Will anyone want to come here?
News broke on Wednesday evening that Boston College football head coach Jeff Hafley would leave the program to take over defensive coordinator duties for the Green Bay Packers. With new NCAA rules in place around head coaching changes, every player on the Boston College football team is now eligible to enter the transfer portal without penalty for thirty days. This includes players like starting QB Thomas Castellanos, who already used an undergraduate transfer to come to BC from UCF. Castellanos deleted all of his posts on his Instagram account last night, signaling a potential shake-up.
The kicker to these transfer rules is that BC can’t bring any new transfers in. The portal is opening for players to leave Boston College, but they cannot utilize the portal to replace any of their departures. So if we see an exodus of transfers due to Hafley’s departure, the Eagles will have to promote players from within the program to take over the starting spots. It’s a great opportunity for some of these young guys to get their shot, like redshirt freshman QB Jacobe Robinson who looked great in the 2023 BC Football Spring Game. But overall it will mean the roster will get worse and any new head coach won’t have a way to fix it until next offseason.
So the BC head coach after Hafley will be coming into a pretty rough situation. They’ll likely have a depleted roster with no way to bring in transfers. The roster was already in rough shape under Hafley, who could barely drag them to a winning record against some really weak competition in 2023. And now the schedule in 2024 is looking really difficult, with match-ups against #9 Missouri and Michigan State on the horizon plus the usual cast of ACC characters (with new addition SMU!). Even if Boston College does manage to pull in a top candidate like Bill O’Brien or Dan Mullen, they are going to basically have to start from scratch in a crowded ACC. As a result, the appeal for the head coaching job is pretty low, and BC may have difficulty attracting their top candidates this late in the cycle.
BCI will be pumping out content over the next few days and weeks as BC scrambles to find a new coaching staff. Be sure to follow along so you don’t miss out on all of the exciting developments!