At Boston College, Isaiah McDuffie still speaks loudest on the football field.

Credit: Buffalo News

• Rachel Lenzi

• Oct 23, 2020

Isaiah McDuffie needed football gloves. Not one pair. Not two, but three pairs. 

When he made the request to his father, Steve, who was also his football coach at Bennett High School, Steve didn’t say no. But he questioned his son’s request for extra equipment before he relented and bought the three pairs of gloves. 

A few days later, Steve McDuffie took inventory of his football team at Bennett, a collection of students from seven high schools in Buffalo. He noticed one of his players wearing the gloves he’d bought for his son. 

“Isaiah has a pair and he’s wearing them, but he’s sharing with his teammates,” Steve McDuffie said. “They might not have what he has. Isaiah always wanted to give the impression that I was buying something for him, but he wanted to his teammates to have what he had, too. Quietly, he would give. He was giving like that.” 

It was always in Isaiah McDuffie’s understated nature to help others, whether he was working with special-needs students in a gym class at Frederick Law Olmsted School, or convincing friends and baseball teammates to play football. 

Now a redshirt junior and a linebacker at Boston College, McDuffie still speaks and acts with thought. But when he's on the football field, he performs with a roar.  

He’s second in the Atlantic Coast Conference and is tied for second in the nation in tackles as Boston College plays Saturday at Georgia Tech. 

“My dad helped me get to this point, and my uncles, all who played at the Division I level,” McDuffie said. “We knew what it took to get to this point, but it’s about putting in the work off the field and staying on top of everything you do. Be in the books. Go to the weight room. Take the guidance. A big part of this has been someone being there for you, and knowing what to do, and what you need to do.”  

From a competitive family 

McDuffie grew up in a family of athletes. His father and uncles, Chris and Teddy, played football at the University at Buffalo in the early 1990s. His younger sister, Gabby, is a freshman on the Niagara County Community College women’s basketball team and is Olmsted’s career leading scorer in girls basketball. His cousin, Dylan, is a running back at UB. His younger brother, Noah, is a budding athlete. 

Family gatherings almost always become competitive affairs. Pickup basketball games among the cousins and uncles have lasted for hours, and almost always end with hugs and good-natured ribbing. 

“My teammates from Bennett would come over, too, and we just played basketball, and it was so competitive,” Isaiah McDuffie said. “There was a hard foul here and there, but we always had fun. And we still talk about those times.” 

McDuffie graduated from Olmsted in 2017, and was the Buffalo News' All-Western New York Player of the Year in 2016. He was also three-time All-WNY first-team selection who played at running back and at linebacker at Bennett. 

His family also served as a source of hope when McDuffie sustained a knee injury in the spring of 2019, which limited him to four games last season at BC. Still, he had 30 tackles, 3.5 tackles for loss and two sacks. 

“When you’re down – and I was in a low place with the injury, and having surgery, my family was definitely there for me,” McDuffie said. “They lifted me up in those tough moments and gave me the confidence that, hey, you’re going to get through this and it will be back to normal. I trusted them, and I’m so happy to have them. They mean a lot to me. They were a big factor in me getting my confidence back.” 

Going between two schools, two worlds 

In a way, McDuffie went between two worlds when he was in high school. At Olmsted, he was a baseball player and a student in a population that valued academic success and diversity. 

Because Olmsted didn’t have a football team, he played at Bennett, on a team that drew students from across the city, as the Buffalo Public Schools had merged its high school football programs. Several of his teammates went to Olmsted, and Mike Webster, a gym teacher at Olmsted, saw how McDuffie was able to gain the faith of his classmates, to buy into the Bennett football program. 

“You could see the brethren, and the brotherhood they formed at Olmsted, and the rest of the school really embraced it,” said Webster, who coached McDuffie in baseball at Olmsted. “The infectiousness of Isaiah brought the student body to games to root for the football team, as if it was our own football program. That’s something I hadn’t seen in years at Olmsted.” 

Steve McDuffie had a philosophy as a coach – each person on his team can learn something from someone else, as they worked toward a common goal. That formed a base for his son’s friendships through football. 

“I was close with people at Bennett and people at Olmsted and spent a lot of time with the people there, because those are my teammates,” McDuffie said. “They’d come over to my house, or we’d go out, and we spent a lot of time together. And with my dad coaching, I was always around Bennett, growing up. Even in middle school, when I was a water boy for the Bennett football team. I’d waited for this my whole life, and when I finally got the opportunity to play for my dad and to play for Bennett, it was a great high school experience.” 

At Bennett, people also saw the competitor in McDuffie. His family nicknamed him, “Clark Kent” because of his low-key demeanor, which counters his intensity as an athlete.  

“He was really a man of his own in school, but he was a leader, especially as a teammate,” said Brandon Barksdale, a former classmate at Olmsted and a former football teammate. “When he’s on the field, it’s like, ‘This is my thing.’ He’s there for a purpose, and with him, you’re going to get things done.” 

McDuffie also put faith in his teammates and friends. He urged Barksdale, a youth baseball teammate of his, to join the football team at Bennett. McDuffie, Barksdale said, also accepted everyone around him and wanted to be the person who pushed his teammates to be the best. 

“Isaiah believes he was one of the fortunate kids from here, who was able to get an opportunity to play,” Steve McDuffie said. “But he believes there’s so many other kids that play football, especially in the Buffalo Public Schools, that if they were given a chance to play, or even got the looks to play college football, they could be successful at that level, too.” 

'His ceiling is so high' 

Boston College coach Jeff Hafley didn’t expect his first season leading the Eagles to be like this. He imagined his office in Chestnut Hill, Mass., as a place where his players could come and go, where conversations could be had, where lunches could be eaten, film could be watched and where relationships could be cemented. 

The Covid-19 pandemic – and the mandate for social distancing, as a means to curb the spread of the highly contagious virus – upended Hafley’s plans. 

“I’m not able to be around these guys as much as I want,” Hafley said. “No one is really allowed around.” 

Hafley works as much as he can to build working relationships with his players. He’s taken note of McDuffie’s focus and his intensity on the field, as well as his habits in meetings, down to McDuffie’s meticulous note-taking. 

“It is very important for him to get everything right,” Hafley said. “He cares so much. And football is so important to him.” 

Hafley became Boston College’s coach last December, and saw a spot for McDuffie and teammate Max Richardson as the leaders on the defense. 

“They have a great relationship, and it’s so key,” Hafley said. “Those two guys have to be in sync, because when things move, those two guys, they have to move together. Their gaps change and they have to play off each other. One guy blitzes, and they have to play off each other. The more those two can do it together, the better off we’re going to be.” 

Richardson leads the nation in tackles with 53, ahead of McDuffie, who has 52 (30 solo, 22 assisted) in five games. McDuffie also has an interception, three quarterback hurries and three sacks for the Eagles (3-2, 2-2 ACC). 

“His production is two-part, in our scheme, the way we play, he has to make a lot of tackles,” Hafley said of McDuffie. “If he’s not, we’re not going to be very good on defense. He can run, he can hit and he flashes all over the football field. He’s like 'The Waterboy' out there, he just runs around, looking to hit, and hits everything that moves. 

“He’s got the right attitude, the right makeup, the right mentality, and you’re going see him continue to improve. His ceiling is so high.” 

It’s merely a coincidence that McDuffie’s first formative days around football were as the waterboy for his father’s teams at Bennett. 

Football as a greater means 

McDuffie is on track to earn his degree in psychology of learning and human development in December, and there’s some chatter about McDuffie possibly becoming an NFL prospect. Steve McDuffie knows that his son wants to reach for the highest level of the sport. 

Isaiah McDuffie also knows that life in football could be long – or it could be short. He and Webster, his teacher from Olmsted, had plenty of those conversations, about life after the game. 

“We’d talk about that, a lot,” Webster said. “He told me, ‘Why can’t I be a PE teacher and a coach, so I can stay in football and work with kids?’ I joked to him that, ‘Oh, you want to be me,’ and we both laughed. But he didn’t ever expect to leave football, and he even said, ‘Working with players and passing what I know to someone else is something I would really like to do.’ ” 

Sports is a passion for McDuffie, but it is also a vehicle that drives his life's purpose. 

“I want to help people, in any way,” McDuffie said. “Definitely something with sports, whether it’s being a coach or a principal or an athletic director. But I want to help people. I want to impact people’s lives and make them better.”