The Packers hired Jeff Hafley yesterday to be their new defensive coordinator. We’ll have a little more on the Packers side of this move below. Up here, though—more interestingly from a broader perspective—we want to talk about why Hafley left Boston College. Because if the reporting is accurate, Hafley left Boston College because he did not want to be a college head coach. Not in 2024, anyway.
This is a common theme in college football, and in college basketball as well. Coaches retire, or coaches otherwise leave their jobs, and the reports come out that the coach didn’t want to do this anymore in this NIL and transfer portal era. It’s fair. Being a college head coach is a 365-day job, and as Hafley reportedly bemoaned, a lot of the gig is not what we think of as coaching. It’s recruiting, and it’s managing an informal network of boosters, and intertwined with both those fronts is the complicated task of keeping an entire roster from jumping ship.
Put this way, the current situation sounds bad for college sports, and to be sure, it’s bad. Any time your industry is driving out talented people (Hafley was fine, but Jay Wright was an all-time great), you have an issue. It is not, however, anywhere close to a doomsday scenario. Two things:
First, this isn’t all that different from how things already worked. Especially on the NIL front. If anything, the NIL changes have made college coaches’ jobs easier, streamlining that booster relationship. The issue is the transfer portal. More accurately, the issue is that players can transfer an unlimited number of times. This is a good and fair thing. Without contracts, there is no justifiable reason players shouldn’t be allowed to transfer as often as other students transfer or change jobs as freely as other professionals (or semi-professionals) change jobs. It’s unfortunate, but given the limits of the non-employee model, it’s a necessary evil. Even then, though, the evil is just a multiplication of a job the coaches already do 365 days a year. Recruiting is already constant. The difference is that coaches now have to recruit their current roster in addition to their future one. It’s like that old piece of marriage advice about continuing to date your wife.
Second, the turnover is happening, and the coaches who stay are choosing to stay, and new coaches know what they’re getting into. It’s uncomfortable, and we’re losing some greats, but even if this remains the status quo—and we’re probably approaching a nadir in the livability of the college coaching profession, with some sort of employment solution surely on its way in the next ten or twenty years—the new generation will be more accepting of this reality than guys like Hafley and Wright.
It’s going to be fine. It’s easy to overblow it. But the phenomenon is real, and it shouldn’t be dismissed. Being a college head coach is an insanely demanding job.
Wisconsin Basketball and the Michigan Model
Credit to kenpom for all stats in this section unless otherwise indicated.
Wisconsin plays Nebraska tonight, and it might not go well. Nebraska is undefeated at home in Big Ten play, an offensive powder keg who smoked Purdue three weeks ago and handily beat Michigan State back in December. Still, Wisconsin is a narrow favorite, and after this game, the Badgers’ schedule gets exciting. They still have to play Purdue both at home and away, but in every other game this regular season, they should be favored. They’re tracking to finish second in the Big Ten, but they lead it right now, and with even the Penn State loss at least coming on the road, it’s not unfathomable that they could be a 2-seed in March. Draw the right region of the bracket, and a Final Four return might only be one upset away.
The really exciting thing for Badgers fans, though, is next year.
Wisconsin is much the same team as it was in 2023. Greg Gard brought back every rotation player but Jordan Davis. He added AJ Storr and John Blackwell, and Connor Essegian’s been edged out of a starting role, but the product is roughly 75% the same. The other 25% is Storr, the St. John’s transfer for whom Gard and his staff carved a big hole in the middle of their offensive approach. Storr is taking a third of this team’s shots, and he’s still producing at an above-average efficiency, while Tyler Wahl and Chucky Hepburn have bounced back dramatically from last season’s struggles, adapting comfortably to reduced offensive roles. On the defensive end? There’s been no meaningful shift. A solid defensive team remains solid. A bad offensive team has become excellent.
Next year? It’s possible only Wahl will move on. There are other question marks—maybe Storr plays so well down the stretch that he declares for the draft; maybe Essegian doesn’t like the reduced role and, as speculated, transfers—but barring that Storr departure, Wisconsin is poised to bring back much of the same core yet again next season, losing a key veteran but only, per EvanMiya, their third-most important player.
There are some echoes here of Michigan football in those final Harbaugh years. Harbaugh had a good team, and through some luck with Covid eligibility, that team was able to age together until it was refined into one of the best teams in college football history. Wisconsin might be able to do something similar, albeit with a slightly lower ceiling.
The aging approach doesn’t always work in college. You need good players to begin with, and they must be players who develop with age as opposed to stagnating. Wisconsin is already so good, though, and Wisconsin’s roster is so well-rounded, that with the one right addition (presumably through the portal), the Badgers could easily be Big Ten favorites to open 2024–25. It’s not outrageous to think they could be among the national championship favorites as well.
The Rest
More college basketball:
- Our friend John Templon tweeted something last night about his alma mater’s loss to Purdue: “There are no moral victories in the NCAA Tournament selection process, or are there?” It’s a good point. While NET has many flaws and using kenpom and BPI as selection criteria is questionable (as Ken Pomeroy himself has said), it isn’t the worst thing for these bubble teams that they can get some credit for taking a great team to the wire. Good for Northwestern. Heck of a performance.
- We were skeptical of Florida’s ability to win in Lexington (we bet against the Gators and took very short moneyline odds), but Todd Golden’s team is cooking. Walter Clayton had a huge night, and the Gators have suddenly won four straight, pulling themselves well clear of the bubble, at least for the moment. As for Kentucky: They still aren’t summing up. They were shorthanded last night, but they look like a more questioned version of Kansas: They have tons of talent and the product is somehow not elite. It looked like it could become that when Zvonimir Ivisic debuted, but as we probably should have guessed, the guy is not going to fundamentally change the team. Like Kansas, Kentucky is a fringe top-4 seed in terms of quality. The difference is that Kansas doesn’t have the troubling track record and frustrated fanbase.
Chicago, the Packers, nothing today on Iowa State:
- Hafley, for the Packers: I really don’t have much to say. He has a good story, and his experience checks out. He’s coached defense for plenty of years at the NFL level, and he’s coached defense for plenty of years, and he has plenty of experience working with young men, something the Packers have no shortage of (and will not have any shortage of for at least a few more years). One good lesson here: Because of the NFL’s rules about interviewing NFL coaches, you hear a lot about intra-NFL moves before they happen. This was a surprise, but only because the Packers didn’t have to be widely sharing that they were interviewing Hafley. He’s not some wacky hire.
- The Bulls got the win in Charlotte, bouncing back from the rough night Tuesday against the Raptors. Not a lot to add here either. Coby White continues to become a rockstar. The longer this goes on, the lesser the chance it’s a fluke, or unsustainable. At the moment, it appears vastly more likely than not that the breakthrough is for real.
Four more things:
- For our third Hafley segment of the day…the college football coaching carousel has lit back up. Boston College does get to navigate this unexpected transition at a time between transfer portal windows, which helps, but they need to find a new head coach right exactly now, and depending who that is, another program might need to find one right now too. There are some funny names on the lists—Bill Belichick is popular on message boards—but there are also a lot of promising names getting traction. Al Golden, whose failure at Miami may have been a product more of Miami than of Golden. Jason Candle, the hugely successful head coach at Toledo. Liam Coen, offensive coordinator at Kentucky and recently for the Rams. Plenty others. One of our guys threw in Tommy Rees’s name, with Rees currently poised to be an assistant with the Browns after possibly being the runner-up for the Alabama job. Boston College is a terribly hard gig in modern college football, but with the ACC deteriorating, it could get easier quickly, and it does seem like the kind of school that might have some dormant potential when it comes to enthusiasm from its boosters.
- After what will be twelve years, six individual titles, and eight constructor championships (barring a surprise this year), Lewis Hamilton is leaving Mercedes to join Ferrari after this season. Charles Leclerc will remain on, so Hamilton will be taking the seat of Carlos Sainz. While I’m admittedly not the most knowledgeable about F1, this is an athlete of Michael Jordan stature joining a franchise like the present-day Yankees, trying to recapture echoes of former grandeur. I don’t know where it leaves Mercedes, but it’s sure exciting.
- The report is out on Bert Neff and Brad Bohannon, the bettor/baseball coach combo who conspired to attempt the sports betting equivalent of insider trading on an Alabama pitcher’s health this spring. At first glance, the story appeared to be that Neff was the bad guy and Bohannon was careless, and that Neff was a little careless himself and that’s why he got caught. Turns out, Bohannon was as nefarious as Neff, a willing participant who told Neff “(pitcher’s name) is out for sure,” then told him to let him know once the bet was placed so he could tell LSU. Neff, meanwhile, was more than a little careless. He was trying to show sportsbook employees the text from Bohannon. It’s been a big week for cartoon villainy.
- The PGA Tour’s recent investment news still doesn’t make a lot of sense, at least to me. My impression of what’s going on is that outside investors have invested in the PGA Tour, and that this is supposed to create larger pots of money for golfers, namely through their ownership of some performance-related equity in the new entity. Some—most notably Jordan Spieth—are saying this could be enough to make the proposed deal with PIF (already bogged down in negotiations and legal troubles and not looking anywhere similar to the LIV-PGAT merger it appeared to be in June) unnecessary. My question with this is: How does this give the golfers more money? Are the investors giving it away? The word “invest” does not traditionally mean that those giving the money are expecting to lose it. Generally, they expect to make money. But if they’re expecting to make money and the golfers are expecting to make money, then the PGA Tour needs to be making a lot more money, and we aren’t seeing a lot of details on how this arrangement makes it possible to do that. What is changing about the PGA Tour to make it more profitable? What am I missing here?
