Trent DILFER Seeing Progress After UAB’s Second Scrimmage
By Steve Irvine
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - August 17, 2025
The fall camp portion of UAB football’s preseason work came to close on Saturday night. Trent Dilfer’s will now move into the in-season practice schedule after concluding camp with a full scale scrimmage at Protective Stadium.
Dilfer was more pleased with his team in the second scrimmage, which once again was closed to the media. A week ago, Dilfer was frustrated with the play of the Blazers’ offense.
“I was way more encouraged by this one,” Dilfer said. “You know, I thought organizationally (and) kind of the energy on both sides of the ball, we were much cleaner. Had weird turnovers, you know. We can't turn the ball over but sometimes weird stuff happens, and there (were) some weird ones. We gotta clean them up. But I thought defensively we played really hard again. They have a nice ability if they get beat on the play here or there, it doesn't affect them.”
Dilfer was more pleased with the offense on Saturday.
“Thought (the) offense, although we weren't finishing drives, some of these drives, remember, were scripted length,” Dilfer said. “So there's some that we have a first down that we keep driving (normally) and we stopped the drive because it was a play count. I thought the offense moved the ball consistently. We had such a great competitive two-minute on the second to last drive, where both sides played really well. Tough call on the illegal hands of the face for the defense and the offense was able to bounce back from it and finish off the drive.”
Overall, Dilfer moves forward with confidence in his team.
“I thought it was a good week,” Dilfer said. “I thought we got a lot better this week. Now, we have long ways to go. But I was encouraged by the growth of the team this week.”
More on what Dilfer had to say after the scrimmage:
On positional battles: “You know, there's still a lot of positional battles going on. I think, you know, there's guys that have leads in certain areas. But Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday will be highly competitive practices for that reason. We need to continue to figure out who we are. I think the scrimmage helped us better understand some things, but I wouldn't say gave us total clarity.”
On the offensive line in the scrimmage: “Better, (but) the one thing, again, your eye can lie to you in a scrimmage. You have to wait and see the film. It looked like there was tremendous get off. There was tremendous running off the football and physicality by the offensive line. I thought protection wise, we were okay. We were good when we needed to be good in the two-minute drill. Had a couple of fourth downs that we converted when we scripted the situation. They held up well, so I think overall they had a really good week. I do think they started to understand, okay, this thing's getting down to six, seven, eight guys, and I want to be part of that eight. You've seen an extra oomph by the offensive line.”
On the switch from camp to regular season practice: “We're done with camp. We’re officially done with camp. Next week will be an in-season schedule and in-season practice times. But instead of the full prep, we'll use the front and back end to get a little more rest and do some team building stuff and touch on some things that, you know, in the business of camp is not getting left behind but getting shelved for a while.”
On firming up the depth chart after the second scrimmage: “I would say more than (written in) pencil. I would say Monday personnel meetings will be not sharpie, but an ink that's really hard to erase. Maybe we'll have on offense, say it's 10 in Sharpie, and there's five in pencil. There might be some of that too. And then rotation, we do play a lot of people. So just because you're not a starter doesn't mean you're not going to play a lot of snaps. It's really where you're going to invest the touches and the snaps as we get ready to play Alabama State.”
On feeling now compared to last year as this time: “I'm more confident in just our process. I think the off-season hardened us more so than in other years. But there is still unknown. I've said that from day one. I'm still not totally sure who we are. I'm going to do my best to know by week one. I do think we have to take the approach (that) we've got to keep getting better no matter what we are. We need to be significantly better in the first five weeks and we've got to be significantly better mid-season. I think if we take the approach in growth and getting better all the time and let the scoreboard take care of itself, we should be OK.
I'm excited. I'm just excited about the opportunity to earn it. It's kind of been one of the themes. We got to earn a lot and prove a lot and I'm excited to go out there and try to do that. I'm a fighter by nature, so I love the fight.”
On the difference in scrimmaging at Protective Stadium: “This was super beneficial. I'm guessing every coach is doing this with all the turnover and roster and coaches. You've got to be comfortable in your environment. This was some guys' first time they were ever in the stadium, because maybe for a recruiting trip, maybe the stadium had something going on we couldn't bring them over here. A couple coaches that didn't come over here, because they kind of jumped in with both feet and never had a chance. So the whole process, the pregame routine, the locker room, what we do, nobody sees us. Maybe all those things are viable, so in two weeks from now, it's not the first time they've ever done it.”