UAB Travels to Tampa for Contest Against South Florida – UAB Athletics

BIRMINGHAM – The UAB football team looks for its first AAC win of the season this Saturday against South Florida. Kickoff from Raymond James Stadium in Tampa is set for 3:30 p.m. ET/2:30 p.m. CT on ESPN+.
 
THREE THINGS TO KNOW:

• One team on Saturday will end its losing streak as UAB enters the game with five straight losses and USF with three straight. The Blazers are 1-5 overall and 0-3 in the AAC, while the Bulls are 2-4 overall and 0-2 in league play.
  
   
• The Blazers have played one of the toughest schedules in the country through six games. UAB’s first six opponents are a combined 28-8 overall and its five FBS opponents have an overall record of 24-5. UAB has faced two of the 11 remaining undefeated teams (Army and Navy) while have also lost to ULM (5-1), Arkansas (4-2) and Tulane (4-2). UAB’s remaining six opponents currently have a combined record of 18-18.
  
   
• Redshirt freshman Kam Shanks set career highs in catches (9) and yards (119) at Army last week. It was his first career 100-yard receiving game and he continues to lead the team in catches (30) and yards (297). Amare Thomas was also productive at Army with seven catches for 53 yards and a touchdown. He now has 79 career receptions through 18 games and needs 14 more catches to crack UAB’s career top 10 for receptions.

 
HEAD COACH TRENT DILFER:
 
Opening Statement: 
 
“Well, I don’t know, again, if there’s a whole lot to say. Another incredibly disappointing game. A game that did not reflect our week of preparation against a very good opponent, but that doesn’t matter. We did not play good football in any of the three phases. I’m disappointed, I feel like I’ve let down a lot of people. It’s my job to get us playing better football and I have not done that to my expectation and my mindset is to change some ways I do things to hopefully get a better response from our building.”
 
On the difficulty of changing ways of doing things: 
 
“Change is always difficult, but I’m open. This is a term that I think is a little esoteric and people cringe at to some point and I agree but it’s true. I have a growth mindset. I did not come in here thinking that I had all the answers. I think I have learned from really good people. I have tried to be a good listener and learner. I applied some things that others had told me were the right things to apply. They’ve proven not to be the best way of doing things and that is my fault. I have some core beliefs that I think need to adjust, not change, but adjust. I think we’re also all learning that the modern day dynamics of college football and what motivates a player and a coach, I think you can’t be an old curmudgeon and say, “well, this is the way it should be, so everybody needs to do it this way.” I think you have to be, “well, here’s the reality, and here’s how you try to get the most out of your people.”
 
On the biggest thing he wants to change ahead of this week: 
 
“I think some of that stuff is internal. People wouldn’t understand if I tried to explain it just because it’s affecting so many things. It’s not as easy as saying, “oh, we’re going to go from morning to afternoon.” Or, “hold them more accountable.” We always hold them accountable, it’s one of the foundational principles. I think the biggest disconnect that I have seen, I have never been around in my history in football, something that is so different from the practice field to the game. As I said last week, I have been part of bad teams, and you know you’re bad, and you practice bad, then you go play bad. I’ve seen that, been a part of it. I’ve been part of teams where you just know you’re better and you practice at a really high level and you go out and you play just like how you practiced. This is the first place I’ve been around where we practice at a very high level and then don’t come close to playing anywhere near that. So I am asking myself, “are we practicing the right way?” It’s things like that. Are our drills transferable? Are our practice sessions transferable? Is the messaging transferable? Obviously, no, right, because we are not getting the results that we want and we are not putting our players in a position to where they can do what they can do in practice on the field on Saturdays. So I think that’s the easiest way to explain it is taking the time you’re with the players, the four hours a day you are with the players, and saying, “okay, how do you reshape that so it’s more transferable to the game so when they get to the game it almost feels easier than practice.” Because something is happening where it’s harder, like basic things that we do not see happen in practice, are happening in games. I don’t blame the player a lot of times because as I told them, as I’ve told people before, I’ve never met a player that wakes up in the morning, and says, “you know what? Today, I’m not going to purposely do that, what I was taught to do. Today, I’m going to choose to miss a tackle. Today, I’m going to choose to miss a blocking assignment. Today, I’m going to choose to drop a football. Today, I’m going to choose to make the wrong read. I don’t believe players do that. So if they’re making those mistakes but they’re not making them in practice, then it’s my job to make sure we change how we practice. It’s not even just practice, prepare. It’s four hours of preparation a day, it’s two hours out there. That’s probably the easiest way of saying it.”
 
On talking to the coordinators about change: 
 
“I think, you know this coaching dynamic is interesting in college football. You hire people that you believe have the same values as you and I believe both my coordinators do and they are both problem solvers. That’s one of the things I look for. They have actively worked on problem solving. They’re frustrated, too, because they feel as if they keep trying to address the problems, trying to make the corrections, doing what they have in their tool belt to fix what is plaguing us. I think they’re like I am, like, “okay, help me grow and find better ways to do it because obviously our ways are not working.” So I think we’re all in this kind of growth mindset of we’re willing to change any way we need to change to help our players be more successful on Saturday and that’s really what this comes down to is taking all agendas aside, like, our job, as I’ve defined in this building, is to help them reach their potential on and off the football field. We’re seeing growth off the field, but we’re not seeing that growth on the field. So therefore we need to change our ways of how to try to pull that out of them on game day so they, as Coach Saban said, I think he said it brilliantly, it was, “create value for themselves.” They have to understand we want them to create value for themselves. Not just this NIL value but value as players, value as people, value as learning lessons that will help carry them into their future lives, whether that be football or something else. So it’s on us to make sure we’re doing the right things to get them to play their best.”
 
On talking to people in his football life about changing the way you practice: 
 
“I’m wrestling with a couple of things. You know, the health of your team is always something you have to be concerned with, too. Some of this is how physical can you be in the middle of the season…let’s take tackling. You can’t tackle in practice. You can’t expose you running backs, your wide receivers to full tackling during the week. So what kind of drills do you use to learn better tackling? We call it ‘thud.’ Are you familiar with ‘thud?’ So ‘thud’ is, we’re going to come up, and we’re going to be in a great form to tackle, but we’re not going to tackle you, we’re going to ‘thud’ off. Well, how do you ‘thud’ better? I think one thing with tackling is that I’ve never seen a bad athlete that was a good tackler. A lot of tackling is an athletic index. So how do we help them get more flexible? How do we help them get stronger? How do we increase their athleticism in season? You know, Lyle (Hensley) does an incredible job and one thing we did last year and it’s showing up this year, too, is we actually get faster as the season goes on. We’re one of the few teams that the GPS numbers get better during the season. So we’re doing that from a speed aspect but it’s not translating into some of the things speed and athleticism should be able to produce. So obviously we’re racking our brains on that. I’m looking through data, I’m talking to Coach, I’m literally trying to turn over every stone there is to try to fix this. But in terms of our practice profile, there’s only so many things you can do without exposing your players to injuries that you wouldn’t want to have happen during the week.” 
 
On missed opportunities at the start of the game to set the tone: 
 
“The thing that hurts my soul as much as anything is, you know, one of our core values is “Life Bringing Energy,” and I think that has been lost, and that is my fault. Any time your core values, they’re not signs, they’re not t-shirts, they’re not things you say in press conferences, although, many times that’s what a lot of coaches do. They should be your ‘fabric,’ you know, you should be weaved with the core values of your program. We’ve done a good job on a couple of them but I think that is one we have absolutely whiffed on. The final ‘E’ in our RARE² is “Life Bringing Energy,” like, regardless of circumstance, regardless of situation, you need to bring life to others, and we literally suck the life out of others. Body language is terrible, audio is terrible, everything you’re looking for that good football teams have, something bad happens to us, and it’s like you got kicked in the groin 30 times and I am searching for how to change that. It’s not who I am, you know, I am passionate to a fault sometimes, but I find myself on the sideline…I’ll give you an interesting example. We, on the plane, we have the iPads, and it gives you four views of a play: it gives you the wide, it gives you the tight, it gives you a hybrid, and it gives you the TV copy. So I’m sitting there on the plane, and I’m watching, okay, here’s this, I’m grading the film, offense, defense, and then about six times during the game, the TV showed me. Now I can’t hear what they’re talking about, it’s no audio on the iPad. So they just show me randomly, that’s the TV copy. The cameras did a, “hey, let’s do a jib shot on Dilfer.” And I watched myself and I’m like, “that’s not me.” I’m sitting there and I look academic. Trust me, I’m not really academic, you know. Where’s my passion? Where’s my enthusiasm? Where’s my fight? Now, internally, I’m doing that. And there’s times that I’m trying to do that, but I own the fact that I haven’t been the best version of me on the sideline from an energy standpoint either. That’s just another self growth that I need to look at and say, “well, maybe they’re feeding off my lack of passion, my lack of intensity. Now I don’t just want to be the guy that runs around and jumps up and down and high fives just so the camera sees them do it. That’s not the intent. But if they need more of that from me, then I need to be that for them. So, another thing I’m looking at to try to hopefully inspire our group to have more passion on the sidelines because that’s really what it is, like I feel it, I see it. Football has so many ebbs and flows, when you’re good, when you’re bad, when you’re indifferent. The game is just a roller coaster, and you can’t let that suck the life… your energy has to be independent of the circumstance if you ever think you’re going to turn the corner and I think that’s a message that our players not just need to hear, they need to see and maybe they need to see it more from me.”
 
Coach Dilfer on the future of recruiting and the strength of the American Conference: 
 
“This cannot come off as an excuse. Our job is to win, regardless of the opponent. Whether it’s Arkansas, whoever, but our conference is very difficult. I don’t think anybody understood, myself included, was the jump this program was about to make, and I think we need to own that. The level of coaching, resources, players, is exponentially better than other G5 conferences. So I think that has been eye opening. The person that said it in the building before anybody else was (Alex Mortensen), you know, who just came from Alabama, but he understood that the gap wasn’t as big as everyone thought it was. And he warned us. And we listened, it’s not like we came into this thing thinking, “oh, we’re going to run it…” that was never the approach. We are very realistic of what a rebuild looks like, but it has been eye opening how good some of these teams are and how well coached they are. That’s one, that’s the conference answer. How do I feel about recruiting? I feel like we are in a tough situation recruiting. I think it’s very hard to compete in an NIL landscape where others have millions of dollars. So that’s going to be one issue is “can you compete at that level?” And I’m not really… that’s uncomfortable for me to talk about and I don’t know what our future is there, and I’ve been grateful for the little that we’ve had to this point. But we may be in a position where we are recruiting the majority of high school players and playing young players on a consistent basis. When your record is what it is, kids want to be part of a winner, and I understand that. So I think the relationships again, and connecting with the kid and trying to get them to understand the vision, the core values, how they will be treated, the level of coaching and development they’ll get here, it has to be communicated constantly, and it’s very difficult to do while you’re reeling and trying to find the solutions on trying to turn the season around. It is a very delicate balance. It’s about as honest as I can get.”
 
Coach Dilfer on what stands out about South Florida and Coach Alex Golesh: 
 
“Well, they are wildly talented, Alex (Golesh) is a tremendous coach, tremendous, I think he will be a Power 4 coach very soon, his reputation is impeccable, he’s a great teacher, he’s a great leader, he’s hired good people, they’ve recruited their tails off, they’ve invested a lot in recruiting and it shows. So they’re very talented, they’re not playing their best football, they’ll be the first to say it, they’ve lost one of the best players in the conference, which is hard to move on from, so it’s definitely, watching them on tape, and again, you see some plays against Memphis and Tulane, both of those games could’ve been very different. They’re in position to make plays, they just didn’t make them so I’m sure that his messaging is, “hey, we’re there, we just have to make plays.” So it’s a lot like what we say week in and week out. I think it’s a great challenge but it’s two teams that aren’t playing very well going against each other and one of us has to find a way to play well.”
 
Coach Dilfer on Jalen Kitna being thrown into a tough situation: 
 
“Going back to what I was talking about myself, I do justify a little bit, my lack of, maybe call it, enthusiasm on the sideline because I was trying to teach so much through the moment, Jalen specifically, with, “hey, I’ve been in these moments, you have to learn how to play in these games, too. Not every game is going to be simple. These are hard games to play in when it’s a must pass game almost every down when defenses are giving you different looks and you worked in practice because we give practice looks and base in the even game, you know, and defenses change when they have big leads. So there’s a lot of education learning how to play in that type of game, a lot of teaching, a lot of understanding of what he was going through. You know one thing I always try to do is put myself in the quarterback’s shoes, like, “listen, I’ve lived this, I bet I know what you’re going through both mentally and what your eyes are seeing, tell me if I’m right on this.” But I will say this about Jalen, outside of the first interception, he played tremendously well. He gave us a chance to move the ball in a very difficult situation when he’s getting a softer shell coverage that’s harder to throw the ball downfield to. But he made some tremendous plays in that game and we didn’t support him enough to have it look better, so to speak, or be more productive.”
 

Coach Dilfer on the status of Isaiah Jacobs:

“Isaiah has had surgery, he had it Friday, and he will miss the rest of the season. It’s devastating because he’s, you know, our moral authority in our locker room, he’s our team captain, a very, very good player, but, you know, injuries are part of the game and he’s handled it tremendously well as I expected he will.”

Coach Dilfer on USF QB Byrum Brown:

“My understanding, and again, this is very hard in college football, I kind of appreciate what the SEC is doing with injury reports, but we don’t know, like we haven’t heard if he’s out for the year, we just know he’s hurt. So we’ll prepare for both.”

Coach Dilfer on preparing for a backup QB:

“The starter is, like I said, one of the best players in the conference. He has the ability to do everything, so you have to prepare for everything. Now, the backup (QB) is a talented kid, I’m not saying he’s not talented, (he) just hasn’t played as much. It would be like preparing for Jalen (Kitna), like, you watched the talent, and you’re like, “wow,” but he’s had two starts in four years. It’s a challenge to prepare for both guys.”

Coach Dilfer on returning to Tampa and the status of Raymond James Stadium after Hurricane Milton:

“I think, number one, I do think it’s our responsibility to make sure people in Tampa understand that the gravity of what they are going through is far greater than any football game. I think, hopefully, Raymond James (Stadium) will be some sort of escape for what’s going on. One of the first things I did as (Hurricane) Milton approached was reach out to Alex Golesh and just make sure he and his people were good and safe. I think he appreciated that. We have a lot of friends still in Tampa. We checked in with them. My wife has done a great job of just making sure she’s checking in on all of our folks there. I think when we land, it will be somber because of what we have gone through. I don’t expect, you know when Helene and Milton hit back to back, it’s not like it’s going to look pretty. I think that’s going to be the first thing. I’m not really nostalgic, you know. I remember going there for the Super Bowl, I had just played there for six years, and, you know, we landed, and everyone was worried… “how is Trent going to handle this?” To me, it was… I think the funniest thing was, I don’t know if I’ve ever told this story, it’s really funny actually. Ah, I don’t know if it’s appropriate. I’ll tell you off camera. I didn’t do anything wrong but how I was welcomed back was pretty funny. I’m somebody that gets very locked in on the next challenge. I don’t really have a great rear view mirror. If you use a car analogy, my rear view mirror wouldn’t even be hanging up there, it would be hanging and kind of by the dash and I’d have to pick it up and look in the rear view mirror. I have to consciously look in my rear view mirror in life. I just kind of block some of that stuff out, so I’ll be focusing on trying to find a way to get this team to win a game more than anything that has to do with Tampa. I have been very well supported by the people in Tampa over my career. When I go back, I don’t know if that will be the case this time. I don’t know how they feel about me. As a coach, I don’t think many people feel real good about me as a coach. That will be interesting, but my experiences in Tampa, the five, six, seven times since I played there have all been positive. Interesting story, when we played in the Super Bowl, actually, we were in the home locker room. I had my same locker for the Super Bowl that I had for the three years I was in Raymond James (Stadium) for a home game, so that was weird. That was weird to walk in, Super Bowl Sunday to my locker, and it was my locker from the year before, like my exact locker. I don’t know if our equipment guys did it, but I remember sitting there going, I’m putting on white, for that game, white and purple, and I had just spent, you know, we had only been in that stadium for I think three of my years in Tampa, but, “last year, a year ago, I was sitting in this locker getting ready to play a home game for the Bucs. That was a crazy experience.”

Coach Dilfer on what a win would mean despite the struggles this season:

“It’s huge, you’re desperate. I think desperate is a very honest term right now. We are desperate to go 1-0. Man, it would be massive because it would be affirmation of all the hard work and months and months and months of what we’ve tried to do to go 1-0. I try to reflect, I try not to use too much of my playing stuff because I don’t know if it’s all relevant, but I do remember being 1-6, you might want to fact check me here, 1-6, I believe, in Tampa in ’96. And then, I can’t remember who we beat, but it was like, “okay, this does work. You know everything Coach Dungy has been saying does work.” We’ve just experienced two years of it not working, but the one time it worked, you’re like, “oh, okay, this is how we do it.” And we ended up winning five of our last six, again, you can fact check me there, and launched us to a wildly successful ’97 season. I was talking to Jeff Tedford last night, and you know, they were 1-4, he said, in one of his last years, one of the Jake Haener years, at Fresno, and they ended up winning 14-in-a-row after that. He goes, “it started with the first one.” It was just a grind and a fight and pulling teeth and just making sure that they understood that there’s still hope there and you win one. You don’t win 14-in-a-row, you win one. And then you start linking those chain links together and I think that’s what we are looking for. We’re looking for the first link and that’s all we can really hope for.”