The Jeff Hafley Teach Tape

The Jeff Hafley Teach Tape

The picturesque small town of Loudonville is just a ten-minute drive from New York’s state capital, Albany. A former 19th-century summer resort for some of the region’s wealthiest residents, its streets are lined with Jeffersonian mansions, characterized by their red brick, white classical porticos, octagonal geometry, and concealed service wings. Named after a Scottish Army officer born two years before the creation of Great Britain, it was famously the home of Henry Reed Rathbone, the former military officer and lawyer who was sat with Abraham Lincoln when the president was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.

Just over a mile from the house Rathbone shared with his wife and children, and where Lincoln’s ghost is said to have appeared on multiple occasions, is the campus of Siena University, a private liberal arts college founded by the Order of Friars Minor in 1937 and named after the Franciscan friar Bernardino of Siena. It’s here where new Dolphins coach Jeff Hafley, an undersized receiver from Bergen County whose playing career as a Saint would be stymied by multiple leg fractures, got the coaching bug.

“I had to have a bunch of surgeries,” he told a North Jersey newspaper back in 2020. “So while I was recovering, I’d go in and watch tape with the coaches. They’d even let me sit up in the booth, and I’d help them coach until I got better.  At that point, I kind of figured, ‘You know what? Maybe I want to coach in college.”

Hafley’s original plan was to become a high school history teacher, thinking he could coach some football or baseball on the side. But it became clear pretty quickly that the sideline gig would become THE gig, and when he interviewed for his first coaching position under his former Siena head coach, Ed Zaloom, he showed the breadth of his ambition. “I told Jeff I needed him for two years,” Zaloom told Albany’s News10. “However, during the interview, he said he could only do one year, but for a reason. ‘I want to be the head coach of Notre Dame within 10 or 15 years,’ he said. I looked at him like he had three heads,” said Zaloom.

Turns out Haf wasn’t too far wrong.

And no matter where he’s coached, whether it was Division-III WPI, Ohio State, the 49ers, Boston College, or Green Bay, his players all say the same thing:

Jeff Hafley is a hell of a teacher.

That became pretty evident in a four-minute, fifty-three-second video released by the Dolphins last night, which was a mix of coaching, dapping, laughing, praising, running, cheerleading, self-learning, and above all, teaching. From the first ten seconds, where he praised underperforming pass rusher Chop Robinson for setting good edges in practice, there were twenty-three separate coaching-specific interactions with his players, most of whom he referred to by their surnames. He bounded over to rookie TE Will Kacmarek to offer praise, pulled former Ravens edge David Ojabo out and told him how to play with better technique, and bantered with safety Michael Taaffe, telling him to wink at former Texas teammate Quinn Ewers when he picked him off. Throughout the video, Hafley was all over his players with hints, tips, and advice for how to do their jobs.

Perhaps the most striking thing, though, was seeing his very intentional involvement with the offense, all done through the lens of his own coaching development and education. In Green Bay, he worked closely with offensive and defensive quality control coaches TC McCartney, Jeremiah Kolone, and Will Smart, who ran the scout teams. Yet despite being an offensive player both in HS and in college, Hafley’s obsession with coverages – press man, zone, vision and break, quarters, and match – took him over to the defensive side of the ball, where he’s thrived.

The middle portion of yesterday’s mic’d-up session became a comedic back-and-forth between the head coach and his newly minted star running back, De’Von Achane, over his involvement with the offense. At one point, he turns to the former Texas A+M star and says pointedly, “I’m not coaching offense, I’m coaching the whole team.”

As podcast host Chris Kouffman pointed out on Twitter last night, when hiring his defensive staff, Hafley stated he needed guys he could trust to install his defense during OTAs and Training Camp, “because he planned to spend that time focusing on the entire team”, including the offense. Then, once the season began, during games, he would function as the de facto defensive coordinator.

What we saw in the video is what he promised months ago.

And yet there’s also a very clear difference between his “hands-on” nature with defensive players versus how he works with the offensive players. With his defense, he comes off as a technical expert in every position. He’s quick to rattle off nuggets of nuanced advice and encouragement, whether that was with safeties Lonnie Johnson or Dante Trader, rookie LB Trey Moore, or CB Ethan Robinson.

But as Kouffman rightly pointed out, with the offense he comes off as a……tourist.

However, as last night’s video underlined, as a head coach and the lead actor for the Miami Dolphins, he comes off as a teacher, and for the youngest team in the NFL aiming to be challenging by 2028, that’s a powerful thing, and what this franchise needs.