The Trent Dilfer Debacle, a case study in why you need to believe in yourself

This is the story of a program which had a lot to be proud of, but decided its own remarkable revival was less interesting than ESPN's 248th-most likable personality.

This is a newsletter about a college football team you probably don’t care too much about—but there are lessons to be learned even if you don’t care about mid-tier college football programs.

UAB is perhaps the most resilient program in college football. Their team was literally shut down by malicious political meddling in 2014, and yet they bounced back without a scratch, instantly rebuilding as a program which made bowl games every year and regularly won conference championships.

Somehow, they managed to find a football coach whose sheer crappiness managed to outweigh all that resilience. Rather than building on their own impressive story, they hired former NFL quarterback and ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer, a man who had never coached a college football team but had been on TV before.

UAB tried to bring a Big Name to a small school. Except Dilfer isn’t that big a name, and UAB isn’t actually a small school. In fact, they had a consistent record of winning that instantly evaporated as soon as Dilfer walked through the door.

It might be the worst coaching hire in the past decade—and there have been some really, really bad ones.

This is a lesson about the dangers of selling yourself short, and the and the importance of being proud of who you are even if you have dreams of something bigger. At the very least, it’s a case study in what happens when you give an important, high-profile job that requires specific expertise to a Loud Famous Guy from Television rather than someone with the actual qualifications to perform the job—and I think a lot of Americans could really use that exact message right now.

So here is the story of The Dilfer Debacle. Or the Dilfsaster, if you prefer.

Things have gotten bad at UAB very quickly.

Last season, Dilfer went 4-8 in his first year as a head coach, UAB’s worst season as a decade. That was just the beginning.

The Blazers are 1-6 this year, with their only win coming against FCS opponent Alcorn State. They’re currently ranked 119th out of 134 teams in Bill Connelly’s rankings, which is potentially overrating them. Dilfer keeps on making the situation worse with weird putdowns about UAB and its athletic programs. The fanbase has had enough:

This past weekend, they lost 35-25 to South Florida, a 2-4 team dealing with the aftermath of a major hurricane whose players openly fought on the sideline during the game. They recently lost 71-20 to Tulane, a scoreline which had never happened before in a college football game. They lost 32-6 to Louisiana-Monroe, a team coached by former UAB offensive coordinator Bryant Vincent. (We’ll talk more about this later.)

But the lowlight might be the moment during their 44-10 loss to Army, when CBS Sports sideline reporter Tina Cervasio reported that UAB’s players looked “sad” on the sideline. I have never heard a sideline reporter say that before!

Part of the problem is just that Trent Dilfer is simply Not That Guy.

The idea of hiring Trent Dilfer to make a splash is absolutely hilarious. I do not know anybody who was a fan of Trent Dilfer, the football player, or anybody who was a fan of Trent Dilfer, the media personality.

You know how TV talking heads sometimes yell at each other to make their debates entertaining? Trent Dilfer understood the “yelling” part, but not the spirit of the thing—it always seemed like he was mad at you, the person watching TV, rather than excited about the football game he was talking about. Why are you yelling at me, Trent? I’m not responsible for the Jaguars’ passing game!

UAB hired Dilfer at about the same time that Colorado hired Deion Sanders—another Super Bowl winner who became a media member as NFL analyst after his retirement. The only difference is that Sanders is wildly charismatic while Dilfer is abrasive and off-putting, Sanders was a Hall of Fame player while Dilfer didn’t even play well in the year he won the Super Bowl. (The defense only allowed one touchdown in the whole postseason! Dilfer barely did anything!) And perhaps most importantly: Sanders actually proven himself as a college coach and recruiter with an exceptional run at Jackson State while Dilfer had never coached a college team before.

Dilfer was clearly unqualified. He’s just the fifth coach in modern college football history to go straight from coaching high school to a top-level college job… and the previous four were all disasters. There’s not much reason to believe Dilfer is a good X’s and O’s coach. He was supposed to be good at recruiting and coaching quarterbacks due to his affiliation with the Elite11 QB camp, but, well… this is UAB’s starting QB. (I’m not just judging him on the arrest—he’s also bad at football.)

In addition to flubbing football stuff, Dilfer is definitely bad at the off-the-field stuff coaches have to do—his teams look profoundly unmotivated, he keeps saying stupid things in media appearances, and UAB boosters and fans almost universally hate him.

And he seems to have anger issues. During his high school coaching tenure, he shoved and screamed at one of his players during a game. He now restricts his screaming to assistant coaches, which is better, I guess.

To truly contextualize The Dilfer Debacle, you have to understand UAB’s remarkable football story.

In the past decade, UAB was killed and rose from the dead like Lazerus. (BLazerus?)

UAB is governed by the University of Alabama Board of Trustees, a 15-person board oversees the whole University of Alabama system, including the flagship Tuscaloosa campus. This is a less-than-ideal situation for UAB, because that 15-person board had just two trustees that went to UAB, but 12 Tuscaloosa alumni—including literally Bear Bryant Jr. The board blocked UAB from hiring Jimbo Fisher in 2006, kept them from building an on-campus stadium in 2011, etc. One trustee even stopped a local businessman who wanted to put new turf on UAB’s practice field for free.

In 2014, UAB commissioned a report which essentially said the football program was financially unviable. The report was maybe a bit bogus, but UAB decided to shut the program anyway. Although the board of trustees didn’t make the final decision, many blamed their decades-long policy of letting the Blazers wither away. UAB’s players were furious:

The Birmingham community fought back. They got loud, raised millions and within a year, the school announced the intention to restart the football program. Head coach Bill Clark decided to stick around as head coach of a team that wouldn’t exist for a few years, doing behind-the-scenes work for a successful relaunch.

Somehow, it worked. In the first six years post-resurrection, UAB won two Conference USA championships, three division titles, and three bowl games. But the most important number was zero—that’s how many losing seasons they had, despite having to rebuild their program from scratch.

UAB had a ridiculously easy choice to make when hiring a coach.

Clark retired ahead of the 2022 season, citing chronic back problems. When a coach suddenly leaves right before a season starts, it can actually sometimes help with continuity. There’s not a lot of time for big adjustments or outgoing transefrs before the season, so the interim coach just has to keep the steering wheel straight, and often gets promoted to the head coaching job. A lot of times, this is a sneaky way for a longtime coach to ensure the guy they want gets the gig.

Perhaps that’s what Clark was trying to do for Bryant Vincent, UAB’s offensive coordinator throughout his tenure. Vincent was on Clark’s staff in 2014, when the program shut down, then Clark re-hired Vincent for the relaunch in 2017. And when he retired, Clark personally recommended Vincent for the interim job, and things went great. UAB went 7-6 with Vincent and won the Bahamas Bowl.

This was the easiest decision in the world. The Blazers risen from the ashes with Clark, an Alabama lifer who had worked his way up from the high school level, had great connections throughout the state, and had overseen the entire UAB rebirth project. Vincent was also a longtime Alabama high school coach who had worked his way up, also had great connections throughout the state, and had also been there for the remarkable relaunch. UAB’s players openly campaigned for Vincent to receive the full-time head coaching job.

UAB ignored what they had, hoping to “elevate” their program.

UAB ignored the players’ pleas and brought in Dilfer. Even at the time, the decision was met with skepticism.

But the people in charge were insistent they were building upwards. Here’s what AD Mark Ingram said at Dilfer’s introductory press conference. (Not that Mark Ingram, I don’t think UAB people would go for having a former Alabama running back as AD.)

“I’m not hiring a high school football coach…I’m hiring the No. 6 overall pick in the NFL Draft, a guy who’s had 14 years playing quarterback at the highest level. I’m hiring a guy that’s a Pro Bowler, who was the starting quarterback on a Super Bowl team and spent nine years with ESPN doing analytics, commentary and draft coverage.

And chancellor Ray Watts:

Dilfer is a well-known and well-networked Super Bowl champion, and he has a national reputation and platform which will elevate UAB football.

But how could Dilfer “elevate” UAB when he keeps putting them down?

In addition to being bad at coaching, Dilfer keeps making strange digs about UAB. Dilfer has referred to his coaching tenure as a “rebuild,” even though he took over a program with seven winning seasons in a row. It was more of a teardown.

In a recent postgame press conference—sparsely attended because UAB got its ass kicked—Dilfer invited his grandson up on stage and said “it’s not like this is freakin’ Alabama.” A little joke, and a true one: UAB is smaller, less prestigious and not as good at football as Alabama. Every UAB fan surely knows that. They just don’t want to hear it from their own damn people when they already have to hear it from everybody else in the state.

And in a podcast released by the school itself, Dilfer sat down with Ingram, the UAB AD, and gave a recruiting pitch for the University of Louisville’s volleyball program, where his daughter plays. When Ingram gently pushed back and said volleyball recruits should also consider UAB, Dilfer weirdly doubled down, saying “they’re pulling from different buckets”—essentially, that he should be allowed to hype Louisville’s program over UAB’s because Louisville’s recruits are so much better that they’d never consider UAB. Thanks, Trent, that fixes everything.

There’s a throughline to Dilfer’s comments: He thinks he’s better than UAB. He was here to rebuild because he didn’t respect what they had. His daughter obviously wouldn’t consider playing for UAB volleyball, because Louisville is much better and she’s much better. And sheesh—who even cares about these stupid little press conferences?

There’s a lesson to learn here.

Name-dropping is the weakest form of self-promotion. When you meet someone who keeps talking about the cooler people they come into contact with as a way of sounding important, you start to wonder: What about you? Why should people care about you when you only seem to care about these other, more interesting people?

UAB didn’t need to go name-dropping. They had a good thing going! They had a winning program. They’re in the biggest city in a football-mad state. (Nielsen ratings almost always show Birmingham as the top market for college football.) And they had something truly special: A fanbase passionate enough to fight back when The Man shut them down. Do you know how incredible that is? (If my school canceled football, we’d get a few online petitions and almost immediately start publishing thinkpieces and retrospectives about the program’s history. No rebirth from the ashes. RIP.)

If UAB hired Vincent—or any replacement-level coach—they’d probably be in decent shape right now. They were putting together winning records every year and winning championships regularly. They could sell that. They could go to recruits, transfers, and potential fans and say: Look at this amazing thing we’ve done—we’re still doing it. The last thing they needed was a big-time shakeup.

But when the people in charge at UAB hired Dilfer, they seemed to think all those good things weren’t enough. They wanted something flashier and more “relevant,” revealing a surprising shame in something they should have been proud of. They felt that all of UAB’s success and their spectacular revival was somehow less interesting than the 248th-most likable ESPN personality of the last decade.

UAB reached up. They found someone who looks down on them. Trent Dilfer was told the best thing about this program was not anything they’d actually accomplished, but that they were a big enough deal to hire Trent Dilfer. He clearly believed it. UAB wanted people to say “wow, look at UAB! They actually hired Trent Dilfer!” Well, they got what they wanted.

So, remember: Believe in yourself! Be proud of the things that you have accomplished! It’s healthy and good to aspire to bigger and better things—but you’re only going to get there by building on what you’ve already done, not by hiring Trent Dilfer. Although I suspect he’ll be available soon.