Battle Alberson passed his first test as the starting quarterback for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
And by acing it, the 6-foot-2, 204-pound redshirt freshman from Gulf Breeze, Florida, also set high expectations for the team’s fans, who might have had trouble not hyperventilating based on Alberson’s 362 yards of total offense (a UTC freshman record) and four touchdown passes in the Mocs’ 45-28 win over Furman last weekend at Finley Stadium.
The tests that lie ahead are probably more difficult, though. And unlike last week, those tests are on the road.
Alberson and the Mocs (5-5, 4-2 Southern Conference) travel to face Mercer (8-1, 7-0) at 3:30 p.m. Saturday at Five Star Stadium in Macon, Georgia. The Bears, ranked eighth in the Football Championship Subdivision polls from both coaches and media, have already clinched the SoCon’s automatic bid in the 24-team FCS playoffs for the second straight season and are coming off a dramatic 49-47 win at Western Carolina that was sealed only when the Catamounts missed a 33-yard field-goal attempt as time expired.
After their game against the Bears, the Mocs will close the regular season with a Nov. 22 visit to Wofford in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Alberson, who came to UTC as a preferred walk-on, made his first career start after seventh-year senior Camden Orth — a Bowling Green transfer who had started the first nine games and thrown every pass attempted by the Mocs this year — was unavailable due to an injury that occurred a week earlier in UTC’s 38-25 home loss to Western Carolina.
Furman had just two quarterback hurries, one tackle for loss and no sacks, but the final two opponents on the schedule will present far different challenges. Wofford leads the SoCon with 81 tackles for loss, Mercer is second with 74, and both are among the top five in the FCS in tackles for loss per game (the Bears are third at 8.2, with Wofford tied for fourth at 8.1). Mercer also leads the FCS with 4.11 sacks per game (the Bears have 37 total), while Wofford is tied for third in the country with 13 interceptions.
Simply put, these next two weeks will continue to provide a UTC coaching staff that is likely losing both scholarship quarterbacks on the roster — Orth and redshirt junior Luke Schomburg — more information about charting a plan for 2026 and beyond.
“Last week was huge because you think you know what you’ve got,” offensive coordinator Joe Pizzo said of Alberson having made an impression during practice, “but until you get into live bullets coming, you don’t really know. But he did things in that game other than just make good throws. It gives you hope that you’ve got something for the future.”
It’s the challenges ahead that Pizzo, UTC head coach Rusty Wright and the rest of the staff are more intrigued about as it pertains to Alberson. After all, both Orth and Schomburg have engineered game-winning drives in a UTC uniform — Orth in a 42-38 home victory against East Tennessee State on Oct. 18 (and almost against Western Carolina) and Schomburg at Austin Peay in the first round of the 2023 playoffs — so seeing how Alberson face a situation like that, if or when it comes, is one of the next steps in the process.
The past couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind for the Alberson family.
After finding out he was going to start last week, the quarterback immediately called his dad Brian, who played baseball at Keiser University in Florida — “He gets excited about that sort of thing,” Battle said — and in addition, Brian and Amanda Alberson’s daughter Sally recently announced she was committed to play softball at Montevallo, an NCAA Division II program in Alabama and some 40 miles south of Birmingham.
But last Saturday wasn’t too much on the plate of Alberson because nothing in his weekly preparation changed, aside from the number of snaps he was getting in practice. And maybe — just maybe — the young group of players surrounding him, the receivers, backs and linemen who had been on the scout team with Alberson just a season ago, rallied around him.
They were certainly eager to celebrate his success afterward, and the Mocs will again be counting on plenty of youth against Mercer as five of the six receivers and six of the 11 offensive linemen in UTC’s two-deep chart this week are freshmen or sophomores.
Wright said that when it came to Alberson’s first start, he never saw him “panic or press or anything.”
Not even after UTC got the ball to start the game and put together a 16-play, 66-yard series that ate nearly 10 minutes of game clock but ended with the Mocs failing to convert on fourth-and-1 at the Furman 9-yard line. Not even after the Paladins responded with a quick touchdown drive for a 7-0 lead.
The Mocs’ second possession was a 10-play, 75-yard drive capped by Alberson’s 25-yard pass to freshman tight end Landon Strickland, the first UTC touchdown for each end of the connection. UTC also faced deficits of 14-7 and 21-14 in the second quarter, tying each time on touchdown passes by Alberson and never trailing after halftime.
“He just kept playing, and that was the best thing for me because I knew we’d be OK,” Wright said. “He’s going to get it figured out, so that was the biggest thing is I never saw any panic or try too hard, he just went and played the game. That’s what you want to see out of a young guy that has confidence in what they’re doing, a kid that’s prepared … to trust the positions we’re trying to put him in and the things we’re asking him to do.”
Wright noted the Mocs played last week without starting tight end John McIntyre and senior receiver Jamarii Robinson, who is tied for the team lead in touchdown catches with four. Over the course of the game, Alberson completed passes to five teammates while finishing 15-of-22.
It’s that sort of foundation that has the program excited for the future, but in the present, the Mocs are excited about this week and next. They didn’t flinch when they were 1-4, and now they have an opportunity to finish the season out strong with Alberson at the helm and even more youth around him.
“I think it speaks to the culture that the coaches have been building here and the type of guys in our program. I think you hear a lot of stories about locker rooms just being awful in situations like that,” Alberson said of the 1-4 start that included losing the SoCon opener. “I didn’t experience that at all. I’d say just the guys and the mentality around the locker room was really good in situations like that.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.