Mortensen’s Path to the Sidelines
By Steve Irvine
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - December 11, 2025
Alex Mortensen’s college football coaching path began in Las Vegas.
Nope, not that Las Vegas. In fact, it’s hard to find a spot further opposite than that Las Vegas, which is known for glitz and glamour, than Las Vegas, New Mexico. The New Mexico version of Las Vegas is a tight-knit community with population of 13,000, which according to a former resident, has “nothing out there aside from (New Mexico Highlands University), some hot water springs and an asylum.”
Now, it’s well documented that Mortensen’s football coaching career has largely been shaped by the nine seasons he spent in Tuscaloosa as part of Nick Saban’s staff at the University of Alabama. His time in Tuscaloosa was spread over two stints and included three national championships and a 115-12 season. Most of all it included a ton of wisdom and knowledge obtained from Saban and the staff assembled around him.
But for Mortensen, who spent the past three seasons as UAB’s offensive coordinator and is the newly-minted full-time head coach after serving the last six games of this season as the UAB interim head coach, the football lessons began long before he joined the UA staff as a graduate assistant in 2014.
“Every experience along the way, I go back to being in middle school and running a wishbone offense, you know, and the things I learned running the wishbone in seventh grade,” said Mortensen, who played quarterback at Arkansas and Samford in college. “ Running the Wing T in ninth grade. I had great coaches and mentors. I almost wish I could name all of them, there's so many. Every step along the way has had an impression on me and it’s more about the people.”
Eric Young was in his second season as the New Mexico Highlands head coach in 2012. He took over a program that was coming off back-to-back 1-10 seasons and the most recent winning record at the time was in 2006 when the Cowboys finished 6-5. His first New Mexico Highland team started 4-0 but dropped the final seven games with four of those losses coming by one score. Young, a defensive coach by trade, was revamping his offensive staff before the 2012. He hired former University of Arkansas offensive lineman Stephen Parker as the program’s offensive coordinator. Not long after, Young hired Mortensen, who at 27 years old, was not much older than some of the players he would coach.
“Stephen was an O-line guy, so we needed a quarterback coach and a guy to help us with the passing attack,” said Young, now a head coach at Helena High in Montana. “Stephen hooked me up with Alex and we talked a little bit about his background and what he liked to do offensively. It was a fit for us. So we gave him his first shot to come in with the quarterback room and gave him those guys. And then he ultimately ended up being our passing game coordinator and it kind of was Stephen and him calling the offense.”
They inherited an offense that was already built toward throwing the football.
“I don't know how familiar you are with the Air Raid and what Hal Mumme has done with offense over the years,” Young said. “We were kind of in that mold, but we maybe didn't have the balance that it always takes to win. You know, I love what Hal does with his offensive attack, but let's be honest, winning football games sometimes is more important than just putting stats on the board and throwing the ball all over the place. What Alex was able to do and Stephen was able to do and what our offense was able to do was find a little bit of that balance, put a little rhythm to things.”
In the middle of it was quarterback Emmanuel Lewis, a talented California native, who had worked through some personal trouble and spent a couple of years in junior college after bouncing back from Ball State. He arrived at New Mexico Highlands in 2011 and captured the starting job but an injury ended his season after two games. Lewis was struggling heading into his second season at New Mexico Highlands, as were many of his teammates.
“I tell people all the time, we were “Last Chance U” before “Last Chance U” came out,” Lewis said. “We were a bunch of kids that had doubters. I myself, you know, I came off some off-the-field issues and just like a lot of my other peers in that situation, we were looking for that last chance. It was really, literally, just like that. We had a bunch of outlanders, outlaws from top to bottom. The coaching staff was just stitched together, you know what I'm saying, piece by piece by piece. These guys brought in athletes that they knew that were sitting around from maybe two to three years. We had a loophole with the D II rules of age and eligibility. So, you know, there was a lot of things.”
Lewis didn’t start the opening game, which was hard to accept for a player accustomed to success at other levels.
“Coach Mort really set himself aside with me and just kind of like really showed me the humane side of coaching,” Lewis said. “You know, we all know the brutal side of it and the cutthroat side of it. But he actually showed the compassion. He actually showed the patience of just more so dealing with guys that were more urban city. Because you looked at Mort (at first), you'd be like, ‘Man, you're just cold, suit and tie, so serious, so disciplined and stuff like that.’ You would never think that he understands you as an urban kid. But he did. You know, he really saved my life, if I have to say. He really saved my life and really gave me hope again to believe in myself and have my love for football because I had lost it. He never let me give up. And he was like, ‘Hey, man, this is still your team. You know, it's not favorable for you right now, but don't quit.’”
Lewis turned that belief into the most productive offensive season in school history at the time. He set school records for total offense (3,919 yards) and passing yards (3,657) and directed an offense that produced 5,384 yards and 416 points in 11 games. The Cowboys finished 8-3 and tied for second place in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference. They missed the playoffs after losing the tiebreaker for the runner-up spot in the conference but the eight wins hasn’t been matched or surpassed at the school since that season.
Mortensen moved on from New Mexico Highlands and took a job as a coaching assistant with the St. Louis Rams. He took away some important lessons learned in his first job, including adapting when he found out the program didn’t have a color printer.
“You just find a way to get things done and go to work and not have self-fulfilling prophecies where you say, well, we don't have this, therefore we can't,” Mortensen said. “But no, let's find a way. Every one of those steps along this journey have helped me. And I would say, too, to be more specific, the one thing about coaching there at that time is a lot of our team was assembled quickly. So obviously, being fortunate to be around Coach Saban and his program, I learned a lot, a tremendous amount. It's just hard to quantify how much I learned. But then in this current era where your team may be assembled quickly, you have a lot of roster turnover, there are some lessons I learned at a place, coaching at a smaller school where a lot of our guys showed up after the Fourth of July. So you had to have a great eight-week plan before you could go put the ball down, kick it off, and be ready to play. I worked with people that had experience at that and I think we had a really good plan doing that. I think those things, practically, really do help.”
In some ways, that brings us back to Lewis, who followed the successful season by throwing for 3,359 yards with 18 touchdowns. He went on to have a successful professional career as both a player and coach in Europe. Lewis, who lives in Amsterdam, now runs a football academy and operates camps and showcases in Europe and the United States to develop players and find them opportunities to continue playing. He said he’d helped 25-30 players opportunities in the United States since he started and laughed when asked if he would send some Mortensen’s way not that he’s a head coach.
“It’s funny you say that because I’ve got a quarterback, man, standing 6-foot-5, a Swedish quarterback,” Lewis said. “He actually developed in Connecticut. I said something to Coach Mort about him about a year or two ago but he was kind of just getting his feet wet. So I do look to send (that information) over to him and I know Coach Mort would give him a solid look. I’m definitely hoping to get one of my guys in there because everybody has seen and it’s proven that Europe has great talent out here now.”