BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Trent Dilfer turns around behind his desk and pulls out a green troll-like monster mask that covers the top half of his face. He wants to know: Does this look scary?
The UAB football staff has held a scare contest throughout spring camp. The goal is to sneak up on fellow staffers and spook them — preferably on camera for proof. There’s a bonus point for using a prop or for a multi-person scare. The winner gets a steak dinner. At the moment, quarterbacks coach Nick Coleman leads, in part because he uses an air horn, which seems kind of unfair.
Advertisement
Nevertheless, it’s midday, and Dilfer realizes that creating a fright in the daylight is difficult; it’ll be easier at night. In the corner of the room, next to a full-length window overlooking the practice field, Dilfer’s dog Nala yawns in her bed. Nala, the 4-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback mix found by Dilfer’s daughter as a puppy in Louisville, Ky., is here every day. The first question the coach asks anyone before they enter the office is whether they’re good with dogs.
This is the fun time of year for a new staff. It’s busy, undoubtedly, as coaches install systems and get to know their players, but, for at least a few more months, they’re undefeated.
Dilfer, 51, was by far the most surprising hire of the coaching carousel — he has never coached a college game. Outside of Deion Sanders at Colorado, he was the most high-profile name, too.
But Dilfer’s no coaching novice: He’s a 14-year NFL veteran and Super Bowl champion who coached the prestigious Elite 11 quarterback camp for more than a decade and went 44-10 at Nashville, Tenn., private school Lipscomb Academy with two state championships in four years.
He has always been brash, unfiltered and confident. He tells you what he thinks and knows from his decade as an ESPN analyst how it’ll be perceived. He talks a big game, but he usually backs it up.
“We ran a college program in Nashville,” Dilfer says. “We had academic services, we had nutrition, we had state-of-the-art strength and conditioning, we had team-building, I dealt with parents.”
On paper, his career path is more similar to Sanders’ than a typical high school coach’s, but he has arrived at a UAB program that went from extinction to two-time Conference USA champion under Bill Clark and moves to the American Athletic Conference on July 1. This is a monumental moment for UAB football, a program that has the resources — including a new stadium and state-of-the-art football facility — to win in the AAC, and a first-time college coach has been tasked with steering it. Will it work?
Advertisement
“I love things that are super hard,” Dilfer says. “Those are my two core values: Do hard things and be uncomfortable.”
When Dilfer’s playing career ended in 2008, he quickly moved into broadcasting as a prominent ESPN NFL analyst. He was part of the company’s mass layoffs in 2017, one year after signing a new contract, giving him a cushy buyout. He lived in a giant house in Austin, Texas, and continued to coach the Elite 11 QB camp for the nation’s top high school prospects. He golfed 218 times in 2018.
Dilfer didn’t know what to do with his life. He and wife Cassandra planned to get a tour bus and drive around the country to watch their daughters play college volleyball, visit their football friends and make a beef jerky blog. His daughters said he’d gotten soft.
Then a friend called about the opportunity at Lipscomb Academy. It was too perfect. One Dilfer daughter was transferring from TCU to Louisville for volleyball, and another was set to play next door at Lipscomb University, which operates the prep school. He didn’t have to do it, but he needed to challenge himself again.
“I took a 1,000 percent pay cut to go to Lipscomb,” Dilfer says. “I was working 38 minutes a week in Austin and making over $1 million, to working 18 hours a day for 300 days a year.”
Dilfer went 25-1 in his last two years at Lipscomb with two state titles. The private school’s resources and talent certainly helped, but Dilfer took over a 1-10 team, went 7-6 in his first year and turned it into the top-ranked team in the state. (The program, now coached by another former NFL player in Kevin Mawae, will move up in class to the state’s Division II-AAA level this fall).
As surprising as his hiring at UAB was, Dilfer didn’t come into the search at the last minute. Clark’s resignation in June 2022 due to back issues was not unexpected by school officials. Athletic director Mark Ingram began talking to potential coaches, including Dilfer after a local businessman recommended Ingram give him a ring, in July. A planned 10-minute call lasted more than an hour. When UAB traveled to play Western Kentucky in October, Ingram visited with Dilfer in Nashville on the drive up.
Advertisement
Dilfer’s name popped up for the head job at his alma mater Fresno State last year, and he’d talked with some other schools about jobs. For UAB,
names like Justin Fuente and Skip Holtz were in the mix, and some other big swings didn’t land. But Dilfer was always in play, and he landed the job a few days before Lipscomb won a second state title.
𝐖𝐄𝐋𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐄 𝐂𝐎𝐀𝐂𝐇 𝐃𝐈𝐋𝐅𝐄𝐑‼️
Trent Dilfer has officially been named the seventh head coach in program history.
🔗: https://t.co/Y2BZ8LcOyw#WinAsOne | @DilfersDimes pic.twitter.com/xZBOJ6spaX
— UAB Football (@UAB_FB) November 30, 2022
“There’s risk in everybody that you hire … but there was an upside potential with him that was different than anybody else,” Ingram says. “He’s never coached in college, but he has coached and he has been a head coach, and there’s no questioning his football knowledge.”
Dilfer loves Birmingham, saying it reminds him of Nashville before the latter got “a little Hollywood-ish.” Above his office door is a sketch of his son, Trevin, who died in 2003 at 5 years old from heart disease. It was never a question that Dilfer would continue the UAB Children’s Harbor Game, where players wear the names of young patients on their jerseys, supporting the local children’s hospital and Children’s Harbor.
The office also includes football memorabilia, like a replica Lombardi Trophy from his championship with the 2000 Baltimore Ravens. Dilfer, often referred to as the worst quarterback to win a Super Bowl, wasn’t re-signed by the team after that season, something he says he has never truly gotten over. The Ravens instead signed Elvis Grbac, who struggled and was cut after one season.
“The core value of that team was mental and physical toughness, and that’s who I am and that’s the opposite of who Elvis is,” Dilfer told ESPN in 2021. “They set their identity back light years by getting it wrong.”
Dilfer, who earned Pro Bowl honors with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1997, has always had a knack for understanding the intangible. He spent another seven years in the NFL after the Ravens let him go.
“I don’t know how to define this, but I’m constantly hyper-aware of the unmeasured, the things you can’t quantify but equal winning,” he says. “We’re in a world where everything is black or white, this way or that way, everything’s defined. I’m a both/and guy. I’m seeing where both can be right and how they mix for the best. When you’re one side or the other, you’re looking for good. I’m looking for the best.”
Advertisement
Dilfer, aware of his lack of recruiting experience, shaped his program around that. His $1.3 million annual salary is less than Clark’s, but he took $500,000 less in salary ($2.5 million over the length of the deal) to direct more to staff. He also turned the facility’s central conference room into the recruiting headquarters. He retained UAB alumnus Tristan Henderson as director of recruiting and beefed up the recruiting staff. Last year’s media guide listed just one full-time staffer dedicated to recruiting. UAB now has six.
The staff had limited time to complete its 2023 class, but the impact was obvious when UAB signed 6-foot-6 defensive end Daniel Harris after Dilfer’s arrival. Along with defensive lineman Emmanuel Waller, it marked the first time since 2010 that the Blazers signed two top-1,000 high school players in the 247Sports rankings. The improvement was also evident on this day as a four-star offensive line recruit stopped by for a visit.
“The last couple of years, we were behind on the volume of kids being seen,” Henderson says. “We did a great job in the region, signed kids from Georgia and Mississippi and junior college, but nowadays, these kids are getting offers much younger. So how can we match the volume? We had an influx of (staff) and now that volume is 10 times more outreach and multiple relationships with a player. This thing is way different now.”
Few people in football have a deeper Rolodex than Dilfer. It’s how he added 50-year coaching veteran Rip Scherer as a special adviser — Scherer coached Dilfer with the Cleveland Browns. Dilfer also consulted with Mack Brown and David Shaw on how to run a program, and with Chip Kelly and Jeff Tedford on recruiting advice. Dilfer’s recruiting experience came on the other side, as his Lipscomb players, Elite 11 quarterbacks and his own daughters went through the process.
“So often, recruiting is done through the staff’s eyes,” Dilfer says. “When you do it through the player’s eyes, you have a sensitivity to and a discernment to it. I think I understand what a kid’s looking for and what matters to them. … High school kids, you know if they’re going through the motions. I think it’s the best thing I’ve added to recruiting, I know if a kid doesn’t want to be here and who does.”
Around 4 p.m., Dilfer bursts into the recruiting room drenched in sweat. He just finished in the top 500 out of tens of thousands of people on a Peloton ride, and he’s fired up as he shows off his score and debates telling ESPN analysts Booger McFarland and Dan Orlovsky, who also use the workout bikes. Dilfer prefers the trainers who are hard on the riders. That’s what motivates him, he says. Sometimes that comes out in his coaching. In 2019, Dilfer issued an apology after a video of him pushing back and yelling at a Lipscomb player on the sideline went viral.
Dilfer emphasizes what he calls “corporate accountability.” Two months ago, he selected 24 players to draft the rest of the team into 12 “platoons.” If a player makes an off-field mistake like missing an academic session, the platoon spins a wheel of punishment, which includes discipline “accountabilities” ranging from a sled push to picking up Nala’s poop. Conversely, platoons can earn “grace tokens” for service projects or acts of kindness to avoid a platoon punishment. Last week, one platoon had nine spins, seven due to one player. It’s on that platoon to get the player in line.
Advertisement
“It just sorts out some stuff,” Dilfer says. “It’s not hazing. (The platoon leader) will probably just meet with the player and say, ‘You’re not going to get through spring and be on the team.’ … At Lipscomb, it was mind-boggling. Week 1 last year, we had like 130 spins. The state championship week, we had zero.”
As players begin to filter in around 4:30 p.m. for meetings, they each grab a food box that includes chicken fingers and macaroni. After getting the job, Dilfer fundraised to improve how UAB feeds the team.
“In the past, it was snacks; now it’s real meals, real calories,” says director of sports performance Lyle Henley.
In the offensive meeting room at 5:30 p.m., the Blazers go over the installation of tempo and signals. At Lipscomb, Dilfer was known to install nine new schemes on a Monday for a Friday game — the Mustangs used 19 personnel groupings in the 2022 state championship game. Here, he lets offensive coordinator Alex Mortensen run the show. Dilfer sits in the back of the room, raising his hand a few times to ask clarifying or hypothetical questions, meant to further inform the players. When the meeting wraps, Dilfer turns and says, “He’s so good, isn’t he?”
Mortensen is the son of longtime ESPN NFL reporter Chris Mortensen. A former quarterback at Arkansas and Samford, he moved up the coaching ranks over the last decade, from New Mexico Highlands to nine seasons at Alabama as a graduate assistant and analyst, where he worked alongside Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones and Bryce Young. Dilfer got to know the younger Mortensen because those quarterbacks came through Elite 11 as recruits. He has only spent two years as a position coach, but he passed on similar coordinator jobs before taking this one at UAB.
“It was going to take something compelling to leave, but I really like Coach Dilfer a lot,” Mortensen says. “It’s exciting to work for him and the way he looks at football.”
It’s a young and somewhat inexperienced staff. Of the 10 full-time assistants, only three have previously worked as an FBS position coach. Many came from analyst-type roles at places like Georgia, Ohio State and South Carolina. Dilfer also hired former Purdue and Florida quarterback Austin Appleby, 29, from Missouri State as wide receivers coach. UAB has the youngest director of operations in the FBS in Cole Peterson, 24, who came from Indiana.
Dilfer calls defensive coordinator Sione Ta’ufo’ou, 40, who followed him from Lipscomb, one of the best coaches he’s ever seen, period. Dilfer’s lack of FBS coaching experience on staff puzzled some industry agents, but he believes the staff is full of rising stars, and he coaches like it.
As practice begins at 6:15 p.m., Dilfer is almost completely hands-off. He walks around and watches, mostly the offense as it works on tempo. He pulls a player to the side to say something or brings the offense together to emphasize the meaning of a scheme, but he lets his coaches coach. Dilfer notices one player, who was recently cleared from concussion protocol, moving awkwardly. He asks the player to change out of his pads, promising this won’t impact his spot on the depth chart. Dilfer suffered several concussions as a player and says he’s extra careful with that injury.
Dilfer calls the format of this practice “Fast for Five.” The offense runs fast team work for five minutes, then pauses and moves into slower individual work, before coming back together for another fast session, back and forth. Dilfer says it models a game, with players on the field for a few minutes before instruction on the sideline. It worked at Lipscomb. Time will tell whether it works here.
Several times throughout practice, Dilfer leans over and puts his hands on his knees. He has a torn rotator cuff and a torn labrum, along with one replaced knee and another he suspects needs to be replaced. Football has taken its toll. So has all that golf. Being hands-off in practice means he watches more film than ever before.
This UAB team lost the nation’s leading rusher in DeWayne McBride and all five offensive line starters from last year’s squad. But Dilfer likes several pieces, including former Baylor transfer Jacob Zeno, who is expected to be the starting quarterback. Dilfer says defensive lineman Fish McWilliams has All-American skill and that this team has potentially nine all-conference players.
“I feel like I’m in the best situation in the country because my coach is a quarterback and he’s won at the highest level,” Zeno says. “This is my fifth or sixth offense in five years, so I’m used to learning fast.”
Dilfer has a plan. It just hasn’t been used at this level before. There are skeptics outside, but Dilfer is plenty used to doubters by this point.
The transition will take time. The move from Conference USA to the AAC is evident everywhere, as every staff member has the AAC logo on their shirt. Dilfer’s first schedule includes road games against national champion Georgia, Cotton Bowl champion Tulane and C-USA champion UTSA, plus trips to Georgia Southern and Navy. The staff understands it’s a tall order. Dilfer says he welcomes the gauntlet.
After practice, it’s dark now. Players head back to the locker room and take off their shoulder pads and helmets. Coaches shower and stop by the office before heading home. Down the hall, there’s a yell, followed by an excited cheer.
Dilfer runs into the recruiting room and pulls out his phone. It’s a video of him sneaking up on a staffer at his computer and scaring him. The staffer hangs his head in shame when he realizes what happened.
It is a lot easier to scare in the dark. Dilfer was right about that.
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photo: Courtesy of UAB Athletics)
