Even a year ago as his first season as a college coach was canceled due to COVID-19, Northern Colorado’s Ed McCaffrey couldn’t have foreseen the challenges he’d face when he finally got to take the field with his team in 2021.

Players and coaches missing time due to COVID protocols was an inevitable challenge that all teams faced this fall, but that challenge has been made significantly worse for McCaffrey’s UNC program, which has a large number of unvaccinated personnel.

“This is an unprecedented season for me and our program,” McCaffrey said Wednesday. “It’s really hard to keep your football program together with a significant number of unvaccinated players and coaches. It’s nothing that I could have foreseen a year ago, but certainly going into this season we knew that would be our biggest challenge and it certainly has been. We continue to miss coaches that will not be here this week, we continue to miss players that will not be here this week. Availability of players and coaches is huge. We don’t have a lot of rules in our program except show up, work hard and have fun, and we’ve struggled to follow rule No. 1, which is just to show up. I don’t know that words can describe how difficult that’s been for us.”

McCaffrey said he and UNC athletic director Darren Dunn spoke to the team before the season about the importance of getting vaccinated not just from an availability and protocols perspective, but from a health and safety perspective as well, with McCaffrey revealing that a few members of the coaching staff that have contracted COVID-19 have had very bad symptoms.

“I love our coaches and I’m praying for the ones that are sick right now to get healthy,” McCaffrey said. “More than anything, I want them to get better. Some of them are very sick. It’s sad and it was really scary last week for a couple of our guys, and thankfully they’re doing a little bit better now.”

This is not at all how McCaffrey envisioned the start to his college coaching career, and the team’s 2-5 record is probably the smallest concern at the moment. COVID protocols have been the biggest issue with the Bears and lately McCaffrey has been wondering what he could’ve done differently to help mitigate the issues that have persisted.

“We went through this thoroughly before the season and maybe it’s my fault,” McCaffrey said. Maybe other coaches forced their players and coaches to get vaccinated. I decided that’s each individual’s choice. I encouraged them to, and I explained that if we have a number of unvaccinated players, because of the COVID protocols at our school, it will wipe out whole bunches of players because all of the unvaccinated players will immediately get quarantined whether they get COVID or not. So that’s really been the issue. Not only the player that got COVID, it’s the whole batch of players because of contact tracing have to go into quarantine because they’re not vaccinated, and they also get tested more regularly. I’m sure coaches probably had behind doors meetings and said [their players] had to [get vaccinated] for liability reasons and other reasons. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to let everybody know how important it is, let them know it’s the biggest challenge to our season and how it could bring us down if we’re missing too many players and coaches. Everyone made their choices and unfortunately for us we have a high percentage of unvaccinated players and coaches and certainly the worst-case scenario happened.”

McCaffrey also knows the situation isn’t going to go away, either. COVID protocols at UNC don’t appear to be going away anytime soon, and even after the season ends, there’s offseason workouts and spring practices that are crucial for player development and can make or break the progression of a program.

“I hope that it’s not something that is going to significantly impact the rest of our season or our offseason or next season,” McCaffrey said. “We have to figure out what to do. I’ve seen schools in the Pac-12 fire coaches for not being vaccinated and I think it’s because they understand the threat that COVID poses to the people that aren’t vaccinated.”

If there has been one positive to take away from this season filled with constant challenges, it’s that McCaffrey has gotten to learn a lot about the players within the program that have been available all season.

“The encouraging part is a lot of young players have gotten an opportunity to compete and develop and I’ve loved their attitude,” McCaffrey said. “We’re going to battle with whoever shows up. But we still have a lot of great young men in our program that are leaders on our team that will not quit and will keep fighting through whatever adversity we have. This time of year, it’s very character building. It certainly hasn’t gone the way we’d hoped up to this point, but we’ve got a lot of football to play. We’ve got four games left and we’re not looking past this one. Southern Utah is a tough opponent, they’ve played a couple of teams well. We certainly can’t take anyone for granted.”