Eli LedermanNov 21, 2025, 07:15 AM ETCloseEli Lederman covers college football and recruiting for ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in 2024 after covering the University of Oklahoma for Sellout Crowd and the Tulsa World.
North Texas Mean Green vs. UAB Blazers: Full Highlights (1:13)North Texas Mean Green vs. UAB Blazers: Full Highlights (1:13)
“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—.”
But, for the moment, Morris is still devoted to the process of a modern, up-tempo offense that has sprouted an improbable line of diamond-in-the-rough quarterbacks since 2013, propelling a swift coaching rise for the ex-Texas Tech slot receiver whom Mike Leach affectionately called “The Elf.”
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.
“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?'”
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.
“I’ll take you out to see Eric Morris,” Christensen told Mestemaker. “If he sees what I know he’s going to see, you’ll walk on at North Texas.”
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.”
“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.
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.
In fact, they’ve adapted an offense to a new quarterback in all three of their seasons in Denton. In those three campaigns, North Texas has ranked sixth, fifth and third nationally in total offense.
The schematic principles remain the same. But Morris understood that Chandler Rogers, Chandler Morris and Mestemaker all had different strengths to play to. “Not being too proud and really sitting down with our assistants and figuring out what our kids can execute is huge,” Eric Morris said.
Rogers transferred in from 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.
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.”
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.
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.”
“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.”
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.
“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.”