Are we really supposed to feel sorry for Jeff Hafley that he had to go back to the NFL?

Jeff Hafley was making just under $3 million a year to win five and a half games a year as the Boston College football coach.

The NIL-obsessed are trying to make Hafley somehow a martyr now that he’s leaving BC for the defensive coordinator job with the NFL’s Green Bay Packers.

Like we’re supposed to feel sorry for a guy who was getting paid $3 million a year to be a mediocre college football coach.

“He wants to go coach football again in a league that is all about football,” a source told ESPN, in supposedly explaining Hafley’s motivation for taking the NFL job.

“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,” the source said.

Cry me a river.

Look, being the head coach of a college football or college basketball program is no fun, I get that.

We only think about the people in charge 12 or so times a year in football season, 30 or so times a year in hoops season, but even in-season, and certainly out, they’re on the road all the time, recruiting high school kids, college transfers, schmoozing up the donors, the rest.

That’s the job, why they get paid the big bucks, and, hate to break it to you, the people in these jobs are way, way, way overpaid.

In the business world, CEOs – want to argue with me that college football and basketball coaches aren’t CEOs – generally are paid at a rate roughly equivalent to a half to a full 1 percent of the business’s overall revenues, meaning, a business bringing in $100 million in annual revenue would pay its CEO between $500,000 and $1 million.

Alabama Football, to cite one prominent example, reported $130.9 million in revenue in fiscal year 2022; Nick Saban’s salary that year was $10.7 million, so, roughly 10 times what he would have been making in the real world.

From Saban, who is now retired, on down to the D3 level, the job of a college football head coach isn’t teaching the finer points of how to break in and out of a pass route, swim moves to get past an O lineman, scheming the X’s and O’s – you have an army of assistants to take care of those and other various and sundry details.

You’re the face of the program; and as the face of the program, it’s your job to oversee 150 or so people working to win football games, and make sure there’s enough money to pay for everybody and everything.

Is it tougher now in the era of NIL and unlimited immediate transfers? Absolutely.

Is it disingenuous for Jeff Hafley to use an anonymous source to make it out that he’s leaving because he doesn’t like it now that the kids have power that they didn’t have even five years ago?

Without a doubt.