Jeff Hafley sat down to eat an omelet, just a few days away from Boston College’s Military Bowl matchup against East Carolina. His first bowl game as a head coach.
A bowl game that would never happen.
Hafley was excited about the practices BC stitched together in Annapolis, Maryland. That enthusiasm morphed into worry with one text.
He told ACC Network’s “Packer and Durham” Tuesday that he received news that one of his players had tested positive for COVID-19 and was dealing with a bad fever.
A BC spokesman told The Boston Globe that BC had one positive result the day the team left Boston, a bunch more on Christmas Day and even more on Sunday.
The outbreak that the Eagles had steered clear from for close to two years finally struck. At the worst time possible.
“That’s what’s hard,” Hafley explained Tuesday on “Packer and Durham.” “You look back to last year when we were in the middle of COVID, we didn’t have one positive case in over 8,000 tests. We played nine straight and 11 [total] games.”
He continued: “Even this year, going forward, our protocols were tight. We didn’t even send our players home. We took our finals, we stuck together. No one left. No one visited their families. We got on a plane. We had masks. We had masks in meetings.”
BC helped set the standard for COVID-19 prevention in college football last year. The Eagles had just one positive case, and no games or practices were canceled because of the virus. They also were the first of 22 teams to voluntarily opt out of a bowl game in 2020 due to the restrictions and rigors of COVID-19.
Ahead of this year, BC was the fifth FBS program to require vaccination or a negative PCR test to attend home games. And the team complied with university guidelines, mandating vaccination. Just one player transferred because of the decision.
Hafley, a player’s coach, makes safety a priority. He said that everyone in contact with positive-testing players was tested, along with everyone else with symptoms. The second-year Eagles coach acknowledged that other programs might not be testing quite the same way but that BC remains committed to following its protocol.
He noted how the positive results continued to snowball leading up to the bowl game. Not only among players but also among staff, including training staff and video staff.
It reached to the point where one undisclosed position group was “totally decimated,” according to Hafley. He said that he’s communicated with most of BC’s sick players and added that they’re recovering. But Hafley made it clear that he feels for everybody involved in the Military Bowl.
“From the bands to the cheer teams to the alumni to the fans to the people who drove all this way to all the ECU fans and their alumni and their players and even to the people who put on the bowl,” he said. “And they put all of their heart and soul and time into it. I ran into a bunch of them yesterday, and I felt terrible.”
ECU Athletics and the Pirate Club launched a Bill Clark Homes Military Bowl Fund Tuesday to help the athletic department cover expenses incurred from the game’s cancellation. Bill Clark Homes started things off with a donation of $200,000: part of that will go toward bowl rings for the team, and the rest will be dedicated to covering expenses.
It’s a financial reality Group of Five teams facing bowl cancellations have to grapple with.
Five bowl games have now been canceled, the latest being the Holiday Bowl between UCLA and North Carolina State. Notably, three of those five bowl games have included ACC teams.
“Some people might be angry with us, and some people might be upset with me,” Hafley said. “Our number one job is the safety of our team. And that’s how it’s gonna be at Boston College.
“We did things the right way. And, at the end of the day, that’s how we’re gonna do it here.”
