Trent Dilfer is back coaching high school football in Tennessee. The 54-year-old head coach returned to Lipscomb Academy after a failed stint at UAB.
He faces an uphill battle.
The Mustangs currently compete on a different level of high school football competition than in his first four seasons with the program. They did not look very good in their first spring scrimmage on Thursday.
Trent Dilfer is back coaching high school football.
Dilfer got his first opportunity as a head coach in 2019 after a long run as “head coach” of the Elite 11 quarterback competition. The former No. 6 overall NFL Draft pick and Super Bowl champion got paid a good chunk of money to take over at Lipscomb in Nashville. He also received a number of facility upgrades. The school installed a new turf field and built a brand-new practice facility and weight room.
His four-year run with the Mustangs was an overwhelming success. Lipscomb was the best Division II-AA team in the state by a large margin. It went on a 21-game winning streak in 2021 and 2022 and won back-to-back state championships. It also finished as the runner-up in 2020.
The successful run at Lipscomb somehow got Trent Dilfer hired at UAB in December of 2022. Everybody knew it was going to be a disaster. It was a disaster. The head coach was caught flexing his Super Bowl ring to a cheerleader during his very first appearance with the Blazers. Things only got worse from there.
Dilfer finished with a horrendous record of 9-21 over two and a half seasons at UAB. Recruiting got worse and worse every offseason. Jon Sumrall publicly mocked him for being a hypocrite. Fans stopped showing up to games.
To make matters worse, the Blazers pulled a major upset in their first game after Dilfer was fired. He also refused to take accountability for the horrendous tenure in Birmingham after he got fired and tried to say that he didn’t really want the job anyway.
UAB fired Dilfer on October 12, 2025. Lipscomb Academy re-hired Trent Dilfer on January 8, 2026.
Can Lipscomb Academy find the same success?
Love him or hate him, Trent Dilfer is a great high school football coach. He was always doomed to fail at UAB but he proved his worth with two state championships in four years with the Mustangs.
And it is the perfect match. Lipscomb is a private, Christian school and Dilfer plays a great false prophet. The Hugh Freeze role, if you will. He looks every bit the part.
However, the Mustangs moved up in class to Division II-AAA in the year after Dilfer left for college. They went 5-6 in 2023, 4-6 in 2024 and 3-8 in 2025 against better competition. The schedule is much harder. Opponents are much bigger and their rosters are much deeper.
This isn’t to say that Dilfer cannot turn Lipscomb into a legitimate powerhouse program, again, but he faces a greater challenge. It is going to be harder to win games on the D2-AAA level than D2-AA.
The Mustangs scrimmaged against the 6A reigning champions on Thursday night. They did not look like a team that is poised for success. Especially on defense. They could not stop the run.
They completely fell apart in the red zone.
The offense was not much better. Lipscomb did not show a lot of life on either side of the ball.
Now, to be fair, this is not the same roster that will be in place come August. It is my understanding that Dilfer is going to bring in ~30 new players from other schools after the spring semester wraps up next month. That includes a few local guys from local like Pearl Cohn and Murfreesboro, and even some out-of-state transfers from as far away as Los Angeles. There will be multiple new quarterbacks.
Will it be enough? I’m not so sure. Trent Dilfer is a great high school football coach. He faces an uphill battle in his return to Lipscomb Academy.