Super Bowl-winning quarterback Trent Dilfer fails as coach of UAB Blazers, worst coach of all time, breaking news

In football-mad Alabama, it's pretty hard not to draw a crowd.

And apparently 19,724 fans showed up for the college football duel between the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Tulane on Saturday.

A journalist's shot of their “ghost town” stadium suggests the number is a WrestleMania-style exaggeration.

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The Blazers, who should be among the stronger teams outside of power college football conferences because of their location in a hotbed of recruiting and passion, lost 71-20 – the most points they have ever conceded at the sport's highest level .

Their coach is understandably under pressure because the school is successful despite external factors. External factors such as the complete shutdown a decade ago for several years, the return in 2017 and six successful seasons in a row.

But that changed in 2023, when Trent Dilfer took over for longtime coach Bill Clark and led the Blazers to a 4-8 record. So far in 2024 they are 1-4.

Dilfer has a much higher profile than one would expect from a UAB head coach; He's a Super Bowl-winning quarterback who led Baltimore's legendary defense to an NFL title in 2000. He then stayed in the league for nearly a decade before spending nearly another decade as a top-rated TV analyst at ESPN.

After being let go by the network in 2017 due to costs – something they seem to do every year at this point – Dilfer didn't necessarily need to take another high-profile job. After all, his stints in the NFL and on television were quite lucrative.

Instead, he took a job as a high school coach in Nashville, Tennessee – a well-trodden path for former NFL guys – and achieved reasonably good success, including winning a few lower-level state championships.

And then he became the head coach at UAB.

No, we don't miss any part of the timeline. Dilfer went from coaching at an OK level high school for a few years straight to playing college football at the highest level Head coaching; Didn't even get a job as a position coach or coordinator.

This was strange to say the least.

The fact that it happened around the same time that former Colts offensive lineman Jeff Saturday was plucked from even deeper obscurity – a failed job as a high school coach – to become interim coach of an NFL team almost gave UAB Coverage for the change. After all, no one could be crazier, right?

Remember, Dilfer was a permanent employee, not a caretaker. And at a job where you can actually find very good coaches who want to get their resume ready before they get a gig at a power conference.

“This is hands down one of the worst searches I have ever seen in the history of college football,” longtime college football reporter Steven Godfrey said on the Split Zone Duo podcast after the hiring was announced in late 2022.

“Mark Ingram, the sporting director, has mismanaged it all along.

“He was looking for fences and fought hard for names that UAB supposedly couldn’t land or couldn’t afford.”

That included trying to hire a former SEC head coach, according to Godfrey – Ingram reportedly claimed to the UAB board that the ex-coach was interested and would come to Birmingham to meet with them before the target failed meeting appeared that he would never attend.

The players almost begged for interim coach Bryant Vincent to get the full-time job after a 7-6 season, but he was overlooked; After a year as coordinator, he defeated minnows Louisiana-Monroe 4-1 in his first season as coach. (One of those wins was against UAB, and several Blazers players were very happy to reunite with their former coach on game day.)

Reading the tea leaves, it became pretty clear that the previous issues that triggered former coach Clark's “medical retirement” were also his frustrations with UAB executives. But either way, the May bye gave the Blazers plenty of time to complete their search.

But in the end, about six months after Clark's departure, Ingram also ignored several current college coaches interested in moving up to the Blazers job, bringing Dilfer out of coaching ignorance (though obviously not football ignorance ).

“Trent Dilfer is in the process of penetrating entire systems with which he is not professionally familiar. He’s never been a college coach,” Godfrey said.

“This is hilarious. This is, holy shit.

“He may have the ability to do the QB whisperer thing because he’s done that for a long time at ESPN…that’s a hundredth of your job.”

So the process was bad. But what about the results?

Also bad.

Dilfer took over at a critical time in the sport, with the expansion of the transfer portal – which allows players to move freely between schools after previously having to sit out a season after transferring – and the growth of NIL (name, image and similarity). ) payments.

Money was already flowing under the table to bring in top recruits, but with the system legalized, there's a lot more work that goes into college recruiting, not to mention the other CEO-like responsibilities of a head coach – dealing with the school itself and their sponsors who help finance much of the operations of the athletic department, the fans, the media, the rest of the coaching and athletic staff… all while trying to win football games.

The Blazers' lack of success on the field suggests that Dilfer has not had success in those areas, but some strange controversies have also arisen.

In 2023, he was penalized for assaulting one of his assistant coaches after the team had an extra player on the field at a crucial moment. (This came after he physically grabbed a player and yelled at him during a game in 2021, when he was still coaching at the high school level.)

Things haven't gotten any better this year. In a postgame press conference a little over a week ago, he joked that it was OK for one of his grandsons to make noise because “it's not like it's fucking Alabama.”

Alabama, in this context, is the strongest school of the future, winning national championships and hated by UAB fans both for its success and for its alleged off-field role in the shutdown of the Blazers program in the 2010s. (The schools are linked through the state's public university system, and Alabama is by far the most powerful because of its supporters.)

Asked later if he understood why the Alabama comparison was so problematic for his school's fans, Dilfer joked that he was “very aware of the history of this show,” even though fans weren't buying it.

Dilfer appeared significantly less combative after the aforementioned 71-20 loss to Tulane and took the blame for the team's current dismal situation.

“I say to the fans: I think you deserve more, the city of Birmingham deserves more,” he told reporters.

“If you want to be angry, please be angry at me. Don't be angry with our children. Our children give us everything they have and it’s my job to make sure something like this never happens again.”

These things off the field are important to fans' opinions, but what matters most is the quality of football. And the quality hasn't gotten any worse for years.

Dilfer was clearly out of his depth from the moment he was hired, and while he deserved a chance, he showed little sign of being an immediate success – which was necessary considering how unprepared he was for the role was.

If anything, he has proven otherwise and now finds himself in one of the hottest spots in the sport. The fact that the criticized sporting director who hired him, Mark Ingram, is still in charge will protect him in some ways, but he can only take so many losses.

The question then is whether those above Ingram will call him instead.

“It should be impossible to screw up a coaching situation as badly as Trent Dilfer did,” quipped Split Zone Duo podcast host and journalist Alex Kirshner this weekend.

“Yesterday there were about 40 people in the stadium, this beautiful stadium in Birmingham.

“This is a low point for the program, except for the time when they ceased to exist as a program – that was probably lower.”

…but only “probably” lower.