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Eli Lederman
DENTON, Texas — North Texas coach Eric Morris — the 40-year-old Air Raid virtuoso who launched Baker Mayfield, unleashed Patrick Mahomes and found Cam Ward — likes a process.
It’s why, even days before a Nov. 1 visit from Navy, Morris is talking about cotton farms in northeast Arkansas.
Specifically, his own. They’re a long-term investment. Morris recently bought his third.
«When I retire, I’m going to farm cotton,» he tells ESPN. «Give me a good process, and I’ll work at it. Plus, cotton won’t talk back to me — I won’t have to deal with any bulls—.»
Texas Tech slot receiver whom Mike Leach affectionately called «The Elf.»
Former Morris protégés accounted for 10% of the NFL’s starting quarterbacks this past weekend. Mayfield walked on at Texas Tech; Ward was a zero-star recruit when he signed at Incarnate Word in 2020. Both turned into No. 1 draft picks. Mahomes spent three years with Morris in Lubbock, then became … Patrick Mahomes. Two more branches of Morris’ quarterback tree — Oklahoma’s John Mateer and Virginia’s Chandler Morris (no relation) — are multimillion-dollar transfers leading College Football Playoff contenders in 2025.
«He gives you confidence to go out there and be yourself and play the game the way you’re supposed to play,» Mahomes said of Morris on Nov. 12. «And he’ll change the offense for that. It’s not surprising to me that he’s had so much success.»
Successful playcalling stints at Texas Tech and Washington State, and head coaching jobs at Incarnate Word and North Texas have established Morris as one of college football’s sharpest talent developers at the sport’s most coveted position. This fall, he has catapulted No. 22 North Texas into the CFP mix with the nation’s No. 1 scoring offense (45.3 points per game) and emerged as a fashionable name in a scorching coaching cycle with help from his latest and most absurd discovery to date: redshirt freshman quarterback Drew Mestemaker.
Mestemaker hadn’t started a game at quarterback since his freshman year of high school before he exploded against Texas State in the 2024 First Responders Bowl last December. Since winning the starting job this fall, the former walk-on from Austin has been as impressive as any quarterback in the country. Mestemaker ranks fifth nationally in passing yards (3,000) and seventh in touchdowns (23), lifting the 9-1 Mean Green into the AP Top 25 for the first time in program history with more completions of 20-plus yards than all but two other FBS passers.
TCU coach Sonny Dykes, Morris’ position coach at Texas Tech from 2004 to 2006. «That’s the thing about Eric: He’s got a lot of belief in himself.»
Mestemaker could become college football’s next Morris-linked portal star as soon as this offseason. Like Ward and Mateer before him, he’s already generating significant portal buzz. Morris’ candidacy in multiple Power 4 coaching searches across the country looms, as well.
But, like Morris’ cotton farms, that can all wait until later. For now, Morris and Mestemaker are the unlikely duo motoring North Texas deep into the American Conference title race and flirting with a Group of 5 CFP bid as the Mean Green visit Rice this weekend (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPNU).
How did an oft-overlooked Air Raid disciple of Leach and a former all-district punter end up here? Former quarterbacks, teammates and coaching peers point to Morris’ innovative scheme, his developmental instincts and the unbending confidence of a once-undersized, overlooked playmaker from Shallowater, Texas, who has never stopped working.
To others, it’s even simpler than all of that.
«He kind of runs a dream offense for a quarterback,» Mestemaker told ESPN late last month. «Like, who wouldn’t want to throw the ball 50 times a game and go for it on every fourth down?»
IN THE SPRING of 2024, Morris got a call from Jeff Christensen. If North Texas needed another camp arm, the Dallas-based private quarterback coach had someone he wanted Morris to see.
«I said, ‘All right, great. Send me his tape and we’ll watch it in the next few days,'» Morris recalled. «Then he tells us that he doesn’t have any tape. We’re all like, ‘Come on, Jeff. Seriously?'»
Seriously.
Mestemaker spent the majority of his career at Vandegrift High School in north Austin stuck behind a pair of other talented quarterbacks — Brayden Buchanan, who went on to play baseball at Baylor, and Louisville redshirt freshman Deuce Adams. Before this fall, Mestemaker’s last full-time starting job had come with Vandegrift’s Freshman B Team in the fall of 2020. Seeking snaps after two years as a backup, he played safety and punted as a senior in 2023.
But Mestemaker still wanted to be a quarterback. A month before Christensen called Morris, he’d watched Mestemaker throw for the first time on a FaceTime call. The 6-foot-4 passer was mulling a walk-on offer from Sam Houston. Christensen saw tools to work with and invited Mestemaker to spend a month training with him in Dallas.
Michael Crabtree at Texas Tech. Crucially, he was learning from the next generation of Air Raid coaches, too: Leach-era acolytes such as Dana Holgorsen, Sonny Dykes and Seth Littrell; a pair of future playcallers in the QB room in Harrell and Sonny Cumbie; and a young analyst named Lincoln Riley.
Morris, a slot receiver, poked his head into the coaches’ offices constantly, peppered assistants with questions and sat in on offensive meetings religiously, as if he was a quarterback.
«E-Mo knew everything,» Crabtree told ESPN. «You’re seeing how they call plays, how they pull a game plan together. He was very aware at an early age. You knew he was going to be a coach.»
For Morris, the experience revealed the Air Raid for what it really was: a deceptively simple but highly effective scheme that, when done right, catered precisely to a given quarterback’s strengths. But seldom, if ever, was the system limited in the style of quarterback it could host.
That notion informed Leach’s unpretentious approach to scouting. Since Morris entered coaching, the same perspective has shaped how he evaluates and identifies quarterback talent.
«I watched a lot of good players with the right mindset, the right determination, the right skill set, go out and be super successful at a high level,» he said. «I’ve carried that with me.»
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Morris loves quarterbacks who play another sport. Point guards, like both Mahomes and Ward were in high school, possess a keen understanding of how to read space, he believes. Morris went to see Mayfield navigate a baseball infield before he offered the future Heisman Trophy winner. Same with Mateer, whom Morris later flipped to Washington State from FCS Central Arkansas.
«He just showed up at a baseball practice one day,» Mateer said. «My coach had to ask me who he was.»
Morris is also always looking for a strength to maximize. When Ward showed up to a prospect camp at Incarnate Word, Morris and his staff saw an underutilized quarterback who often threw less than 10 times per game in his high school’s option-heavy system. They also saw elite arm talent and an intriguing build. From the platform of a quarterback-driven offense at UIW and Wazzu, Ward developed into a Heisman finalist and top draft pick.
Sometimes, in the open-minded pursuit of quarterback finds, you even stumble on a gem.
When Christensen finally brought Mestemaker to North Texas for a throwing session in the spring of 2024, Morris and his assistants identified raw tools to build on. But it wasn’t until the program’s first scrimmage in August that Morris began to grasp the walk-on’s full potential.
«We’ve got our fourth-string guys in there,» Morris recalled. «Next thing you know, the freshman we’re going to redshirt starts moving the ball up and down the field and making checks. We’re like, ‘Where did this come from?’ We didn’t have any idea that Drew was going to become Drew.»
HOW DOES A quarterback process information? It’s the first thing Morris wants to know. More specifically, can he do so extremely fast? Morris says Mestemaker, somewhat inexplicably considering his relative inexperience, is «as good as anybody I’ve been around.»
North Texas quarterbacks coach Sean Brophy offers one explanation: Mestemaker’s past as a high school safety has been a game changer.
«The way he sees defenses, when we break stuff down in the meeting room, he’s able to truly understand the coverages and the run fits and how it all matches together,» Brophy said. «We’ll be talking in meetings and he’ll say, ‘We did something similar to that at Vandegrift,’ and he’s able to take that with him onto the field.»
Mestemaker’s ability to process is one of North Texas’ building blocks. That he’s peaking late in his first full season — averaging 380 passing yards on a 76.% competition percentage with six touchdown passes and one interception over his past three games — is no surprise to Morris and a staff who have made quick-turn quarterback development into an art form in recent years.
UL Monroe in 2023. He was a great runner, so North Texas found ways to use his legs. Chandler Morris, who arrived after stops at Oklahoma and TCU, hated running but thrived on the move. In turn, the Mean Green manipulated the system to get him outside the pocket. This fall, Morris & Co. are scheming ways to keep Mestemaker in it.
«I think he’s really good at identifying what a guy’s strengths are and then being able to accentuate that while not getting away from who he is as a playcaller,» said Texas Tech offensive coordinator Mack Leftwich, who worked under Morris at Incarnate Word from 2019 to 2022. «They haven’t missed a beat. If anything, he keeps getting better on offense.»
Repetition was paramount to Leach. Morris takes it just as seriously. «Being able to take the meeting to the field is critical,» Morris said. «I think the way we prepare them with meeting time is as good as anybody in the country.» North Texas’ quarterbacks get booklets filled with notes for each opponent. Morris is notorious for quizzing players on the contents throughout the week.
«He would always test us,» former Wazzu quarterback Emmett Brown said.
At every school where he has coached, Morris has had a board in the quarterbacks room. Each week, he has his players stand around it to rank their favorite plays, often ditching the ones that drop down the list. At Wazzu, Ward often came into the room with ideas. On Saturday, they’d find their way onto the call sheet. For Morris, it’s as important that his players trust what he’s seeing on the field as it is that he understands what they’re seeing and feeling within the offense.
«At the end of the day as a coach, I can draw up a lot of cool plays,» Morris said. «But if we can’t execute them on game day, then we’ve got issues.»
#GMG🦅 pic.twitter.com/vrDWFuDpQa
— UNT Football (@MeanGreenFB) October 25, 2025
Mestemaker notched the first 600-yard passing performance by an FBS quarterback since 2020 during North Texas’ 54-20 win at Charlotte on Oct. 24. Days after the record-setting, 608-yard outing, he was asked what it feels like to operate as the quarterback in Morris’ offense.
His response is illustrative.
«He’ll say, ‘If this guy comes here, he’ll be open for a touchdown,'» Mestemaker explained. «So, you go out there and run it and it happens. You walk onto the field knowing you’re about to score.» Another member of the fraternity of former Morris quarterbacks knows exactly what he means. «He has a good feel for making you comfortable,» Mahomes said. «I think that’s the biggest thing.»
CHANDLER MORRIS FELL back in love with football at North Texas last fall. After injuries derailed him at TCU, Morris transferred into an offense built to maximize his skills just 39 miles away. Morris finished 2024 as the nation’s seventh-leading passer with 4,016 yards. «I’d give the credit to the coaches there,» he told ESPN’s Max Olson this fall. «They poured so much confidence into me.»
A week after the regular season ended, Morris walked into his head coach’s office with tears in his eyes, unsure of whether to pursue one of the $1 million offers on the table in the portal market. Eric Morris was matter-of-fact about telling his fifth-year quarterback to go.
«He was crying. I started laughing,» Morris recalled nearly a year later. «I told him, you’ve got to take this opportunity. It’s a lot of money.»
Miami) to Mateer (Oklahoma) to Chandler Morris, who eventually landed at Virginia, North Texas’ head coach has gotten used to watching his quarterbacks take a leap and find success somewhere bigger. With the Mean Green navigating a tight American Conference title race this month, both Eric Morris and Mestemaker could be on the cusp of doing the very same thing.
Sources tell ESPN that Morris is among the leading candidates for multiple Power 4 openings. Mestemaker will instantly become one the cycle’s most attractive transfer quarterbacks if he enters the portal after this season. ESPN sources also suggest there’s a real possibility that Mestemaker could follow Morris to his next school, as Ward did when Morris left Incarnate Word for Washington State in 2022, presenting a potentially intriguing package deal.
Morris has deflected questions surrounding their respective futures in recent weeks, even in late October when the UNT board of regents formally authorized athletic director Jared Mosley to negotiate a second contract extension since January. Mestemaker isn’t the only North Texas player likely to draw Power 4 portal interest, either, with rusher Caleb Hawkins, whose 16 touchdowns rank second nationally, and wide receiver Wyatt Young garnering national attention.
«I think I’ve gotten as good as anybody at being where my feet are, knowing that we’ve had roster changes before,» Morris said in an Oct. 28 news conference. «And then [it’s] being able to coach and love the guys that we have on our team right now. So, it’s something that doesn’t cross my mind.»
Like his cotton farms, the future can wait. Change might well be coming for Morris, Mestemaker and North Texas. So could a potentially historic postseason run.
Morris, the 40-year-old quarterback whisperer, has every ambition of coaching and developing quarterbacks somewhere into at least his mid-50s. For now, he is focused on the present.
«I got a long time to coach before I start drinking beer, driving around in my pickup truck and looking after the cotton farms,» Morris tells ESPN. «… If I get another good 15 years out of this, I think I’ll be happy to go sit on a tractor for a little bit.»
Max Olson and Nate Taylor contributed to this report.
