Former Gulf Shores High School standout Brandon Silvers will open the new XFL season as the starting quarterback for the Seattle Dragons, and he is one of several players with South Alabama roots on rosters as the league prepares to debut next week.
Dragons coach Jim Zorn announced the decision as XFL teams finalized their rosters. Zorn, the former Seattle Seahawks quarterback who later coached the Washington Redskins, built his Dragons staff around developing young passers, and the choice of Silvers signals that the Gulf Coast product won the job outright in training camp rather than sharing it in a rotation.
For Silvers, it is a settled job after several unsettled years: he left Troy holding numerous school records, got a look from the New Orleans Saints as an undrafted rookie in the summer of 2018, then revived his career in the short-lived Alliance of American Football, where he started two games for the Memphis Express and threw for 799 yards and four touchdowns. He signed with the New York Jets in April and was waived after minicamp in May.
The XFL’s return gives players in Silvers’ position something the professional football landscape has rarely offered: a full-time starting job, a national television audience and a stage that NFL scouts will be watching. League rosters are stocked with players cut in NFL camps, college standouts who went undrafted, and veterans of the alternative leagues that have come and gone over the past two decades.
The road from Gulf Shores to Seattle
Silvers’ path began at Gulf Shores High School, where he established himself as one of the Alabama Gulf Coast’s most productive quarterbacks before signing with Troy University. At Troy, he became one of the most prolific passers in school history, setting program records across the categories that measure a quarterback’s career — attempts, completions, yardage and touchdowns — while leading the Trojans through a stretch of competitive seasons in the Sun Belt Conference.
His professional resume has been a study in persistence. The Saints’ rookie minicamp look in 2018 did not produce a contract, but the AAF’s Memphis Express gave him live game action, and his production there — two starts, 799 passing yards and four touchdown passes in a league that lasted only eight weeks — kept his name in circulation when the Jets signed him that spring. His release after minicamp could have ended the journey; instead it led to Seattle.
The Dragons open their season at home, where Silvers will operate an offense in a league that has experimented with rule changes designed to keep games fast and scores competitive. For a quarterback whose career has been defined by second chances, the XFL opener represents the first chance he has had to start with a job secured rather than won week to week.
Other Mobile-area players on XFL rosters
Wide receiver Sammie Coates, a Leroy High alum who starred at Auburn, is with the Houston Roughnecks. He played 12 games for the Houston Texans in 2018 after earlier stints with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns, and he was released by Kansas City in May 2019.
Coates brings the most NFL experience of the area contingent to Houston. A third-round draft pick of the Steelers in 2015 after a career at Auburn that included a role in the Tigers’ national championship game run, Coates flashed big-play ability in Pittsburgh before injuries and a crowded depth chart sent him through Cleveland, Houston and Kansas City. His speed remains the kind that second-tier leagues are built to showcase.
Guard Quinterrius Eatmon, a former Vigor standout who played college ball at South Florida, joins Silvers in Seattle. He was cut by the Oakland Raiders in 2015 and the Carolina Panthers in 2018, and appeared in two games for Hamilton in the CFL in between.
Eatmon’s path reflects the grind of an interior offensive lineman on the roster bubble — signed, released and re-signed through multiple camps while taking his chances in Canada when the NFL door closed. In Seattle he reunites with Silvers on an offensive line charged with protecting the Dragons’ most important position.
Tackle Matt McCants landed with the St. Louis Battlehawks. He has NFL time with the Bears, Browns and Raiders and played for the Birmingham Iron in the AAF.
McCants’ late start in organized football remains one of the more unusual stories in the area’s recent sports history. He played tuba in the Williamson High School band before joining the football team as a senior, a late start that still earned him a scholarship to UAB, where his size and athleticism developed into professional potential. Six NFL seasons later, the Battlehawks make his fourth professional stop.
Linebacker Tre Williams, out of St. Paul’s and Auburn, is on the Los Angeles Wildcats roster. He signed with the Jets as a free agent after the 2018 draft but was released because of a neck injury, then signed with Detroit in February 2019 before being released in May and serving a two-game league suspension.
Williams was a consistent presence in Auburn’s linebacking corps and a leading tackler during his time on the Plains. The Wildcats’ defense gives the Mobile native a fresh start in a league where every roster spot comes with an audience — and where a strong season has historically been the fastest route back to an NFL contract.
The new XFL and its local meaning
The league’s 2020 relaunch, backed by a fresh ownership structure and a national broadcast arrangement, marks the second attempt at the XFL brand. The original 2001 season lasted a single year, but the new version has positioned itself differently — shorter games, simplified rules, and an emphasis on player pathways rather than gimmicks. Teams in eight cities, including Seattle, Houston, St. Louis and Los Angeles, will play a ten-game schedule culminating in a championship.
For South Alabama, the league’s rosters read as a testament to the region’s football pipeline. The five area players on XFL teams this season came through high schools from Gulf Shores to Prichard — Gulf Shores, Leroy, Vigor, Williamson and St. Paul’s — and colleges including Troy, Auburn, South Florida and UAB. Leroy High School, Coates’ alma mater, has been one of the most successful small-school programs in Alabama history, and Vigor and Williamson have long traditions of producing college and professional talent from Mobile’s inner city.
Local high school coaches often point to players like these when explaining to families what a football career can look like: not a straight line to the NFL, but a profession with many rungs. Silvers’ route — college records, a minicamp tryout, a startup league, another tryout, and now a starting job in a national league — illustrates the persistence the path requires.
What a starting job can mean
Quarterbacks carry outsized value in spring football leagues. The past two decades are filled with examples of passers who used alternative-league performances to revive NFL careers, and NFL teams routinely assign scouts to watch the XFL’s early weeks for exactly that reason. A strong season in Seattle would put Silvers back on the league’s radar at 26 years old, an age at which many NFL backups are still developing.
The same arithmetic applies down the roster. Every XFL contract includes structured releases that allow players to accept NFL opportunities, and the league has marketed that openness as part of its mission — a bridge rather than a rival. Players with previous NFL snaps, like Coates, Eatmon, McCants and Williams, are precisely the profiles NFL personnel departments track when injuries open training camp spots in the fall.
The season opens next weekend with the Dragons hosting their home opener, and Silvers will take the first snap of the new era for a franchise counting on a Gulf Coast quarterback to lead it. In Mobile and along the Eastern Shore, the weekend’s box scores will be checked in Gulf Shores, Leroy, Prichard and Mobile for the names of the region’s own.
Five locals to watch
The area’s XFL contingent for the 2020 season: Brandon Silvers (Gulf Shores High, Troy) starting at quarterback for the Seattle Dragons; Sammie Coates (Leroy High, Auburn) at wide receiver for the Houston Roughnecks; Quinterrius Eatmon (Vigor, South Florida) on the offensive line in Seattle; Matt McCants (Williamson, UAB) at tackle for the St. Louis Battlehawks; and Tre Williams (St. Paul’s, Auburn) at linebacker for the Los Angeles Wildcats.
Week one will tell them little about how the league’s experiment unfolds over its ten-game schedule, but each man starts the season with something that has been scarce in their professional lives: a defined role, a uniform and a schedule. For five players from the Alabama Gulf Coast, that is the opportunity they have been working toward since the last league folded.
