UAB fired Trent Dilfer on Saturday following a 53-33 loss to Florida Atlantic, according to Football Scoop.
Dilfer finishes with a 9-21 record across three seasons. The loss dropped UAB to 2-4 overall and 0-3 in American Conference play.
UAB hired Dilfer in November 2022 over Bryant Vincent, the interim coach who had just led the Blazers to a 7-6 record and bowl win. Players wanted Vincent to stay. The school wanted the name recognition that came with a former Super Bowl champion.
The problem was that Dilfer had never coached college football. His experience included four years at Lipscomb Academy in Nashville, where he coached high school football and won two state championships. Before that, he spent nine years at ESPN as an NFL analyst, until the network laid him off as part of cost-cutting in April 2017.
That ESPN departure came with complications.
Years later, Dan Le Batard revealed that Dilfer had tried to negotiate private plane travel during contract discussions, arguing that Kirk Herbstreit had one. The issue was that Herbstreit needed private travel because ESPN’s schedule sometimes required him to be in multiple cities on the same day. Dilfer apparently just wanted the perk.
He also explored options with Fox Sports but couldn’t secure an offer before returning to ESPN, where he reportedly clashed with NFL producer Seth Markman ahead of his eventual layoff.
“I got involved in a contract negotiation that I should not have done, which made things weird with my bosses,” Dilfer admitted on a podcast in 2023.
None of that mattered to UAB, which was betting that Dilfer’s name would change the program’s trajectory. Bill Clark had already done that. Clark posted six straight winning seasons after UAB reinstated football in 2017, building the Blazers into a consistent winner. Dilfer took over and immediately went 4-8. The next season brought a 3-9 record. This year started 2-1 before the Blazers lost three straight.
The fanbase gave up on Dilfer long before the school did.
Protective Stadium sat mostly empty during home games. This season’s opener against Alabama State drew more visiting fans than UAB supporters, a particularly damning image for a program trying to establish itself in Birmingham, where Alabama’s shadow looms over everything. The school literally shut down its football program in 2014, partly because of political pressure from Alabama boosters, making Dilfer’s comment after a loss to Navy last season hit differently than he probably intended.
“It’s not like this is freakin’ Alabama,” Dilfer told reporters after bringing his young grandson to the postgame press conference. When a reporter asked him to clarify the remark at a subsequent press conference, Dilfer refused, saying the reporter hadn’t been at the Navy game.
The on-field product matched the empty seats.
Last October, Tulane beat UAB 71-20 in a game that produced the defining image of Dilfer’s tenure. ESPN+ aired a prerecorded sideline interview where Dilfer discussed how his team would bounce back while Tulane was actively scoring another touchdown. The postgame press conference was equally bleak, with Dilfer putting his head in his hands and calling the performance “embarrassing” and “humiliating” when asked about calling late timeouts in a blowout.
Dilfer had blown up on the sideline before. During a September 2023 loss to Tulane, cameras caught him screaming at an assistant coach. ESPN’s Marcus Spears, a former colleague, tweeted: “Trent need a good ass whoopin.” Videos from Dilfer’s time at Lipscomb Academy showed similar meltdowns coaching high school.
Athletic director Mark Ingram stuck with Dilfer after last season’s 3-9 record, saying he believed in Dilfer’s “football IQ, commitment to UAB, passion for the game, love for student athletes, and relentless work ethic.” That confidence looked misplaced when UAB’s 2025 recruiting class ranked 136th nationally, last in The American, and behind programs like Akron, Kent State, and the Naval Academy.
Six games into this season, Ingram changed his mind.
And now UAB will owe Dilfer a $2.4 million buyout, according to On3.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.