Trent Dilfer will go down as one of the worst coaches in college football history after a disastrous tenure at UAB. He now claims he didn’t even want the job!
And to make matters worse, the 53-year-old still refuses to take any accountability for his failures.
Dilfer blames the college football players for his inability to succeed as a head coach. However, the players are a direct reflection of the head coach.
Trent Dilfer was never going to succeed at UAB.
The decision to hire Trent Dilfer was always doomed to fail. It was never going to work.
First and foremost, UAB decided not to hire Bryant Vincent after he led the Blazers to a 7-6 record and Bahamas Bowl victory as the interim head coach in 2022. He kept his roster together to lead a team that was in disarray to a winning season and its third bowl win in program history. That is a successful season.
Players rallied around their interim head coach. They lobbied hard for him to get the full-time job and even penned a letter to administration asking them to remove the interim title.
UAB went with Dilfer instead. The former top-10 NFL Draft pick and Super Bowl champion had never coached football above the high school level at that point.
Dilfer was the head coach at Lipscomb Academy in Nashville. He won back-to-back state championships with the Mustangs— but there was a caveat to his success. Lipscomb is a private school, so it can recruit players. Most other teams in its division do not have that advantage and the division itself was already inferior to begin with.
Just to put things in perspective, the Mustangs hired a Pro Football Hall of Famer to replace Dilfer. Lipscomb moved up to a harder division and had just one win that next season.
All of this goes to say that most people knew Dilfer would not be a very good college football coach… except for the people that hired him.
He didn’t even want the job!
Sure enough, the Trent Dilfer era at the University of Alabama at Birmingham went as poorly as expected. He went 9-21 in two and a half seasons before he was fired. He never won a road game or two games in a row.
Dilfer’s time with the Blazers will be remembered for vicious sideline tirades, public threats for hypocritical behavior, a weirdly handsy exchange with Jon Sumrall, horrible recruiting classes, embarrassingly small crowds, lots of excuses, photos on the sideline just moments before kickoff, and a lot of losing. Any time it looked like things were at least headed in the right direction, another epic failure would stop all of he forward momentum in its tracks. Rinse, repeat.
Now that Dilfer is back at Lipscomb Academy after being fired by UAB, he told Jonathan Hutton and Chad Withrow he didn’t even want to be there in the first place. It was just too much pressure to say no.
Head Coach @LAmustangFB, @DilfersDimes shares the pressure he felt on behalf of high school coaches across the country to take the UAB job.
— OutKick Hot Mic (@OutKickHotMic) February 28, 2026
So many outstanding high school coaches never get the opportunity to move up to the next level, and Dilfer felt like he had to take a swing… pic.twitter.com/6VRN4yxdqz
Mind you, this is a guy who got paid more than $1.2 million per year to win ~42% of his games. Not a bad gig if you can get it.
The blame game continues.
If there is one thing about Trent Dilfer, it is that he refuses to take any accountability. He is never responsible for his own failures. There is always something or someone else to blame.
Dilfer took over a UAB program that had some real juice and ran it into the ground in grand fashion. His tenure will go down as one of the worst of all-time. That is not hyperbole. There is not even one positive thing to say!
Most people who got fired after a 9-21 record would be willing to reflect on their shortcomings and learn from the mistakes. Dilfer takes the opposite approach.
He does not blame himself for the Blazers’ inability to win. First, he blamed the university for not caring enough about winning. He also blames the lack of talent on the roster— which he was tasked with recruiting as the head coach.
It was not a trait thing. It was a “competitive temperament” thing.
Dilfer said that when the going got tough, his players quit on him. His players did not rise to the occasion. They shrunk. They lacked discipline.
.@DilfersDimes on the reality of the transfer portal 😳
— OutKick Hot Mic (@OutKickHotMic) February 27, 2026
"When you go to the portal for leftovers, that's what you get." pic.twitter.com/5ENVaxFNUM
What Dilfer seems to forget is that a head coach is responsible for his players. It is the head coach’s job to teach the players how to handle hard. It is the head coach’s job to teach discipline.
If the players fail at any or all of those things, that reflects right back on the head coach— Dilfer.