The spin from the Boston College side of things is funny. Jeff Hafley, BC head football coach, stepped down from his position to take the Green Bay Packers Defensive Coordinator job in the NFL. BC fans will say he was on the hot seat anyhow and would be fired if he went 5-7 next season. This is after he recovered from a 3-9 2022 season to go 7-6 with a bowl win. There was no hot seat even with a 22-26 record at BC. Hafley just saw that being a middling Power Five head football coach just sucks now. And he wanted out.
Some will say he’s a quitter and didn’t want to do the hard work required to break through at a non-blue blood. I’ve known Hafley since he was a GA at Pitt in 2006. The dude worked as hard as anyone I’ve known and has zero quit in him. But his stints in the NFL with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Cleveland Browns, and San Francisco 49ers changed things for him. When he came back to college in 2019 I remember being excited that one of the best young recruiters in the game was back and how much he could flex those skills at Ohio State. And he did, impressively, which led to the Boston College job.
I didn’t go to BC but it’s no secret they’ve been my team forever. Do I care about BC like I did when I was a kid and Doug Flutie was making magic? Not even close. Do I suffer from angst or relish in wins like when Tom Coughlin, Tom O’Brien, or Jeff Jagodzinski was in charge (never mention Dan Henning to me)? Nope, I don’t really care. Even when Hafley was hired, a dude I know, I wasn’t excited and didn’t care. Why? Because BC has zero chance to relive any magic they might have had when Flutie or Matt Ryan were slinging the rock. Both likely would have transferred after early success at BC. But Hafley was excited. And then that excitement clearly wore off.
What was the tipping point? I have no idea. I haven’t reached out or asked him. The last thing he needs right now as the first Power Five coach I can ever remember stepping back by choice to take a coordinator job in the NFL is a bozo like me asking questions. Frustration over a minimal NIL collective? Inability to recruit elite players to BC or keep them with the portal so active? The level of exhaustion that is being a college head coach from high school recruiting, booster engagement, portal scouting, and recruiting your own roster over and over? Maybe one or all of these things is true. But I can tell you this for sure — being the DC at Green Bay in a professional league with guidelines and rules and proper staffing is a lot more attractive than being the head coach at BC. Hafley can coach and let scouts, his general manager, his team president, and the staff handle all the other garbage. And if he’s successful, he can be a head coach in the NFL. Right now, at BC, he could only survive until he failed. And it’s like that for all but around 10 head coaches in college football.
Being a Power Five head coach was Hafley’s goal and dream since he was at FCS Albany in the mid-2000s. He got a taste of the NFL for more than a decade and saw how the lifestyle was. But he was still pulled back to college, back to recruiting and developing young kids into men and leaders either in the NFL or in society. But he came back to a different game and it got worse and worse each season.
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We will lose many more coaches who have an absolute passion for college football. Hafley would sleep in parking lots of schools during crunch time in recruiting to make sure he had a chance to close on a kid he wanted. It was all so cool and so fun and so exciting, it drove his passion and what drove the passion of others. And now it kinda sucks. And trust me, there are many coaches out there reading this article nodding their heads in agreement. They won’t say it publicly, but they know it’s true. Hafley is the first to throw his hands in the air and say screw this. Others will follow.
