Pass rate, stint by stint
Where each stint’s offense sat between run-first and pass-first, and how far it moved from one season to the next, against the FBS-wide average of 41% pass. The band is that stint’s real season-to-season range, not a fixed-width box.
Season-to-season pass-rate range for all 449 FBS coaching stints with at least three covered seasons, 2004–2025.
Building the roster
Four numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His 2 ranked UAB classes of his own have averaged #95 nationally — best #92, worst #98.
His class — he had the full signing cycle
Rank is each signing class’s national recruiting rank (#1 is best). Only a class he had a full signing cycle to build counts as his.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2025 roster arrived on his watch — 51 of 106 players. The other 55 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 53% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2023–2025Counting players who have since left: 19% of the 105 arrivals we can classify came through the portal.
“His own” means the player arrived while he was head coach; “inherited” means a predecessor brought him in.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 19 of 60 signees (32%) across his 2023–2025 tenure, drawn from 14 states in all. Next: GA (15).
77% of his signees come from AL and its 4 border states (GA 15, FL 5, MS 5, TN 2).
Off this map: 3 signees to the west (CA 2, AZ) and 3 to the north (DE, MI, others).
- median hometown distance
- 199 mi
- within 100 mi
- 31%
- within 500 mi
- 67%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 7%
The map counts signed recruits across his tenure; the distance figures cover his current roster, transfers and walk-ons included. Two different groups, kept separate on purpose.
The NFL pipeline
The NFL pipeline
players drafted into the NFL off his teams here. None were his own recruits yet: all 1 roster-verified picks arrived under Bill Clark.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | R6.15 | Tejhaun Palmer | Wide Receiver | Arizona Cardinals | recruited under Bill Clark |
A pick counts toward his tenure when the player’s final college season was one he coached, a checkable rule rather than a claim about who developed the player. A blank note means the player is on a verified roster and arrived on his watch. “Estimated” means no roster record, so the final season is assumed to be the year before the draft.
News
No outlet on our list has written about him by name yet. His record is on Career.
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
4th-best UAB tenure of 7 by the numbers.
Followed Bryant Vincent (2022) · succeeded by Alex Mortensen (2025–now).
| Season | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||
| Record | 4-8 | 3-9 | 2-4 | |
| Postseason | — | — | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||
| OC | Alex Mortensen | Alex Mortensen | Alex Mortensen | |
| DC | Sione Ta'ufo'ou | Sione Ta'ufo'ou | Steve Russ | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||
| Offense | 79 | 53 | 35 | |
| Defense | 22 | 30 | 5 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||
| 1st-down pass% | 42.9 | 51.9 | 43.9 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 33.0 | 44.8 | 45.6 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 33.3 | 31.7 | 50.0 | |
Performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on offense and underperforms his recruiting talent on defense.
Typical size for position, once adjusted for position mix.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
1 player-season honored (All-America / national award): Kam Shanks (2024)
AI Narratives — “UAB — stat check” and 3 more on the team page.
Was he good?
The data leans negative, where the data can separate from zero: every conclusive reading points the same way.
-5.8 pts at UAB · #1050 of 1290 · bottom quarterModel fit as of 2026-09-04.

Arizona Cardinals