Adjusted Eagles Celebrate Signing Day With Eyes Towards Future

Adjusted Eagles Celebrate Signing Day With Eyes Towards Future

December 22, 2023 | Football, #ForBoston Files

The lower-numbered class was by design for Hafley's present and future goals.

By: Dan Rubin, BCEagles.com contributor

National Signing Day looks a lot different nowadays.

The dot-matrix printers that once connected to fax machines are probably stowed away in closets for reasons that still aren't totally clear, and the recruits electronically transmitting their letters of intent don't know what that even means. The world in which everyone lives is much more national and year-round than the regional days of yore, and the system by which teams are viewed is designed to evaluate futures and players who haven't even spent one day developing raw talent into the necessary position groups that'll one day form championship legacies.

The world is different, but even in a society greatly impacted by the advent of web-based awareness and social media, of transfer portals and NIL, the one constant permeating through last week's signing period didn't change for the players and coaches who spent months and years sacrificing and planning for the celebratory moment of signing.

"I'm happy for everybody involved in recruiting," said Boston College head coach Jeff Hafley during last Wednesday's press conference. "It's not just our staff, it's everybody operationally that did an unbelievable job with a smaller class. I know that are questions about why it was done [this way], but we changed how I wanted to attack this class. We felt there were certain players who could help this team right away, and with the intent of going hard into the transfer portal, which we've done and will continue to do for this class, we were just really excited about these players who are great kids for Boston College."

Hafley's class was, by his own admission, smaller than the usual two-dozen recruits who once committed to the Eagles, but it wasn't difficult to see how he already planned his team's future around several members of the class. The shift in mentality meant less players compared to the future transfers who will eventually join BC, but the players on the list still hit position groups that needed to restock their depth charts after the inherent departures related to both the portal and graduation.

The offensive line, for example, added three players in Jadon Lafontant, Judah Pruitt and Pape Sy to a stable that returns multiple starters and reserves for at least the next couple of years. The experience factor of players like Drew Kendall and Logan Taylor, of Ozzy Trapilo, Dwayne Allick, Kevin Cline and Jude Bowry made it easy for Hafley to load balance his class by adding players who wouldn't have to necessarily play next year, but he still saw the measurables of loading a couple of players who could one day start next to players like Jack Funke, Ryan Mickow or Michael Crounse.

"Jadon Lafontant was a hard fight," Hafley said. "He's an offensive lineman who can play both tackle and guard, and when I first saw him, he looked like Christian Mahogany. That's the type of body size that he has where he's very athletic but has a very good three-technique. He was committed to Kentucky but we stayed on him and stayed consistently. In our opinion, that's a local guy [from Connecticut] that was here in the New England area, and we had him on campus [earlier in December]. We had him and his mom at practice, and we spent a lot of time with him in the office. Flipping him was a big one for us.

"Pape Sy is from Senegal," he continued, "and we found him in the NFL Academy [in London]. Chris Snee did a great job there with Osi Umenyiora, and they sent us a bunch of film. He's a giant with a wingspan that I've never seen before, and he was one of the coolest visits that we had. He got here with an appreciation and a smile on his face of all the little things that make you take a step back and appreciate [everything] like sleeping on a comfortable bed or eating certain types of food, and he was just so grateful for everything that he had on his visit. But then we watched his film, and he was doing all of his drills in sand. It's 110 degrees, and there's this giant doing footwork drills and running in sand, and he looked athletic. He's a different kid."

Finding diamonds in the rough is a staple part of the BC experience, but the entire process illustrated how Hafley, a known recruiter who was a former finalist for the Broyles Award as the top assistant coach in the country, is remaining fluid to the circumstances surrounding him. The class itself looked small and wasn't favored by experts solely dedicated to ranking teams based on their incoming freshmen class, but the blended newcomers struck a nerve of where BC looked at its future while simultaneously planning to hit the portal in college football's "free agency."

"It's hard," Hafley admitted, "because it used to be where you laid out your freshmen, your sophomores, your juniors, and your redshirts, and you kind of knew who you would need to replace each year. [With the transfer portal], you don't know who you're going to need to replace anymore, so it could be that in a particular class, we know we're going to need four offensive linemen and no receivers, but then two receivers leave and you have to recruit two more. It's really hard to manage a roster, so I just started looking at positions where we really needed depth.

"You're going to attack those positions regardless," he added, "but there are guys where you ask about not passing up on him because he's too good or if you think you should take him. There's no way to predict it, but we've been really fortunate where our starters and older players have largely stayed. You have to go through the spring portal again, and the hard part is after the spring if kids decide to go into the transfer portal. The only input to your roster is then the transfer portal and whoever's left in the portal because there isn't any high school recruiting that can [change] that. So you have to guess at which positions you want to overload."

Understanding that dynamic is changing college football, and the portal itself is now part of the lexicon that every coach is dealing with. Players leaving is now standard, and the reasons behind players leaving is more complex than the surface-level belief that someone is simply angry or doesn't want to say. The maturation process is very different, and players who decided to leave or stay closer to home may decide and change over time. Teams, likewise, shift, which is why a more professional mentality is starting to emerge when it comes to digesting the whole recruiting cycle.

"Managing rosters is really challenging," Hafley said. "There are high-need positions where you absolutely have to have depth, and it becomes a priority. But then you just can't say no to a really good player who can help you in the future. It's tricky. Man, it has really become tricky."

Through that cycle, BC fielded a recruiting class that it believes will form the nucleus for its future success. The players that were brought to BC may or may not stay at their current positions over time, but the development model installed through the strength and conditioning program will eventually turn them into the next group of four-year Eagles. Building that belief along with the installed culture that allows transfers to see how things might work for this year doesn't mean that the Eagles will avoid adding 20-odd players with a huge, highly-touted recruiting class in the future, but for this year, the success factor allowed Hafley to take a deep breath on Wednesday night.

His class was secure, and the past, future, and present all merged into a single day that still celebrated the entire package of Boston College football, even if the fax machines were still buried somewhere in the Yawkey Center.