Eric Morris got a call from his old quarterback protege, Cam Ward, midway through this past season.
Everything has changed for coach and player in the five years since Morris gave Ward his only collegiate offer at FCS Incarnate Word (UIW). Morris has built the conference’s top offense at North Texas in back-to-back seasons. Ward was a Heisman finalist at Miami and is a projected top-five NFL Draft pick. Yet all their conversations drift back to the time they shared at the Catholic school in San Antonio with less than 5,000 students.
“Some days, I just want to go back to my dorm at Incarnate Word and play video games with my friends and get up and practice the next day,” Ward said.
Morris got his first head coaching job at UIW at 32 years old in 2018, which might as well have been a generation ago in a college football world that’s changed more in the last five years than it did in the previous five decades.
He, Ward, and numerous others who ‘cut their teeth at the Word’ have since graduated to the FBS ranks with lucrative NIL payments for players and ever-expanding support staff for coaches. Morris jokes that his current players complain when they only have three flavors of Muscle Milk, because his best stories are running to HEB to grab the bread that’s one day from expiration and convincing the store for a free bulk order of peanut butter and jelly so his players could have a pregame PB&J Bar.
“That place will always have a special spot in my heart,” Morris said. “I think any time you do something the hard way, you’re a little more proud of it.”
When his North Texas team kicks off the SERVPRO First Responder Bowl against Texas State on Friday afternoon, Morris and opposing head coach GJ Kinne will share that fondness for UIW. Their paths never crossed, but they’ve each been integral to the school winning four Southland Conference titles in the last seven years.
Morris inherited a team coming off a 1-10 season and coached it to a 24-18 record over four seasons with its first two FCS Playoff berths in program history. Kinne then replaced Morris, kept his entire offensive staff and a large part of the roster he built, and took it to new heights in the 2022 season with a 12-2 record and a trip to the semifinals.
New Texas Tech offensive coordinator Mack Leftwich was part of that offensive staff that bridged the Morris and Kinne regimes. Anytime UIW is on TV, he’ll watch and marvel at how the program has turned into a hotbed for young coaching talent and an FCS powerhouse, because he remembers what it was like building it to that point.
Leftwich lived in a pseudo-frat house with three other UIW coaches when he joined as a graduate assistant in 2018. The others? Current North Texas offensive coordinator Jordan Davis, North Texas Chief of Staff Rolando Surita and now-UIW head coach Clint Killough. All were brought to UIW by Morris.
“FCS coaches really know how to hire assistants because you really have to do your work in interviewing guys and finding guys who will come and work for less,” Morris said. “I thought we did find a lot of great coaches and guys that have gone on to do great things.”
Leftwich sees far more similarities than differences between Kinne and Morris, both young offensive coaches who excel in building relationships with the players. The one difference is Morris’ Mike Leach-ian qualities in off-season training compared to Kinne’s Chip Kelly-esque, science-based approach.
Morris brought Leach’s famous ‘Midnight Maneuvers’ from his time at Texas Tech. Almost every college program does 6:00 a.m. winter conditioning workouts to build mental toughness. Leach, who wasn’t known for being a morning person, moved those workouts to midnight so the players had to sit around all day dreading the workout. The players would jog around the field listening to the Rocky theme song before cycling through 8-9 grueling workout stations. Everyone would start with a grey shirt, either upgraded to a black shirt or downgraded to a red one based on performance.
Those workouts were part of why UIW went from one win to winning the conference title in Morris’ first season. But sustained success came from the recruiting trail.
Morris says UIW benefitted from the unique time in college football when the Transfer Portal existed before NIL. While many Group of Five Texas college coaches prioritized the Portal, Morris’ staff instead recruited the high school guys who went FCS because of it. Guys like Ward and offensive lineman Nash Jones, who will participate in this year’s East-West Shrine Bowl, later proved to be FBS quality players who started their careers at UIW.
Leftwich also says the COVID era was a boon for the program, which signed current Texas State offensive linemen Dorian Strawn and Emeka Ogbigbo because G5 coaches couldn’t scout them in person.
That roster helped Morris win Southland Conference Coach of the Year twice and have an offense that finished top-10 nationally in total offense in three of his four seasons.
When Morris took the offensive coordinator job at Washington State, Kinne kept his offensive staff for his sole season at UIW. He promoted Leftwich to offensive coordinator, kept Jordan Shoemaker as offensive line coach (now in the same position at Texas State) and Killough as receivers coach.
“That showed a lot of maturity and wisdom from him, even being a first-year head coach,” Leftwich said. “Being able to make that decision and not having an ego in wanting to bring in a whole new staff and start it from scratch.”
Kinne’s faith in the previous regime paid off in the illustrious 2022 season. UIW ranked first in the FBS and FCS with 51.5 points per game and 581.2 yards per game behind quarterback Lindsey Scott Jr., the Walter Payton Award winner.
Plenty of coaches and players who entered UIW between 2018-22 have since moved onto FBS football, and it’ll be on display when Morris and Kinne square off for the first time as head coaches in the bowl game. But they, and the others who got to experience it, were built by UIW’s 2,000-seat Benson Stadium, now home to an FCS powerhouse nestled in San Antonio.
“It was the perfect time, the right place and the right people there doing it together,” Leftwich said.
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