UAB head football coach Trent Dilfer loved his first five years at ESPN and was appreciative of the platform and the opportunity to work with so many talented people, but then it got weird.
Dilfer was an NFL analyst for ESPN from 2008-17, and he told Adam Breneman on a recent appearance on his YouTube show Next Up that things in Bristol shifted for the worst after around 2012.
“TV got weird, man. It got people telling you what you should be talking about and what was important, what wasn’t important,” Dilfer said. “It wasn’t about football all of a sudden. The politics and the building started determining what people got the chance to say what where.”
“If it was a hot-button topic that Twitter, at the time, was trending on then it made the front of the show whether it was a premier game or not,” he continued. “Like all these other things started creeping in. And that with on top of me going from the Bay Area in California on a red-eye to New York and car servicing from New York to Bristol. And then a flight to Monday Night Football and a flight back to the West Coast.”
Trent Dilfer said it got to the point where he was just being spread way too thin.
“Things start piling up and I didn’t enjoy it,” he said. “And it wasn’t all the TV stuff, it was just a lifestyle. And then I made some really stupid decisions. I got involved in a contract negotiation that I should not have done looking back at it, which made things weird with my bosses.”
Eventually, the writing was on the wall that he needed to go his own way.
“It just got funky at the end, and it was better for everybody that I was off TV,” Dilfer said. “And I’m sure the 50% that hated me are like, ‘Great, get him off.'”
