Four players who came up through Mobile and Baldwin County high schools found roster spots in the Alliance of American Football, the spring league that launched earlier in the month. The new venture gave NFL fringe players, practice squad veterans and underrated prospects a place to play real, televised football in the spring months when roster spots elsewhere are scarce — and the Gulf Coast was well represented on the league’s opening rosters.
Three of the four landed with the same team, the Memphis Express, giving the expansion club an unmistakable Mobile flavor. The fourth signed with the Orlando Apollos, one of the league’s most talented rosters. All four followed winding roads from Coastal Alabama Friday nights through college programs big and small, and each saw the AAF as a chance to put fresh game film in front of professional scouts.
Three on the Memphis Express
Brandon Silvers held the backup quarterback job in Memphis, completing three of four pass attempts across the team’s first two games with one interception. Silvers played at Gulf Shores High School before a standout career at Troy, where he became one of the most productive passers in Sun Belt Conference play. His college resume carried weight beyond the stat sheet: he appeared in the 2018 Senior Bowl — the annual all-star game played in his hometown of Mobile — and drew a tryout with the New Orleans Saints afterward.
Silvers’ path illustrates why a spring league mattered to players in his position. Quarterbacks drafted into the NFL occupy crowded depth charts, and even a strong training camp rarely yields a roster spot behind established starters. Game repetitions in a league where every snap is filmed and scouted offered him what offseason workouts could not: proof of how he manages a huddle, reads a defense and throws under pressure in live games.
Cornerback Jonathan Cook was also on the Express roster. Cook played at Spanish Fort High School, one of Baldwin County’s most successful programs of the past decade, and spent one season at Alabama before moving on in search of playing time. After a stop at Garden City Community College in Kansas, he started two seasons at the University of Memphis, re-establishing himself as a cover corner in the American Athletic Conference.
Defensive end Jamichael Winston rounded out the Memphis trio. Winston played at Vigor High School in Prichard and then at Arkansas, competing in the SEC’s weekly grind, and he had a tryout with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2016. Like Cook, he spent years staying ready on the edges of professional football, waiting for an opportunity to show his game had progressed since his last look from an NFL team.
A second Vigor product in Orlando
Tackle Quinterrius Eatmon, another Vigor graduate, landed with the Orlando Apollos. Eatmon won a Class 5A state championship with the Wolves before playing at South Florida, where he spent his college career anchoring the offensive line. His professional path took him through several camps and leagues: he attended training camp with the Oakland Raiders in 2016 and the Carolina Panthers in 2018, and in 2016 and 2017 he played in the Canadian Football League with Saskatchewan, Ottawa, Montreal and Hamilton. Few players in the league accumulated more miles or more uniforms before reaching Orlando.
Eatmon’s journey reflects the reality for most offensive linemen on the professional fringe. NFL teams carry few tackles in camp, and the position rewards experience over youth, which sent him hopping between CFL rosters in western and eastern Canada before the AAF offered a stateside stage. Playing for four CFL clubs in two seasons is a testament to persistence as much as ability, and scouts have long noted his championship pedigree and big-school training.
A new landing spot for area talent
For players in that stage of a career, a spring league offered game film and a paycheck at a point in the calendar when NFL rosters are set. The AAF’s debut season gave four Gulf Coast products that opportunity at the same time, with three of them sharing a locker room in Memphis. In previous winters, players like Silvers, Cook, Winston and Eatmon had to patch together arena league contracts, CFL deals and tryout invitations. A stable league with weekly television exposure changed the calculus.
The league itself was built with credibility in mind, staffed by former NFL executives and coaches and playing a ten-week schedule that bridges the gap between the Super Bowl and training camps. For prospects, the pitch was simple: play meaningful snaps in front of scouts in a scheme and setting that translates directly to the next level. For the four Coastal Alabama players, the pitch was also a chance to keep a professional dream alive a little longer.
Local fans had reasons to follow the league beyond the four players. The AAF placed one of its eight franchises in Birmingham, giving Alabama football fans a spring team of their own and putting more college-aged talent in the state each weekend. That regional footprint only raised the stakes for the Mobile and Baldwin County players on out-of-town rosters, whose high school coaches and former teammates could track their progress on television every week.
The Senior Bowl connection is worth noting as well. Mobile’s annual all-star game has long been a showcase where draft hopefuls prove themselves, and Silvers’ appearance there in 2018 was a homecoming milestone for a Gulf Shores product. A spring league extends that pipeline, giving players who peaked after the all-star circuit another measurable stage. If the AAF becomes an annual proving ground, Coastal Alabama’s steady output of college talent will keep flowing into it.
What the four share
What the four players share is a route through some of the region’s most storied high school programs. Vigor has produced generations of Division I defenders, Spanish Fort has won multiple state titles across classifications, and Gulf Shores has sent its share of skill players to the college ranks. That pipeline runs through summer camps, recruiting combines and Friday nights from Prichard to the beaches, and the AAF rosters simply added a new professional stop at the end of it.
Their presence also sends a message to current high school players in the area: the road is rarely straight. Cook needed a season at Alabama, a reset at a Kansas junior college and two years in Memphis to work his way back into professional consideration. Eatmon’s career crossed four Canadian cities before returning to the United States. None of it was planned, and all of it mattered by the time each man signed an AAF contract.
As the Express and Apollos played out their early schedules, the four kept working toward the same goal that drives everyone in the league: another invitation to an NFL camp, or at minimum a season of film that makes the case. Memphis fans got three Coastal Alabama players to cheer; Orlando got a tackle with a state championship ring. And back home, four high school programs could point to their sidelines as the first step on a road that led to professional football in its newest spring form.
The spring league’s early weeks also tested how quickly players could jell. Teams held concentrated training camps in the weeks before kickoff, then went straight into a regular season schedule compressed into the spring calendar. For veteran fringe players, that environment favors experience: a quarterback like Silvers who has sat in professional meeting rooms, a cornerback like Cook who has been through multiple college systems, and a tackle like Eatmon with four CFL teams on his resume all arrived in Memphis and Orlando better prepared than most rookies would have been.
Coaches around the league emphasized that the evaluation never stops. Every practice rep is charted, every game is available to NFL scouts, and player contracts are structured so that signings by higher leagues remain part of the plan rather than a betrayal of it. Players publicly embraced that arrangement. The AAF, from their perspective, is not a destination but a bridge, and the four Coastal Alabama players crossed it with the same goal in mind.
Why the Gulf Coast keeps producing
The concentration of professional talent along the Gulf Coast is no accident. Mobile and Baldwin County sit in one of the most fertile recruiting territories in the country, where high school programs play deep schedules against elite competition and college coaches make regular stops along the I-10 corridor. Vigor’s defensive tradition, Spanish Fort’s recent championship run and the steady stream of collegiate quarterbacks, linemen and defensive backs from area schools have made the region a fixture on national recruiting maps.
That depth shows up in rosters at every level. Area players appear on SEC and Conference USA depth charts, in the CFL, and on NFL practice squads each fall. What has historically been missing is a spring destination — a league where those players could stay sharp and stay visible after their college or CFL seasons ended. The AAF’s arrival in February filled that gap, and four locals were on hand from the opening week.
For the Express, the Mobile trio was a practical windfall. Building an expansion roster on short notice meant signing players whose professional readiness had already been tested, and veterans of SEC programs, Senior Bowl rosters and NFL tryout camps fit that description. Memphis fans who follow Alabama high school football may also have recognized names from recruiting rankings of a few years back, when Silvers, Cook and Winston were among the region’s most sought-after prospects.
The season ahead will determine whether the league takes permanent root, but for the four players the outcome was already significant. Silvers had real quarterback reps in a professional offense. Cook and Winston added recent game film at premium defensive positions. Eatmon extended a professional career that has already spanned two countries. Whatever comes next — a training camp invite, another spring season, or a coaching future built on these reps — the debut season of the Alliance of American Football gave four products of Mobile and Baldwin County high schools what they needed most: a place to keep playing.
