University of Tennessee Martin was once Ty Simpson’s playground.
He never left the side of Skyhawks quarterbacks growing up, taking in each drill at each of his father’s practices, throwing a football too big for his hand.
But Simpson was not just another kid who wanted to play catch. He was not the annoying coach’s son who interrupted drills. Simpson was different. He was fired up. He wanted to be involved, to compete, to be the best, to be set apart.
It was awesome,” said former UT Martin quarterback Derek Carr, affectionately known by the Simpsons as “our Derek Carr,” as opposed to the player by the same name who plays for the New Orleans Saints of the National Football League. “It’s kind of refreshing, too, at the same time, going back and thinking back to whenever you’re a kid, right? And everything’s so simple. Almost like a breath of fresh air, like it is all so simple.”
Simpson’s journey with Alabama football has been anything but simple.
Simpson, a former five-star quarterback out of Martin, Tennessee, has backed up two Alabama quarterbacks. He’s played for three different offensive coordinators, three different quarterbacks coaches and two different head coaches, one of whom he thought would never leave.
And his time as Alabama’s starting quarterback has not yet come.
That time may have finally arrived. Jalen Milroe, the quarterback Simpson has backed up for two seasons, has entered the NFL draft. Simpson is heading into spring practiced as the presumed favorite to be the first Crimson Tidequarterback to take snaps when Alabama faces Florida State on Aug. 30.
It’s not how I drew it up for sure,” Simpson told the Tuscaloosa News. “I think anybody could tell you that. But it’s God’s plan and I think, ultimately, it will make me a better player.”
Simpson, a redshirt junior in 2025, faces a spring where Alabama can, finally, become his team to lead.
But in that, Simpson has remained who he’s always been: the loyal coach’s son who grew up in a college football locker room, the coach-in-training whose love for the sport and for those around him shows up everywhere, from the sidelines of Bryant-Denny Stadium to the phone calls he makes with his brother, Graham.
Simpson is the Alabama quarterback who understands the long game and whose mentality is unwavering even with his turn behind center possibly coming soon.
“We’ve watched him completely change into an even better player than we thought simply because he’s matured and he’s recruited in-house and understands the way things work,” said Julie Simpson, Ty’s mother. “And he understands how the portal works. He understands the love of the game and how that can actually take you a lot farther than necessarily the money for the game.”
How Ty Simpson was built differently
It didn’t take much convincing.
Ty Simpson had just returned from Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a Wolverines scholarship offer, one hand-delivered by Jim Harbaugh. The eighth-grade quarterback viewed the offer more as a “token of gratitude” that showed that Michigan liked him before any other program did.
Simpson was motivated, knowing that the Michigan offer would set him apart even before he took a snap at Westview High School in Martin, Tennessee. He knew he needed to get bigger, faster and stronger.
The best solution? Work out at UT Martin each morning before school. The problem? Simpson didn’t have a driver’s license, let alone a permit. But in a small town, and with a football facility minutes away, that did not stop the quarterback.
“We would let him drive the vehicle a mile to the office here in the morning without his driver’s license,” said Jason Simpson, Ty’s father and the UT Martin football coach. “He would get up at 5 o’clock and come do that on his own.”
That’s who Ty Simpson was, the quarterback who never had to be told how to work to become a college player: He was wired like one from the beginning.
Ty Simpson knew what a quarterback was supposed to look like. He watched his dad, a former Mississippi State quarterback-turned-Southern Miss baseball player. He watched Carr. He trained with former UT Martin quarterback Dresser Winn.
Simpson had to learn how to be tough, how to have the loudest voice on his team. He had to become what he calls the “franchise guy,” the one who leads through difficulties.
That is the impression he made on Westview football coach Matt McConnell when the coach arrived in 2019, inheriting a sophomore quarterback who had one season of starting experience under his belt. A new coach meant Simpson had to learn a new offensive system while balancing basketball and baseball seasons.
“(He was) willing to work and do what it took, you know, to be successful in whatever it was he was trying to do,” McConnell said.
McConnell was not with Simpson long, leaving Westview after one season. But McConnell saw a quarterback who learned to read opposing defenses and coverages, how to move an offense without forcing plays downfield.
To Jason Simpson, Ty started “playing catch and taking completions” as the talent around him grew stronger, a team that won a state title in 2021 led by a quarterback who was named as Tennessee’s Gatorade Player of the Year.
Winn knew Ty Simpson was different, calling him “obsessed” on the practice field even as the five-star ranking and the reality that Simpson would play major college football came.
“I was recruited somewhat highly coming out of high school,” Winn said. “But I could always tell that Ty threw it better than me. He knew more about the game. He was more curious, more interested and he just was more athletic. He did everything better than I did.”
‘Do you remember what you are there for?’
Nick Saban was different.
Ty Simpson remembers watching the former Alabama coach walk into a room with a swagger, dressed in a suit, confident in what he saw from high school players he was passionate about.
“As a guy who loved football and a guy who’s been around it all my life,” Ty Simpson said, “I just kind of fell in love with the process and the way that he envisioned it.”
Saban was one of many SEC and Big Ten coaches who flocked to Jason Simpson’s office at UT Martin to meet Ty, coaches from whom Jason admits he would try to steal ideas.
From when Saban talked to Ty Simpson, Jason remembers a coach who never made promises but whose pitch was clear: if you want to be an NFL starting quarterback, the pathway starts at Alabama.