The Boston College administration can stomach a two-year buy out, right?
That’s what it will take if they want to fire BC football head coach Jeff Hafley at the end of the 2024 season. Hafley signed a contract extension in November 2021 that would keep him at BC through the 2026 season, but that seems like a long, long time ago. Since then, Hafley’s program has endured a disastrous 3-9 campaign in 2022 and then a mess of one this year, in which BC barely scraped by to reach 6-6 with the easiest schedule in all of Power 5 football. Now with recruits dropping like flies and players hitting the transfer portal, the BC football roster looks like it could be in rough shape in 2024 and beyond. And Hafley won’t have the same luxury of a cakewalk schedule to mask some of the deficiencies.
If the BC administration wasn’t so conservative in its decision-making, Hafley would probably already be out. But he was afforded some leeway after the 3-9 debacle in his third year, and he’ll likely be afforded even more leeway after he brought the team back to a bowl game this season. But with that contract starting to run out and a tough 2024 schedule on the horizon, don’t be too certain we’ll see the same amount of forgiveness come next fall. It will be year 5 of the Jeff Hafley era, and the excuses should start running out.
So it falls on Hafley and his staff. They need to take the opportunity and run with it, because this is probably the end of the line. They’ll need to hit the transfer portal hard and do some serious reckoning with their roster. They’ll need to rethink their offensive gameplan in a way that absolutely maximizes starting QB Thomas Castellanos, who is their biggest weapon right now. And they’ll need to rework basically everything about their defense that didn’t show up to play for most of the 2023 season.
They have quite the laundry list of problems and there are no easy fixes. We’ve seen trends over time with Hafley’s roster that make me think the same old issues will crop up and we’ll get the same old excuses. I personally don’t think it can be fixed by this staff. But they will at least have the opportunity to prove the doubters like me wrong.