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The Green Bay Packers have hired Boston College head coach Jeff Hafley as their new defensive coordinator, the team announced Wednesday.
“We are excited to welcome Jeff, his wife, Gina, and their daughters, Hope and Leah, to the Packers and the Green Bay community,” Packers coach Matt LaFleur said in a statement. “Jeff has had success at every stop of his coaching career with an impressive track record of developing players at every level. We look forward to him leading our defense.”
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Hafley went 22-26 in four seasons at Boston College, bringing the Eagles to bowl eligibility in three of his four years. Boston College finished 7-6 this season with a win over No. 22 SMU in the Fenway Bowl.
Hafley had resisted prior NFL coaching opportunities in the past. But his reasons for taking this coordinator job are rooted in both the overall state of college football and the opportunity to work for one of the NFL’s most respected franchises.
hat is all about football,” a source told ESPN. “College coaching has become fundraising, NIL and recruiting your own team and transfers. There’s no time to coach football anymore.
“A lot of things that he went back to college for have disappeared.”
Hafley becomes the third sitting college head coach to leave on his accord this year for a coordinator job. He follows South Alabama’s Kane Wommack and Buffalo’s Maurice Linguist. They both took coordinator jobs at Alabama, and the moves speak to the gap created as the top-tier schools pull away from the others in terms of resources. That’s only been magnified in this era of name, image and likeness deals being critical to recruiting and roster retention.
The future of the Packers proved a significant allure to Hafley, as they have a strong young core and bright future. He’s a longtime friend of LaFleur’s and longtime admirer of the Packers franchise.
He’ll replace Joe Barry and be the third different defensive coordinator as LaFleur enters his sixth year as the franchise’s head coach.
While LaFleur and Hafley have never directly worked together, they have some mutual connections. Hafley was the Browns’ defensive backs coach in 2014-15 under then-head coach Mike Pettine, who was LaFleur’s first defensive coordinator in Green Bay (2019-20). Hafley also worked for 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, one of LaFleur’s mentors. Hafley was the 49ers’ defensive backs coach from 2016 to ’18 before he became Ohio State’s co-defensive coordinator.
The rest of the Packers defensive coaching staff is under contract for the 2024 season and none of them was let go when the Packers parted ways with Barry. So there’s a good chance some — or all — of them could return to work under Hafley.
Hafley is a veteran NFL assistant coach who worked seven years in the NFL coaching various secondary positions before returning to college football as Ohio State’s defensive coordinator in 2019.
Hafley became Boston College’s head coach following the 2019 season, taking over for the COVID-19-affected season of 2020. He had one losing record in four years — 3-9 in 2022.
The past three Boston College coaches have failed to win nine games, as the school’s last nine-win season came under Jeff Jagodzinski in 2008.
Hafley’s time at Boston College included three of the top recruiting classes in BC history. In 2022, Hafley led BC to its first win over an Associated Press-ranked opponent since 2014 when BC upset No. 16 NC State. BC’s bowl win this seaso
Niners’ D urged to up effort after ‘unacceptable’ play vs. Lions
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49ers DC on lack of effort: It was embarrassing (0:30)
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — In the aftermath of their NFC Championship Game win against the Detroit Lions, the San Francisco 49ers first felt a sense of relief followed by joy and then, after watching the tape, at least a little bit of disappointment.
For all of coach Kyle Shanahan’s tenure since taking over in 2017, the Niners have prided themselves on playing at full speed all the time. But on multiple plays in the 34-31 win against the Lions, Shanahan and his staff spotted issues with
“Collectively as a team, I can tell you as a defense it’s unacceptable,” defensive coordinator Steve Wilks said Friday. “We talked about that. I wish I could tell these guys on Play 4, on Play 27, this is what’s going to happen. You don’t know. So we’ve got to make sure that we play every down as if it’s going to be the difference in the ballgame. And you could see on those particular plays, it wasn’t to our standard. Those guys understand and know that, and quite honestly it was embarrassing.”
Shanahan pointed to two or three plays in the game that he said were “not our culture.” That culture is rooted in the ethos of past defensive coordinators such as Robert Saleh, who preached an “all gas, no brakes” mentality, and DeMeco Ryans, who insisted on “swarming” opposing ball carriers.
For most of this season, effort has not been an issue. But it did show up against the Lions and contributed to San Francisco’s 24-7 halftime deficit. Shanahan called out his defense for what he considered poor backside pursuit on run plays against the Lions.
That was most evident on Detroit running back Jahmyr Gibbs’ 15-yard touchdown run when defensive end Chase Young could be seen jogging toward Gibbs, who cuts back in front of Young for the score. There was a similar problem in the secondary on Lions wide receiver Jameson Williams’ 42-yard touchdown run.
“They were expecting someone else to make the tackle,” Shanahan said. “Whenever you’re expecting someone else to make the tackle, bad things happen. ”
Those bad things have added up for the Niners defense in the postseason. Through two games against the Green Bay Packers and Lions, San Francisco has given up an average of 26 points and 159 rushing yards per game, a significant uptick from the 17.5 points and 89.7 rushing yards it yielded in the regular season.
On Friday, general manager John Lynch cited his playing career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ dominant defense of the late 1990s and early 2000s as the standard of what he expects from a Niners defense that has consistently been among the best in the NFL over the past five seasons.
“Effort is a nonnegotiable,” Lynch said. “Those things have been addressed. You’ve got one game. I really would be shocked if we saw that again.”
That one game just happens to be the one the Niners have been longing to return to for most of the past four years. The 49ers leave for Las Vegas on Sunday to finish preparations for Super Bowl LVIII against the Kansas City Chiefs, the same team that defeated them in Super Bowl LIV.
