At this time last year, a 43-year-old Philip Rivers was preparing for an unlikely comeback to the NFL. Now, a 44-year-old Rivers is preparing for an unlikely promotion to the FBS.
Riversinterviewed for the vacant head coach position at his alma mater, North Carolina State, after the Wolfpack fired head coach Dave Doeren in October. Now he's reportedly set to get it. Hiring Rivers would make the eight-time Pro Bowler one of just a handful of people to take over a Division I coaching job without any experience on a Division I sideline.
It would be a splashy hire -- but you don't have to go too far back in time to understand how bad it could be for fans in Raleigh.
Philip Rivers is following in Trent Dilfer's footsteps. That's a bad thing.
Rivers has only been a coach since 2021 -- the year after his first retirement from
the NFL. It wasn't in the FBS, FCS or college at all. It was near his Alabama hometown at St. Michael Catholic High School.
After a modest start, he's 25-3 over his last two seasons, pushing the Cardinal to the state's Class 4A semi-finals each year. That leaves the Wolfpack with a coach who was a former college All-American and NFL Pro Bowler who led a private high school to glory but has never even been an assistant at a higher level.
That exactly describes what the University of Alabama-Birmingham got when it hired Trent Dilfer.
The Blazers eschewed well-liked interim head coach Bryant Vincent, even after he led the team to a 7-6 record and Bahamas Bowl win in 2022. With a move from Conference USA to the American Conference looming, UAB opted for a risky, but splashy hire. In came Dilfer. Out went six straight years of winning seasons.
Dilfer was a disaster. He went 9-21 before being fired halfway through his third season. His defenses never ranked better than 120th when it came to points allowed. His offense backslid. He had a single win over an FBS opponent who finished its year with a non-losing record.
He was unequipped to handle the rigors of recruiting and transfers, especially in a landscape of paying players and Group of 6 teams emerging as farm squads for Power 4 departures. Fans and boosters, the fundraising base who could help give him the talent to prove his playbook was sustainable, universally disliked him. He tried to describe his tenure as a rebuild -- weird choice for a team that had been a consistent bowl presence before his hiring! -- and wound up overseeing a teardown.
NC State does not think this will be a problem. Rivers is a bigger name than Dilfer. More importantly, he's an alumnus. In an ACC where hiring Bill Belichick garnered national headlines, good and (mostly) bad for North Carolina, the Wolfpack are making a similar decision.
But the new hire will have an uphill battle to escape the program's gravity of "good, in a way no one really cares about."
Rivers status as a respected NFL veteran who played as recently as 10 months ago brings some cache with high school prospects and their parents. That would have been useful a decade ago. Now, it's a cavalry in a battlefield ruled by tanks when NIL payments and roster budgets play an outsized role in attracting elite talent.
Even so, he'll also keep his son, a blue chip recruit who he coached at St. Michael,in the team's 2027 recruiting class. If hiring Rivers unlocks a new current of booster cash heading to the athletic department -- and with actual ties to the university, he won't alienate diehards the way Dilfer did -- he'll soften the curve of moving up to the big leagues.
It's still a very steep curve! Rivers has bigger expectations than any coach who leaped up to the FBS from high school since 1985. That list includes Dilfer, Tony Sanchez (20-40 at UNLV from 2015 to 2019), and Todd Dodge (6-37 at North Texas from 2007 to 2010). Only one coach who's been called up to a top NCAA job since 1974 has been to a bowl game, and that was Gerry Faust at Notre Dame. Faust's 30-26-1 record made him the Irish's worst coach (in terms of winning percentage) since 1966.
This stacks the deck very much against North Carolina State. Rivers might succeed. The likely outcome is that the Wolfpack squandered a head start in the 2026 coaching carousel in order to create a more visible and volatile version of the UAB experiment that blew up in the Blazers' faces like a middle school science experiment.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: NC State’s reported Philip Rivers hire shows we learned nothing from Trent Dilfer disaster
