The news broke Tuesday: Mark Ingram, UAB's athletic director for the past 11 years, is out. Brett McMurphy was first to confirm the separation, with Pete Thamel following minutes later to note the school made the announcement itself rather than Ingram walking on his own terms.
UAB & athletic director Mark Ingram have "agreed to part ways." Ingram was UAB's AD the past 11 years
It's a big chair to empty. 11 years is a long tenure for any athletic director, let alone one at a Group of 5 program navigating conference realignment, NIL and the transfer portal all hitting at once. Ingram had steered UAB through the move to the American Athletic Conference and years of budget balancing acts that come with running a mid-major department in this era.
UAB's veteran AD is out, the school announces.
The timing isn't hard to connect to the dots on the field. Ingram fired head football coach Trent Dilfer back on October 12, six games into Dilfer's third season, after UAB dropped to 2-4 with a 53-33 loss to FAU. Dilfer left with a 9-21 record, having turned a program that used to be a near-annual bowl team into one stuck in three straight losing seasons.
Ingram had actually stood behind Dilfer once before, explaining a decision to bring him back for a third year despite a 7-17 mark at the time. That patience blew up in his face this fall, and it reignited an older complaint from UAB fans and players: back in 2022, players reportedly lobbied for Bryant Vincent to get the full-time job, and Ingram passed him over for Dilfer, a coach with just 2 years of high school head-coaching experience beforehand.
With Ingram gone, interim athletic director duties fall to Andy Kennedy, giving UAB a bridge while it figures out its next full-time hire. Whoever gets the job inherits a football search too, with offensive coordinator Alex Mortensen currently running the show on an interim basis. It's a full reset for a department that just a year ago looked stable.
For UAB, this is about more than one bad coaching hire. It's a program trying to figure out its identity in a conference landscape that's brutal for schools without deep pockets, and now it's doing that search without the guy who'd been steering the ship for over a decade. Expect a national search, and expect Ingram's Dilfer decision to hang over how the next hire gets scrutinized.