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Trent Dilfer Apologizes For Roughing Up Phil Dawson’s Son During High School Football Game

10:38 AM EDT on August 30, 2021

Trent Dilfer screams from the sideline of a high school football game.
Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

Video made its way around the internet over the weekend of Trent Dilfer, former Super Bowl-winning quarterback, current Fox Sports 1 football analyst, and head coach of the Lipscomb Academy high school football team, losing his mind at one of his players on the sidelines during their game Friday night. Dilfer can be seen aggressively shoving the teen backward, screaming into his face, and then shouting "Sit down now!" in roughly the voice you would use to command a Rottweiler that was chewing your dick off. Needless to say, this is not an appropriate way for 49-year-old authority figures to communicate with children.

Dilfer released a statement via the school Sunday, accepting responsibility for "unfairly" singling out the player and "for not deescalating an emotional situation." Dilfer describes the player, tight end Beau Dawson, as "one of our finest student-athletes" and the embodiment of "all the characteristics we are looking for in our Mustang players."

"Beau plays the game with the right kind of passion and is an inspiration to our other players. During a moment of frustration in an attempt to get our team to play with more discipline, I unfairly singled Beau out. Somehow Beau Dawson has been portrayed publicly as the culprit in this situation, when in reality I should have been a better leader and shown greater wisdom and discernment in how I handled this incident. Overall, I could not be more proud of Beau and the rest of our team for how they handle the emotional nature of each game they compete in.”

Pro Football Talk

Beau Dawson is the son of retired NFL kicker and former Browns, uh, great(?) Phil Dawson, who played with Dilfer for one season in Cleveland, back in 2005. Awkwardly enough, Phil is on Dilfer's staff, as special teams coordinator at Lipscomb Academy. The elder Dawson told the Browns fan blog Dawgs By Nature back in November that he enjoys the privilege of coaching his son and the experience of "working with high school aged boys." There is no particular reason for you to know that, except that it provides me the flimsiest of segues for introducing the incredible lede from this blog, which offers possibly the saddest depiction of Browns fans in human history:

4.

To uneducated sports fans, that is simply a number. The quantity of judges on “America’s Got Talent” or “The Voice.” The number of fingers cartoon characters have. The smallest squared prime and the only even number in this form. The four corners of the globe. Four basic states of matter. On a keyboard, the dollar sign is also the number 4 key. In Revelations, four horsemen arrive with specific functions. Four-letter words. Four beats per measure needed to write a song. The “Final Four.” Four seasons. Four legs on a chair. Four suits of playing cards.

But for Cleveland Browns’ fans, the Number 4 represents one thing: Phil Dawson’s jersey number.

Dawgs By Nature

Browns fans: Is this true? When you see the number four, does it mean just one thing, and that one thing is Phil Dawson's jersey number? Not the smallest squared prime, or even the four basic states of matter? Not even the number of fingers cartoon characters have? All that stuff is wiped out in favor of an image of a guy who kicked for exactly two winning Browns teams in 13 seasons, and in just one (1) playoff game? I really don't like the sound of this too much.

According to Pro Football Talk, there has been no indication that Dilfer will face any punishment for his sideline meltdown. Dilfer led the Mustangs to the Division II Class AA State Championship game in 2020, in his second season on the job. Educated Browns fans, anytime you see the number eight, worn by Dilfer during his lone season in Cleveland, please remember this accomplishment and not the ugly scene from Friday's game. In keeping with local tradition, you must not also think of how eight is the first number which is neither prime nor semiprime.

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