Can Trent Dilfer, college football's most baffling hire last year, shock the world at UAB?

The former Super Bowl champion and ESPN analyst comes directly to the FBS from a small Tennessee high school

Before we get going, a quick note: this week, after a year of working primarily as a freelancer, I started a full-time position as a Big Ten/SEC trending reporter for USA Today Sports. This should not affect my work here. The Front Porch will continue to exist and (fingers crossed) grow, and I plan on continuing to have two newsletters a week most weeks, as has been the case since I launched this little venture back in March. There are still way too many compelling stories I want to tell and that I know y’all will want to read. If I end up scaling back to one post a week — which I don’t anticipate happening — I’ll adjust the per-month and per-year subscription cost and I’ll be in touch with existing subscribers about how to adjust their payments so they won’t be charged the same price for less content.

With that newsletter business out of the way, let’s dive into things.

When a Birmingham-area businessman suggested to Mark Ingram that he reach out to Trent Dilfer about UAB’s vacant football head coaching position, the Blazers’ athletic director was happy to make the call. In his line of work, you always take the meeting.

From there, though, the process went in a direction Ingram could have never imagined. A 10-minute phone call became an hour-long conversation. That conversation led to another one. And another one. And another one.

Before Ingram knew it, he had done something he had sworn he wouldn’t at the outset of a nationwide search to fill the most important position in his athletic department – he had hired a high-school football coach.

The most audacious hire of college football’s last offseason wasn’t Colorado turning to Deion Sanders to rescue its languishing program, but UAB bringing in Dilfer, most recently the head coach at Lipscomb Academy, a small, private high school in Nashville. The move caught many by surprise after a slew of other, more conventional names had been linked to the job for weeks. The search itself was even convoluted, with Blazers players releasing a statement saying they had been left in the dark and urging the school to hire interim coach Bryant Vincent for the permanent position.

It all ended with a choice that could be generously described as bold and more cynically, and perhaps even realistically, labeled as reckless. There have been few figures like Dilfer in the history of the sport, jumping right from high school to what is now the FBS. Even fewer of them had quite as thin of a resume, with just four years of coaching experience.

There’s a middle ground scenario that exists, one in which Dilfer is generally competent while guiding UAB to .500 seasons and occasional bowl games. More than likely, though, his tenure seems fated to follow one of two paths – either he’s a shocking success story that shows that great coaches can be found in unorthodox places or he’s the disaster many believe he will be, a misguided choice to lead a stable, successful and potential-laden program as it transitions into a more difficult league.

How did Dilfer get here?

As any athletic administrator does at an introductory press conference, Ingram lavished praise on his new hire while simultaneously laying out a rationale for why Dilfer was chosen over ostensibly more qualified candidates.

He’s a Super Bowl-winning quarterback. He has the visibility and gravitas of someone who spent nearly a decade on television as one of ESPN’s main NFL analysts. He was a longtime head coach at the Elite 11 quarterback camp, where the nation’s top high-school signal-callers gather annually for a series of competitions and where Dilfer built connections with some of the best, most recognizable quarterbacks in the NFL and college over the past 10 to 15 years. As a coach, he built Lipscomb Academy up from nothing, taking what was a 2-9 program the season before he took over to back-to-back Tennessee state championships in just a four-year stretch.

Most of all, at least from Ingram’s standpoint, Dilfer is a force of personality, a self-assured figure and an engaging messenger who sells himself and his vision with passion and certainty.

“As we transition into the American Athletic Conference, we also wanted someone that not only wanted to win that conference but who wanted to go and win and play in the College Football Playoff,” Ingram said at Dilfer’s introductory press conference. “I know that UAB can do that. Trent Dilfer knows that UAB can do that.”

Others, particularly in the national media, didn’t view Dilfer quite as optimistically.

The move was widely ranked among the worst, if not the worst, coaching hire of the most recent carousel. The Athletic was one such outlet to do so, critiquing Ingram’s decision by noting “When you’re more concerned with winning the press conference than winning games, you pass on any number of qualified college coaches for a high school coach of four years who has a Super Bowl ring.” Even CBS Sports, which wrote of the hiring in relatively glowing terms, could only bring itself to grade the move as a C+.

Grading a coaching hire within days of it being made is a click-hungry exercise in futility – just look at how prominent national media figures wrote about Nebraska bringing Scott Frost aboard in 2017 – but those skeptical words reveal larger and valid concerns.

While Dilfer’s accomplishments at the high-school level are laudable, Lipscomb is a well-resourced school – complete with nicer facilities than some colleges have – that competed in the second-smallest of Tennessee’s six football classifications. It’s hardly a coaching template applicable to a program just outside the realm of major college football.

If he fails, he’ll hardly be alone among high-school coaches who made the sizable leap directly to an FBS sideline. 

Gerry Faust at Notre Dame is the most famous example, but there’s also Todd Dodge at North Texas, where he went 6-37 from 2007-10, and Tony Sanchez at UNLV, where he went 20-40 in five seasons before being fired in 2019. And say what you will about Faust, Dodge and Sanchez, but they all had much lengthier and more impressive resumes at the prep level. Faust oversaw one of the country’s top programs at Moeller High School in Cincinnati, where he went 178–23–2 in 19 seasons and won the Ohio state championship in five of his last six years there. Dodge won four state titles in five years in the highest classification of Texas high school football, going 79-1 during that stretch. Sanchez spent six years at the helm of Bishop Gorman in Las Vegas, one of the most accomplished high school programs nationally this century, and won a state championship in each of those seasons.

Dilfer’s Elite 11 experience is notable, but it’s the kind of job title that looks better on a resume than in practice. For all the bonds he forged and insight he gained into the minds and methods of the top prep quarterbacks in the nation, it’s unlikely to have any direct or tangible effect in recruiting. Why would one of those top-ranked quarterbacks being pursued by many of the best Power Five programs choose UAB?

He’s arriving at UAB at a tenuous point in the program’s history

As a college football program, UAB is a bit of an enigma.