Rob Turner

Morgan Scalley was the first player ever handed the Pat Tillman Award. A year later he took a job at the University of Utah as an administrative assistant. The award goes to a player for character, intelligence, sportsmanship and service. They gave out the first one at the East-West Shrine Game in 2005. He got it. Here is what he had just finished doing at Utah. He was the captain of the 2004 team that went 12 and 0, beat Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl and finished fourth in the country. He was the Mountain West co-Defensive Player of the Year and a second team All-American at safety. He was a first team Academic All-American twice. He graduated magna cum laude with a 3.96 and then went back and got an MBA. The coach of that team was Urban Meyer. Meyer left for Florida as soon as the season ended, and a defensive coordinator named Kyle Whittingham got the job. In 2006 Scalley came back to the building where he had been a captain and started at the bottom of the staff. Administrative assistant. Graduate assistant the next year. Safeties coach in 2008. Recruiting coordinator after that. Special teams in 2015. Then defensive coordinator, which he did for ten seasons. Twenty years. One school. He never left and he never got the top job, because the man in it was Whittingham and Whittingham was not going anywhere. Until he was. In December of 2025, after 21 seasons, Whittingham left to take over at Michigan. The day after that, Utah gave Morgan Scalley the job. So he has now watched two head coaches walk out of that building for a bigger one, and both times he stayed. He is from Salt Lake City. He played there, he coached there for two decades, and now the whole thing is his. TODAY, in his first full season running it, Utah beat BYU 28 to 20. They are 9 and 0. The last time Morgan Scalley was part of an undefeated Utah team, he was wearing the uniform and somebody had just decided he was the kind of person they wanted to name an award after.