How Jeff Hafley and Boston College are making the best of an unusual 2020 season.
There has been a preseason paintball outing and an end-of-week Wiffle ball tournament, a season-opening Powerade bath and some Friday night card games. There has been a new coach and a new coach’s boss, two milestone changes playing out amid a pandemic that threatened to upend this whole experiment before it even started. There has been the damn-near perfect discipline that has allowed it all to continue unabated, too.
Through it all there has been a football season at Boston College, a very fun one, to hear every person from this 5-3 outfit tell it. It reaches its biggest stage Saturday at home against the No. 2 team in the country, Notre Dame, two weeks after an exhausting battle with the then-No. 1 team in the country, Clemson. It’s the ninth game in nine weeks for an operation that has made up for lost time by simply deciding not to worry about it and make the best of this situation.
“I remember standing up in the indoor in our fieldhouse and guys were spaced out with masks on and still not knowing (if they would play),” Hafley said by phone of his first face-to-face meeting with the entire 2020 roster, back in June. “It was a really cool feeling to sit face-to-face with the players and the staff and to be around them in person again. Yeah, I have a vivid memory of that.”
It didn’t get much easier for the coach who had planned on having an open-door policy, who had hoped to regularly dine with players in his office and create as intimate of an environment as humanly possible. The Eagles have made the collective decision, though, to not take themselves too seriously.
(And here we pause, acknowledging the severity with which this program has approached this pandemic, which is the only way that a group of 100-plus folks can take nearly 6,500 COVID-19 tests in the past four and a half months and have just a single one, back in June, show up positive.)
What has happened since the ACC gave the green light to play has been one of the surprise stories in college football. No first-year Power 5 head coach who has coached more than one game this season has a better winning percentage than Hafley’s (.625). BC has been an underdog of two touchdowns or more three times, but it took two of three to the final play, not that the message in the locker room has changed much based on result.
“We’ll get better, too,” Hafley emphasized after a 20-point pasting of favored Duke in the opener.
“Truthfully, did we play great today?” he asked his players — No! — after beating Pitt. “No, but it shows you what we can do.”
“We don’t take it as a moral victory, we take it as something we could build off,” defensive end Brandon Barlow said after nearly upsetting Clemson. “We could get even better going forward.”
Now comes Notre Dame, which did to Clemson what BC almost did, and in doing so was able to turn the volume down on what could have been an exhausting storyline (at least for the visiting Irish) surrounding the quarterback matchup.
Everyone knows that Phil Jurkovec signed with Notre Dame as one of the most decorated quarterback prospects of the 2018 class. Everyone knows that he will lead BC against Notre Dame in Alumni Stadium as one of the most prolific quarterbacks of the 2020 season, leading the ACC in passing yards (2,083).
Jurkovec has made no bones about how his happiness level had sunk in South Bend, when he backed up Ian Book, who enters this duel coming off the best performance of his career. That the pandemic-induced, re-worked ACC schedule netted Jurkovec a face-off with his old comrades just two months into his new job as BC’s starter is a juicy storyline.
“There’s a lot of great things about Notre Dame, the school, just how much they win, the culture of it, the players; there’s a lot of good people there, there really is,” Jurkovec said this week. “But for me football was really changing for me. I was debating about switching positions because I don’t think I could have done another year just sitting on the bench. I had to go play somewhere. I was really down. I was basically on the brink of not playing quarterback, so at that point I was just talking to my family. They’re like, ‘You have to go somewhere to play.’”
Said Hafley: “I got such a good feel for him and his family. I just felt like he was a kid who needed some love in his life, needed some confidence in his life and needed a new, clean slate and a shot. And you combine that with Frank Cignetti, who I think is one of the best quarterback coaches in the country, and I just think it was the perfect fit for Phil at the perfect time. He just keeps getting better.”
This is Boston College’s annual Red Bandanna Game, and this is the Holy War. But emotions — and history, for anyone familiar with 1993 — will only take BC so far. This stretch, this season, this year, has been unforgiving. The week of the Clemson game, Hafley recognized the physical and mental fatigue in his players and staff. He pushed morning activities back a half-hour, telling all to sleep in. He shortened up periods, stressing efficiency above all.
And he relied on Patrick Kraft, whom he calls a “football guy,” the athletic director who came over from Temple in early June, and who was once a walk-on linebacker at Indiana.
“I think you’ve got to get out of what you assume, or what you’re used to, the norm,” Kraft said. “The push and pull is so drastically different now. Little things like making it easy for them to have food and access to food. Giving them a dinner and rewarding them for the incredible job they’ve done with COVID, being so successful there.
“(Hafley’s) done a great job of kind of taking the NFL approach, right, of backing off, letting their legs rest and listening to the players and letting them be a part of the process.”
It probably caught up to them last week at Syracuse, where they followed up their fight at Death Valley with a mere three-point win against a last-place team.
Again, the postgame message kept with the theme of this run, a run that was supposed to be a feeling-out period between staff and players that has thus far defied convention.
“Will we get better?” Hafley asked his guys. “Hell yeah, we’re gonna get better! But you’re 5-3. I love you guys. Understand that right there.”
Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2020 12:41 pm