Trent Dilfer is still blaming everybody but Trent Dilfer

Trent Dilfer went 9-21 at UAB, got fired a year ago and has spent the time since telling anyone who will listen that the school was the problem. This week he was back at it. Philip Rivers might take the NC State job, and reporters wanted to know what the last famous guy who skipped the coaching ladder learned from trying it. Dilfer was happy to share.

"It was frustrating more than hard," Dilfer told USA TODAY Sports last week. "It was frustrating to know what a good team looks like, and to see what a good team costs, and know you couldn't do it."

He told OutKick in January that he "got truly broken by college football." He said Lipscomb Academy, the Nashville high school where he's coaching again, is invested in a way UAB was not. "I cannot say that about the last place I was at," he said.

He told USA TODAY he didn't fail at the Xs and Os. Didn't fail at recruiting. The one thing he failed at, he said, was "rallying the base."

"I just couldn't get the UAB base rallied."

I covered Dilfer's tenure up close. I worked with him on NIL collective initiatives through Magic City Impact. This isn't personal. He just never figured out when to stop talking, and after enough losses the fan base stopped hearing explanations and started hearing excuses.

Not everything Dilfer has said about UAB is wrong. Some of it is fair. The NIL landscape is brutal for Group of 6 programs. Dilfer said he had $1 million for the entire team while the defense he wanted to run would cost $2 million. That math is real. He said 14 players he recruited and developed left for Ole Miss, Arkansas, Alabama and everywhere else. That happens at every G6 school in the country.

The university's commitment to athletics has been inconsistent for decades. Those challenges existed before Dilfer arrived, even as they changed in the portal/NIL era. People won anyway. At various times, coaches such as Jim Hilyer, Watson Brown, Gene Bartow, Mike Anderson and as recently as this week, UAB men's basketball coach Andy Kennedy, have spoken out about those challenges. But unlike Dilfer, they've never hidden behind them as a reason for losing.

Jim Hilyer built UAB football from nothing. There was no program, no tradition, no infrastructure. He built it. Watson Brown coached with less than Dilfer had and kept the program competitive. Bill Clark took a program that had been shut down by its own university and turned it into a winner. Clark went 49-26 with three consecutive division titles, two Conference USA championships and a bowl invitation every season from 2017 through 2021. His 2018 team won the program's first conference championship. His 2021 team beat No. 13 BYU in the Independence Bowl.

Clark did all of that starting in Legion Field, without a massive NIL war chest, before the transfer portal turned roster management into free agency, at a school where the Board of Trustees had tried to bury the program three years earlier.

Gene Bartow took UAB basketball to the Elite Eight. Mike Anderson took UAB to the Sweet 16. Andy Kennedy has won 20-plus games every year as UAB coach and has two conference titles. Every one of them dealt with the same institutional headwinds Dilfer complains about — the budget, the board, the Birmingham market dynamics, the shadow of the university 50 miles down I-59.

They won anyway.

Alex Mortensen is in his first year as UAB's head coach. He's 4-3. He was Dilfer's offensive coordinator — the guy who was in the building for all of it, who saw the limitations up close. Mortensen doesn't do interviews about how UAB broke him. He doesn't tell podcasts that the people around him didn't care about winning. He talks about winning with what UAB has. He coaches the next game.

Dilfer went 4-8 his first year. The worst season at UAB in a decade. He went 3-9 the next year. Then 2-4 before the university finally ended it. His team lost 71-20 to Tulane — a score that had never happened before in a college football game. They lost 32-6 to Louisiana-Monroe, a team coached by Bryant Vincent, the man UAB's own players had campaigned to keep as head coach before the university hired Dilfer instead. They lost 44-10 to Army.

In the middle of that 2024 season, after a 41-18 loss to Navy dropped his team to 1-3, a reporter asked Dilfer about his postgame comment — "It's not like this is freaking Alabama" — and whether he understood how UAB fans might take that.

Dilfer's response: "Were you there?"

The reporter said he wasn't.

"There were two people there," Dilfer said. His grandson wanted to come up to the podium. He said there were only two media members in the room, so what was the big deal.

A reporter then asked the follow-up: "But you are aware of this program's history?"

"I am very aware of this program's history," Dilfer said.

A coach who understood what UAB's fan base went through — the shutdown, the years of fighting their own administration — would never have said those words into a microphone. You don't get to dismiss the setting when you're the one who emptied it.

The fan base didn't abandon Dilfer unprovoked. They showed up. They gave it time. Then they watched him go 4-8, 3-9 and 2-4 while he used a UAB podcast to recruit for Louisville's volleyball team — where his daughter played — and told the AD Louisville was "pulling from different buckets." He called his tenure a "rebuild." He inherited six consecutive winning seasons, a $175 million stadium, a bowl-winning interim coach and a fan base that had raised more than $40 million to save the program.

He's back at Lipscomb Academy now. He's 6-3 against high school competition and telling national reporters that college football broke him and UAB didn't care about winning.

The football culture Dilfer left behind was so rotten that last year's South Florida game almost didn't happen. A UAB player attempted to stab teammates during a team meeting at the football operations center on the morning of the game. That's where the DiLLLfer Error ended — not just with losses but with a program that had come apart at a level deeper than the scoreboard.

Mortensen inherited that. He hasn't taken a single public shot at the man who left the program in that condition. He just went to work.

UAB players are routinely using the hashtag #NewBlazers. They chant it in locker room celebrations. They put it on social media posts. Running back Bam McReynolds said he coined the phrase during a spring practice.

"I think I just said it just to say, like, this was a new team," McReynolds said. "Not only this is a new team, but I felt like this was gonna be a very high energy team, and I feel like we've brought that in a lot of the games that we found success in."

They have made it a point of pride to change the culture, even though half the roster is new and the other half stayed through the worst of it. McReynolds said the phrase gave a locker room full of transfers and holdovers something to hold onto.

"It gives us a sense of camaraderie," he said. "We got a lot of guys that this is their first year here, a lot of transfers, mixed in with a bunch of guys that they've been here. They've seen the ups and downs of the team."

The players who stayed saw the bottom. The players who came chose to be here anyway. They've made changing the culture their own project — not because the coaching staff demanded it but because they decided it mattered.

"It's amazing just to have guys buy into the things that we wanna accomplish this season," McReynolds said.

Mortensen has put his own stamp on this program. His players don't make excuses. They hold each other accountable. That starts at the top.

UAB plays South Florida on Saturday. The Blazers and Bulls have met three times since UAB joined the American. The first, on October 7, 2023, was a 56-35 UAB win in Birmingham — probably the high point of the DiLLLfer Error. South Florida won in Tampa in 2024. By the time the two teams played again last year, a 48-18 Bulls win in Birmingham, Dilfer was gone and UAB was in freefall. The program that walks into Raymond James Stadium this week is a different team. Mortensen's team.

Dilfer could learn something from that.