The Trent Dilfer experiment is failing. And that’s only part of UAB’s problems

Once a consistent Group of Five winner, the Blazers are a punching bag under their new coach while the man he was hired over has lifted up a perennial loser

The UAB football team was ensnared in a special kind of hell heading into its game last Saturday at Army.

For one, the Blazers are in the midst of a dreadful season, with a 1-4 record prior to their meeting with the Black Knights, who were (and remain) undefeated. Secondly, the second-worst run defense in FBS – allowing 258 rushing yards per game and 5.6 yards per carry – was going to have to contend with a team that does basically nothing but run.

A nightmare of a matchup on paper was somehow even worse on grass.

By halftime, Army led 34-3, having scored touchdowns on each of its first five drives. Even after they showed mercy, scoring just 10 points in the second half and giving up a late touchdown to make the score slightly more presentable for UAB in a 44-10 loss, the Black Knights still finished the game with 515 total yards, 413 rushing yards, 7.4 yards per carry and eight yards per play.

In a contest between relative peers – both programs are part of the American Athletic Conference – one side looked like a competent, well-run college football program while the other looked like the exact opposite.

Under Trent Dilfer’s watch, it has become a common occurrence for the Blazers, to the point of being their identity.

Midway through his second season at the school, the former NFL quarterback and television analyst is 5-13 overall at a program that made it to a bowl game in five of the six seasons before he was hired (and in the one year it didn’t, the pandemic-altered 2020 season, it still went 6-3.) His second team is worse than his first by virtually any measurement, with UAB at 1-5 with no wins against FBS opponents and an average margin of defeat of 28.8 points.

Those numbers, however, only tell so much of the story of how a consistent winner at the Group of Five level and an uplifting story of triumph in the face of considerable odds has suddenly become a laughingstock.

Why UAB’s gamble has backfired

When UAB athletic director Mark Ingram hired Dilfer in Nov. 2022, he knew he was taking a risk. He acknowledged as much at Dilfer’s introductory press conference, going out of his way in his opening remarks to say that he wasn’t just hiring a high-school football coach (though, technically, he was doing exactly that.)

It was a gamble, however, he felt would be worthwhile.

“We wanted a great person who’s compassionate and cares about people,” Ingram said. “We wanted high character and high integrity above all else. Naturally, we wanted a proven winner and we wanted someone who had head coaching experience. And 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. I know that UAB can do that. Trent Dilfer knows that UAB can do that.”

Dilfer was hired during the same cycle as Deion Sanders, whose ascent to an FBS head coaching position was met with similar skepticism about whether such an experiment could work. 

For whatever questions his hiring at Colorado raised, Sanders wasn’t exactly an unknown. He had spent the previous three years at Jackson State, where he took over a once-proud program that had withstood six consecutive non-winning seasons and, over the course of his tenure, went 27-6 with a pair of conference championships. For good measure, he’s also one of the best athletes in American history, one who had managed to stay culturally relevant nearly 20 years after his final game.

Dilfer represented a different, more volatile kind of unknown. While he made a nice living and was the starting quarterback of a Super Bowl-winning Baltimore Ravens, Dilfer wasn’t nearly as good of a player as Sanders. Though he was a regular presence as an analyst at ESPN, he wasn’t nearly as culturally ubiquitous as Sanders, something that stripped him of the recruiting cachet a coach with little experience might be able to lean on. Unlike the man now known as “Coach Prime,” Dilfer had never coached at the college level, instead coming directly from Lipscomb Academy in Nashville, a small, private high school that competed in the second-smallest of Tennessee’s six football classifications.

Whatever hope there was that Dilfer could be a groundbreaking, swaggering disruptor who proved all the doubters wrong and elevated UAB football hasn’t come close to fruition.