College football teams don’t have preseason games. But Boston College head coach Jeff Hafley, who spent seven years as an NFL assistant, is getting creative to make an equivalent.
The Eagles are scheduled to scrimmage for the second time this summer on Sunday. Then, the following week, Hafley wants to mimic a real game.
Hafley is easing BC back to game action. BC’s first scrimmage consisted of 35 plays from the ones and 35 plays from the twos, he explained. Sunday’s exhibition will be more intensive. Hafley’s thinking three quarters. He wants the offense on one sideline, the defense on the other, and the coaches off the field.
“Let the players play,” Hafley said Thursday. “Just let ’em play. Don’t tell ’em where to line up. Don’t tell ’em what to do. Don’t give them any alerts. Let them go play football and then watch it and grade and really see where we’re at.”
The final scrimmage will be four quarters, Hafley said. He wants his players physically ready to play Week 1 against Colgate. It’s a matchup that’s fast approaching, although Hafley doesn’t want to start game prep too early. In fact, he’s going to wait to treat it like a normal game week.
After finishing this week of fall camp, he plans for another full week to work on fundamentals and situational football before turning to the season opener. Hafley doesn’t want to sprinkle the Colgate game plan into the final two weeks of camp. He doesn’t believe it would be beneficial.
“I’ll start seeing ghosts and trying to defend every single thing,” he said. “So we’ll just get into a nice rhythm.”
Khris Banks is expected to take on a bigger role with Chibueze Onwuka out: The Temple transfer is coming off a 2020 season in which he played six games on the two-line of the Owls’ depth chart. Banks piled up 18 total tackles as well as 3.0 TFLs and his first career sack. Even at 6-foot-2, 294 pounds, the Paterson, New Jersey, native is nimble. He landed four quarterback hits in 2019, while registering 11 hurries and batting down three passes. Hafley said Banks is “twitched up” and has good lateral movement. He described how the defensive tackle can move from A gap to B gap—and vice versa—and swim offensive linemen.
“We’re gonna count on him now, losing Booze the way we did,” Hafley said. “Quick, athletic, doing a really nice job. Just needs to work hard, learn the defense, work on consistency, and he has a chance to be a really good player for us.”
Offensive lineman Dwayne Allick is moving to the other side of the ball: The three-star Class of 2020 offensive lineman from DeMatha Catholic High School in Maryland is going from one line to the other. Allick will help fill the void at defensive tackle, a position that has been decimated by injury on the Heights. Allick played both ways in high school so the change isn’t foreign. Hafley said that BC was missing at least four defensive tackles for the team’s first scrimmage on Monday, including Onwuka who is out for the season with an Achilles injury.
Allick got some rotational run in team periods this week. It appears as if defensive line coach Vince Oghobaase is preparing to constantly sub players in and out of the trenches, at least until BC is relatively healthy on the interior again. Defensive end Marcus Valdez recorded a fumble recovery during team periods Thursday, and Shitta Sillah notched a would-be sack, as did true freshman Ty Clemons.
Hafley shared his perspective on rushing defense: When Hafley was asked about how many rushing yards BC allowed last season—171.4 per game—he said that he said that he isn’t really concerned about yards. He elaborated by illustrating how sometimes the teams that are great against the run are actually just terrible versus the pass. Then sometimes it’s the other way around. Essentially, if a team is really bad at defending one, the other is probably going to look better than it actually is. Hafley measures defensive success in a different way.
“I look at points and how we’re playing,” he said. “The improvement needs to be on our defense as a whole, not just the run game. So we’re emphasizing it all. Stopping the run, rushing the quarterback, being good in coverage.”
Safety Deon Jones is back to practice: The graduate safety, who transferred from Maryland last offseason, wore a yellow non-contact jersey in team work Thursday. Jones suffered a knee injury in BC’s regular season finale at Virginia and is in the latter stages of recovery. Notably, he also missed two games earlier in the 2020 campaign with an elbow injury he sustained against Texas State. When he wasn’t banged up, though, he was one of the Eagles’ best defenders, according to Pro Football Focus. Jones ended the year with an overall defensive score of 71.9, good for fourth on the team. The free safety started six of the nine games he played and clocked out with 42 total tackles and two fumble recoveries.
Pass catchers were turning heads Thursday: Ten NFL scouts were in attendance, and a bunch of BC playmakers did their thing through the air. Wide receiver Jaden Williams continued his torrid stretch with a 40-yard touchdown reception from quarterback Phil Jurkovec. Williams had a pair of 40-plus-yard catches the day before, too. Jurkovec was sharing the wealth, hitting five different receivers during 7-on-7 work. The running backs flashed their hands as well. True freshman Xavier Coleman scampered for 55-yard, catch-and-run touchdown, and Pat Garwo III also hauled in a score. In addition to Williams, Lewis Bond has been another impressive first-year wideout. He showed promise in the spring game and has further developed a rapport with the Eagles’ quarterbacks, namely Dennis Grosel, who found Bond several times in 7-on-7s.
