Someone once called Wade Phillips a lousy head coach. That someone was Wade Phillips. He said this back in 2015, during a press conference at which he was introduced as the Denver Broncos’ new defensive coordinator. The now 76-year-old son of legendary Stetson-clad Houston Oilers coach Bum Phillips had worked for the Broncos before, both as a coordinator and then, for two inglorious seasons in 1993 and 1994, as head coach. Phillips went 16–16 and was fired. More head-coaching opportunities would come in the following decades, and Phillips was fired from those too. The Buffalo Bills canned Phillips in 2000 after three seasons. Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys axed him midway through the 2010 season—his fourth in Dallas. 

Phillips figured a less-than-stellar reputation had preceded him when he returned to Denver. So he led his 2015 press conference with a joke. “I think I said I was a lousy head coach, but I was a great defensive coordinator,” Phillips tells me from the Arlington headquarters of the United Football League. He’s head coaching again, only now it’s for the spring league’s San Antonio Brahmas, who have a playoff game Sunday. Phillips chuckles at the recollection and adds that he didn’t believe he was all that bad of a head coach. In the UFL, he’s getting a second chance to prove that.

Well, strictly speaking, Phillips’s gig with the Brahmas is his fourth chance. Or maybe his seventh, depending on how you do the math. In addition to his full-time head-coaching positions in Denver, Buffalo, and Dallas, Phillips had interim stints with the New Orleans Saints, the Atlanta Falcons, and the Houston Texans over an NFL career that spanned four decades. After the Los Angeles Rams dropped him as defensive coordinator in 2019, no other NFL franchise came calling—even after Phillips announced that his services were on the market. He tells me he thinks his age was the reason no jobs materialized. “I don’t think it was a conscious thing for the league to say, ‘Oh, we don’t want to hire him [because he’s too old],’ ” Phillips tells me in the soft drawl he developed growing up in Orange, Texas, about a half hour east of Beaumont. “I just think they know your age and that becomes part of their thinking. But just look at my record.”

Okay, let’s do that. The very same record that got him fired three times and passed over three more times—the record that made Wade Phillips a “lousy head coach”—isn’t all that lousy. Phillips amassed 82 wins against 64 losses from 1985 to 2010, giving him more NFL wins than all but five of the current NFL head coaches. His win percentage is just a notch below that of San Francisco 49ers’ coach (and former Texas Longhorns wide receiver) Kyle Shanahan.

Then again, Shanahan, who has been called a mastermind, has taken San Francisco to two Super Bowls, while Phillips notched just one playoff win in his head-coaching career—when his Cowboys beat the Philadelphia Eagles 34–14 in the 2009 wild card round.

But it’s as a defensive coordinator where Phillips’s NFL impact looks most impressive. In his first season with Denver, in 1989, Phillips’s defense helped lead the team to a Super Bowl appearance (a blowout loss to the 49ers). When he returned to Denver in 2015 as “a great defensive coordinator,” he oversaw a crushing Broncos defense that galloped to a Super Bowl win—with help from an aging Peyton Manning. Phillips was named the AP’s Assistant Coach of the Year that season.

Just two years later, Phillips teamed up with the youngest coach in the league at the time, Sean McVay, to help the Los Angeles Rams bounce back from a 4–12 finish the previous season to make the playoffs, with an NFC West–leading 11–5 record. A year later, the Rams made the Super Bowl, where Phillips’s defense limited a Tom Brady–led New England Patriots attack to just thirteen points (albeit in defeat). Then, after a disappointing 2019 season, the Rams replaced Phillips amid a youth movement in the NFL’s coaching ranks. Today 20 of the league’s 32 teams are coached by men under the age of 50. The oldest NFL head coach is 65-year-old Andy Reid, who is 11 years younger than Phillips.

Phillips is now the elder statesman among UFL coaches. He’s also eleven years older than the upstart league’s next-oldest coach. But despite his age, Phillips has racked up fourteen wins in two seasons of spring football, defying oddsmakers who twice predicted weaker results. Last year, when Phillips coached the XFL’s Houston Roughnecks, Las Vegas sports books projected his team would finish last in the league. Instead, the Roughnecks led their division with a 7–3 record. (Houston lost in the 2023 XFL playoffs to eventual champion the Arlington Renegades, helmed by former longtime Oklahoma Sooners coach Bob Stoops.)

Then, in a quirky twist within a quirky league, Phillips was asked to change teams this year by the UFL’s bosses—Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson among them. Phillips moved over to San Antonio, which had flailed in its inaugural season, going 3–7 under coach Hines Ward while somehow drawing the second-biggest crowds in the league. Under Phillips, San Antonio flipped that record to 7–3. The playoff-bound Brahmas have the best defense in the league, surrendering just 15 points per game. Those results also defied the Las Vegas brain trust. “The year I started in Houston, [oddsmakers] had us ranked in last in the power ratings,” Phillips tells me. “We were last again this year in San Antonio. That’s two different teams where they don’t think I’m a very good head coach going in.”

It may also be telling that, without Phillips, Houston finished this season 1–9. That included a loss to San Antonio on a last-second, 51-yard field goal. When the ball cleared the uprights, Phillips exclaimed, in the way only a 76-year-old could, “Oh man!” Clad in a bright yellow T-shirt, with his hair tousled, he looked more like a kid than a grizzled coaching veteran. Two weeks ago, Phillips had a similar, if bigger, celebration after the Brahmas defense secured an interception with 33 seconds left to seal a victory over the previously undefeated Birmingham Stallions. Phillips threw his hands in the air and shouted simply, “We win!” He then repeated that phrase four times, inspiring online memes.

Brahmas players, who refer to Phillips as “Coach Wade,” have embraced that enthusiasm, likely out of respect for Phillips’s long career, but also because they, like their coach, have something to prove to the NFL. Take the eight Brahmas team members who played college football in Texas. They include former Baylor Bear Sam Tecklenburg and former SMU Mustang Delontae Scott. Both recently played in the NFL, and both are trying to get back to the big league. Phillips says he’s not necessarily trying to work his way back into the NFL, but he does hope the league notices the success he and his players have had over the past two seasons.

“All the players I’ve coached in this league and in the NFL play hard for me, and I have always appreciated that,” Phillips says. “I don’t know if these [UFL] players work any harder than in the NFL. But they really do have a lot of concentration in meetings—something that is really above what you would normally see.”

Phillips says that during his first team meeting as the Roughnecks head coach, in 2023, he marveled at the way each player focused on what the special teams coordinator had to say. “Half these guys weren’t even on the special teams,” he recalls. “That’s when I thought, ‘Wow, this league is different. These guys are all locked in.’ I could tell they want to do well; they want to get an opportunity.”

Come Sunday, Phillips’s Brahmas will have the opportunity to give their coach just his second playoff win as a head football coach. Although San Antonio will be facing the St. Louis Battlehawks on the road, both teams will travel from Arlington for the matchup. In another of the league’s quirks, all of the teams are based in Arlington during the season and fly to and from their “home” games each week. The game would have been played in San Antonio, except that when the same two teams met last week, with postseason seeding on the line, the Brahmas fell short when their would-be game-winning field goal attempt was tipped and missed the goalposts. Now the Brahmas will have to pull out a win inside the Dome at America’s Center, where the Battlehawks draw the biggest crowds in the league. Phillips says his team’s ability to manage crowd noise will be key to its chances of victory.

If the Brahmas win Sunday and win again in the UFL championship against either Birmingham or the Michigan Panthers, Phillips will have notched his ninety-eighth career win, between the NFL, the UFL, and the XFL. And that mark just two shy of one hundred, he thinks, ought to prove something to anyone who’s called him a lousy head coach. “Being a few wins from a hundred is pretty neat,” Phillips says. “No matter what league you’re coaching in.”