Earlier this month, UAB fired head football coach Trent Dilfer after a disastrous 9-21 record over three seasons, seasons which should never have happened for he should never have been hired to begin with.
In November 2022, UAB hired Dilfer despite have zero college coaching experience.
Not as an assistant coach, training coach or even a scout.
Zero. Nada. Donut.
His only qualifications were that he was a former NFL quarterback for 13 years, won a Super Bowl with the Ravens in 2000, was an NFL analyst with ESPN for nine years and became a high school coach at Libscomb Academy in Nashville for four years after being laid off by the Disney-owned network.
A solid resume, yet one devoid of coaching at the college or NFL levels.
So when he was hired at UAB, many shook their heads in doubt of the decision for a high school coach making the jump to a DI program without any prior college coaching experience wasn’t something that instilled much confidence in the media and fans, regardless of it being a P4 or G5 conference team.
But to UAB, which was trying to continue the program’s upward trajectory after shutting it down after the 2014 season, it was a move that they felt brought stability and attention to the still rebuilding program.
UAB started its football program as a club team in 1989 and has proved to be a program of progress. In 1991, it became an official NCAA DIII independent team. Two years later, it moved up to I-AA, made the jump to I-A in 1996 and joined Conference USA (C-USA) in 1999.
In 2000, the Blazers beat LSU in Baton Rogue and in 2004 it made its first Bowl game in school history (the Hawaii Bowl). In 2011, the program achieved another first by hiring Garrick McGee, its first and only Black head coach.
Unfortunately, the program was shut down in 2014 due to reported budget issues, but revived two years later and began playing again in 2017 under head coach Bill Clark. That year the program won 7 games, its highest since becoming an FBS program, and was bowl eligible. A year later, the Blazers won their first conference title and their first bowl game.
After two CUSA titles, Clark resigned before the 2022 season and a year later, Dilfer was hired and took over as the team moved to the American Athletic Conference (AAC).
Dilfer’s hiring was the first time UAB had hired an inexperienced head coach, and it proved to be period of set back for a program which, while lacking the long and storied history of its fellow Alabama-based football programs, had generally demonstrated a history of progress.
While other coaches had losing seasons, they arrived on campus with experience. Dilfer didn’t have their resumes, and during this new age of NIL, multi-million dollar collectives and discussions of opening the door to private equity, programs cannot afford to have their current and future success hampered by losing seasons.
That should have been the primary reason for not hiring Dilfer.
That’s not a knock on him personally or his love for the game, but his lack of qualifications for leading a program in a state where the Crimson Tide and the Tigers reside should have deterred his hiring, regardless of his name having weight attention-wise.
In the Blazers first game after firing Dilfer, the team rallied to defeat no.22 ranked Memphis 31-24. That gave the Blazers its biggest win of the season and with four of their five remaining games against unranked teams, UAB has a chance of winning 7 games and becoming bowl eligible again, something it failed to achieve in the last two season with Dilfer at the helm.
And while it was only one game, the win over Memphis showed that Dilfer’s inexperience was hampering the Blazers progress, something that inexperience usually causes.
