Whirlwind Start To Head Coaching Role continues for UAB’s Mortensen

By Steve Irvine

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - December 12, 2025

Alex Mortensen never really stopped after the UAB football team ended the 2025 season with a win over Tulsa. At that point, he was still the program’s interim head coach but Mortensen and the coaching staff were still busy with postseason meetings with the players and trying to put together the best recruiting class they could in the early signing period.

But his pace ramped up even more last Friday when Mortensen was introduced as the program’s full-time head coach. Since then it’s been a dizzying series of recruiting players inside and outside of the UAB football building while also trying to finalize his first staff and learning what it takes to maneuver through the NIL world of college football as a head coach. On Thursday, he also sprinkled in an early morning local TV appearance and an appearance at the JLab Birmingham Bowl press conference to support his close friend and college teammate Dowell Loggains of Appalachian State and visit with Georgia Southern head coach Clay Helton. Mortensen then hustled over to a meet-and-greet reception with UAB boosters.

“I've not stopped to breathe,” Mortensen said during a phone conversation on Thursday morning. “I’m breathing, I just haven’t stopped. So, yeah, there really hasn't been any slowdown yet. I expect it to be that way for a little while. I think when you start off, it can feel a little bit like you're just scratching where it itches.  As quick as we can, we want to get things organized and systematic and where we've got processes we follow. But right now, we're trying to get everything set up where we need to.”

On the busy December schedule: “There's a lot to do right now, obviously. I think one is recruiting. And recruiting is your own players and high school, you know, and then having an idea of the portal. There's really multiple components to that. So we're trying to work on that. I think the other part is the staffing part, having an idea of making sure we get the best staff here possible. Some of that involves having the best people and some of that involves making sure it's structured and organized in the best manner too. So those are two big things. I think the third thing is just working with our community and trying to help them. I think we have a lot of people that want to help. We need to help them understand how they can help. We're in this new era of college football. I think I've talked about this in the press conference. But UAB has had some stretches of success in the past. There are some people here that did a great job. But we're in a new era. Just simply, relationships and recruiting ratings are not going to be enough. They're important. They're not going to be enough. With the addition of (revenue sharing) and the transfer portal, we have to adapt if we want to have success and be competitive in the future. So we're working in all those areas right now. That's kind of the long and short.

I think one of the things, to circle back to what the first item I came on here, the recruiting part. It’s just three different things - our players, high school and the portal. We are genuine in really wanting to recruit the state heavily. We were able to patch a little bit of a class together in December, but we are a little bit behind, just because we were an interim staff and a lot of kids want to know if you're going to be there permanently before they commit to you. We would have liked to have taken a larger number, but we weren't able to do that. But there's still the February signing date. We want to see who's out there, who's available in our five-hour radius because we do feel like we can build the (signing class) with some good players in the area.”

On having staff decisions made by the time the transfer portal opens on Jan. 2: “You know, on one hand, you would say it would be good and then I have a lot of people that are counseling (me) that say, getting the right people, making sure it's right is more important than being rushed, even under these circumstances. I can understand both perspectives because having (a staff) in place where you need all hands-on deck to go recruit and it's going to be a pretty narrow window. And I also think that it's a little bit, I don't want to say daunting, but I think we all understand the seriousness and the importance of that phase because it's a tight window and there's really not a great opportunity to course correct in May with the portal. There'll be some players available at that time, but you really got to nail it if you can or do your best to nail it right there because it's going to have a pretty big bearing on what your 2026 team looks like.”

On his message to current players when trying to convince them to stay at UAB: “When you’re talking about retention of your own players, it does start with having a good, strong relationship with them. I think, too, helping them understand the vision of the program and the team. I do believe, though a lot of guys are very committed to whatever their individual goals are, I get the sense that a lot of these kids actually kind of crave when you're part of the team and a good team environment. I think understanding that vision of what's our team going to look like and, to be more specific, what their individual goals are and how we can help them accomplish those. Really just going through all that with them is really important. But if you go back to some of the relationships, there is a trust factor. Now, on the flip side, we know that with Rev Share being a real factor, too, every player weighs it differently in terms of how important it is to them. I think one of the challenges is there are agents out there that are going to recruit your players to leave you. And these agents, a lot of times, and again they're doing their job and they have a job to do, which I understand, respect, and appreciate. But they're going to argue sometimes from their perspective of ‘Hey, I think they can get you more money or a better deal somewhere else.’ So you've got to combat that. The further the players get away from you, the harder that gets. You know, when they go home from finals and they're rounding up people that are able to get in their ears. That becomes a challenge. I've talked to other head coaches and I've had a couple head coaches tell me, ‘Hey, you might have the best relationship in the world with the guy but they think you can get a better deal somewhere else.’ (The coaches) have had their heartbroken a lot in situations like that. So that is something that we've got to work at. And, again, I think that's why the trust is so important, because I think a player often is wondering, ‘Hey, are you just trying to get me to stay here because it's best for you? Because my agents thinks he knows what's best for me.’ And a lot of times, I think sometimes the other parties are trying to argue what's best for themselves as an individual. So it gets to be a little bit of a complicated process, and it does remind me a little bit of how it used to be when juniors were trying to decide whether to go out for the draft early. Getting them to trust us a little more is really important.”

On whether he will put a general manager on his staff: “I think it is an important part of staff with the roles and the responsibilities of managing roster and revenue shares. One way or another, whether it's someone in-house or someone from outside, we're going to have a plan for a great solution in that regard.”

On whether he had a list prepared for coaches he wanted on his first staff as a head coach: “Yeah, there are a lot of people through the years who I've been fortunate to work with or gotten to know. People who I have interest of working with or hoping to work with again. We've had a lot of people reach out and have interest on being here. It is a different situation here, going from an interim to being in a permanent position where we do have a staff here currently. We're not starting from scratch, that also is being taken into account too. We do have some really good people here already.”

On looking back at season-closing win at Tulsa: “Well, I will say, obviously we had a lot of guys that weren’t here for various reasons and I think some of those reasons vary. But what I can tell you is the guys that were there, we practiced at a very high level. The energy and enthusiasm was excellent. Even their attitude on the trip was really positive and then to the game it was really positive. Most football games there are ups and downs and just the positivity on the sideline during the game was really strong. Guys were very encouraging of each other and stayed focused on the game. So the guys that were there that week actually made it a great week of practice. There were some organizational challenges in terms of having less depth and being able to practice properly. We had to be a little bit creative to make sure that we were getting good looks from each other, offense and defense, without guys taking too many reps where we were going to go into the game tired. There were some things that we had to adjust from an organizational standpoint.”

On his growth as a coach during the eight week of being an interim head coach: “I think those eight weeks really helped in a lot of ways. I think, on one hand, I've been involved with the game for a long time and been in the profession for some time and have been fortunate to be around some really good people. So a lot of it, I felt very prepared for. And then there are certain things, you know, getting into the (head coach) seat, I think just experiencing it, there's just some trial and error too that occurred pretty quickly. I think having the ability to adapt to that helps me. But I definitely feel like there was some growth as an interim coach during that time period. But I also felt very prepared for it too.”

On his thoughts of how the recruiting class will be structured as far as high school, junior college and portal players: “The number will change, what we're targeting and recruiting will change. I find that to be one of the bigger challenges in college football right now, in my opinion. This is another thing I referenced at the press conference we had the other day. It used to be a lot more defined as to what your target was at each position in terms of you know you're losing x-amount of players. You’re losing one quarterback, you're losing three on the defensive line, you're losing two corners, whatever it may be. You know that you need to replace them with, in terms of this is a guy that is older, and maybe we fill the need in that room. If it's a young room, maybe you want to take a juco guy or grab a transfer. Then you would say, ‘Ok, for another spot, maybe we want to just only replace or build our depth with high school players.’ Now, it's very fluid. You have projections and you start with projections, but they change and they change fast. It's definitely not an exact science. I think you have to commit to really being flexible daily.”