UAB’S DILFER GIVES THOUGHTS ON CLOSED SCRIMMAGE
By Steve Irvine
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - August 11, 2025
The UAB football team held its full first-scale scrimmage of fall camp on Saturday. The scrimmage was closed to the public and media and no stats were released. UAB head coach Trent Dilfer talked about his impressions of the scrimmage following Monday’s practice, which kicked off the third week of fall camp. Dilfer also answered questions about offensive tackle Payton Kirkland, who practiced for the first time on Monday. The 6-foot-5, 305-pound Kirkland, a former three-star recruit, was at Texas and Colorado before joining UAB’s program.
On his thoughts about Saturday’s scrimmage: “I thought defensively it was really good intensity, energy. They were disruptive. I thought regardless of what happened to them, whether it was a good play against them, positive play for them, they got back and played the next play hard. Offensively, it's been our issue all camp, the floor is so low, our bad is really bad. So it's hard to see the good things offensively when the bad things are so egregious. Big point emphasis of emphasis is just to raise the floor offensively. I think that's team-wide, you know. We talked about it since early this morning. But really some encouraging things on the defensive side of the ball. When you look at the film, you get the emotion out of it, there were some good things offensively, but they're negated by the egregious mistakes that we continue to do.”
On the mistakes: “I mean, there's a multitude of sins. You know, bad IDs in the running game, pass protection sets that are bad, turnovers by the quarterbacks. Receivers not finishing, whether that's a route depth or a ball. It's just like one person takes turns on offense. Really, that was our Achilles last year too, was offensively at times, 10 guys doing a really good job and one guy messing up the whole play. So we got to offensively really narrow our focus on what we can do well and not play around with things we're not good at yet.”
On the limited good things on offense: “There were some off-schedule plays that were pretty darn good. I thought we had some receivers win some big one-on-ones that we didn't find at the quarterback position or protection broke down. I thought our runners ran really hard. I would say our runners ran extremely hard. All five of them that played ran the ball with some physicality and finished off runs as well. I thought there were some good things in the red zone. Offensively in the red zone, I thought we did some pretty good things.
Again, that’s the thing about offensive football, none of that stuff really matters if you're making the egregious mistakes. Incompletions aren't bad, a negative -1 yard loss isn't bad. You mess up something and you get out of the play, that's not bad. But when we compound mistakes, making bad plays worse, we just can't do anything.
On how close the coaches are to figuring out five-man rotation on the offensive line: “It's a great question. No, we're not close. There's still a lot of position competition but also like who are the 7 or 8? We'll probably play more than five. So who are the 7 or 8 that, you know, can play again with a high ceiling and a mid-floor, not a low floor and a high ceiling. They've all shown glimpses. The problem is the bad play. We've got to figure that out. You know, timeline, I wish I could nail that down. But with this modern day of the portal and bringing in, what, six new ones, I don't know if we'll know for quite a while.”
On JonDarius Morgan playing guard or tackle: “Again, I don't know if I can answer that. You know, we want to find the best mixes. And JD gives us flexibility at guard and tackle. So I think a lot depends on how other guys elevate their games, too. We know we can slot him in at left guard, left tackle, right guard, right tackle. So again, I'm not trying to be coy or not answer questions. I don't know if I can answer your questions. We're going up right now for about three hours of conversations about what we have. It's constant evaluation. It's constant tweaking. As I told you guys, I think it was a week ago that you're going to see a lot of combinations. And we're going to commit to that here for the next, I guess, probably ten days. Nine days, I guess and try to see going into Alabama State, who are the eight that we feel like we can trust to play at a high level. And the bad isn’t that bad.”
On new offensive line addition Payton Kirkland: “We don’t know. There’s a lot to learn there, too. You know, Payton’s had a modern-day portal road. You know, highly recruited. Two stops that haven't worked out. He was very honest about his culpability in that. He's worked really hard. He's lost 117 pounds since his freshman year. He's hungry. He's a good athlete. There's a reason he was so highly recruited, but he didn't go through the winning edge in the off season. He didn't earn the trust of his teammates like a lot of these guys did. He hasn't been in the fires. There's still a lot we have to find out about Payton Kirkland and Payton Kirkland has to find out a lot about us.
He's nimble, like you can tell he's an easy mover. There's a lot of things in (shorts) that he looks good doing, but there's a lot of real football things we have to see him do before he starts contributing.”