It’s hard to fathom at this point, but Zac Boyes says he wasn’t sure he was destined to play college football when he was a junior in high school.
“I wasn’t the biggest kid,” Boyes said. “I wasn’t 6-foot and I was barely 170 pounds soaking wet. I grew up in the DIII game and I knew how physical the game was.”
Zac was a four-sport star at Kenmore West. He played basketball, baseball and golf. But he was the son of a football coaching legend, Jerry Boyes. He had grown up watching his dad coach at Buffalo State. The game was in his blood.
“So going into my senior year, I challenged myself,” he said “I put in a lot of work in that offseason for football. I played four sports, so I never had the chance to work out as much as I wanted in the summer. I put my head down and grinded my senior year. That’s when my love of the game took over. I had more fun playing football my senior year than anything else.”
He took his game to a new level as a senior at Ken West, where he was a two-year starter at quarterback. Boyes set seven school records, breaking the school record by passing for 424 yards in a game his senior year. In 2019, he was the Section VI Class A-1 player of the year.
Boyes received no offers from Division I schools. Zero. He attracted interest from Division III colleges. Some were willing to let him play two sports. The idea of playing football and golf appealed to a kid who was a sheer competitor and was accustomed to shifting his athletic focus with the seasons.
“But I wanted to give my all to football,” Boyes said early this week. “After that senior season, I said, ‘I’m playing football,’ because I developed a confidence in myself and thought I was one of the best quarterbacks in the area. I didn’t think I got that kind of respect after my senior year and I wanted to go out and prove ‘I’m better than you think I am’ to people.”
He proved it, all right. In 2020, Zac committed to play football at Cortland State, along with his old friend Ryan Bitka, an offensive lineman whose father, Terry, was Jerry Boyes’ first hire as an assistant at Buffalo State. Zac was won over by Cortland's first-year head coach, Curt Fitzpatrick, an innovative offensive mind.
Pic Courtesy of Darl Zehr Photography
Cortland’s 2020 season was canceled by the pandemic. That gave Boyes and Bitka an extra season to mature, and four more years of eligibility. In 2021, Zac was the backup quarterback. The following year, as a sophomore captain, he threw for 2,826 yards and 28 touchdowns, setting a QB rating record for a Red Dragons team that won its second straight Empire 8 championship.
“He was a skinny kid, a four-sport athlete, probably didn’t get in the weight room a lot.,” Fitzpatrick recalled “But on the football field, he had great instincts and knowing his father, he would know the game very well. I didn’t know he would be first-team All-America, but you know he loves football. He’s a coach’s kid so he understands the grind of it. He’s been everything we thought he could be and a lot more.”
Last season, Boyes had a season to remember. He became a Division III superstar and All-American, passing for 4,794 yards and 44 touchdowns and running for eight more TDs. He threw only five interceptions.
He saved his best for the biggest game of all, passing for five touchdowns in the second half to lead Cortland State to a 38-37 victory over heavily favored North Central (Ill.) and a national championship in the 50th Stagg Bowl last December 15.
Jerry Boyes had waited half a century to see a Stagg Bowl title. He lost the title game twice as an All-American quarterback at Ithaca College. He inherited a moribund Buff State program in 1986 and built it into a Division III power that went to nine straight postseasons from 1991-99. But his teams never won it all.
So, you can imagine what it was like for Jerry, watching his son lead a magical run to the Stagg Bowl title last year and become the player of the game in the championship game.
“It’s tough to describe. Surreal is kind of the word,” Jerry said. After the game, I told him, ‘I’ve been able to wear a number of titles over the years, but to say that I’m Zac Boyes’ dad is one of the best titles. That’s pretty special.”
Zac was a special child. He was Jerry and Sue Boyes’s third child, born 13 years after brother, Kris, who played golf at St. Bonaventure. Katie, who is 16 years older, was a sports management major at Cortland State. Zac used to
visit his sister during her time in Cortland. Katie is married to Jack Mrozinski, who played football at Buff State and is head coach at Hiram College.
“Do you believe it?” Sue Boyes said. “Thirteen years from Kris and 16 from Katie. That’s why she’s like his other mother. I always say, ‘Same husband! Same husband!’ Some people would say, ‘Oh, you started a second family.’
“It was such a pleasant surprise. We never even thought about having a third child. Oh, for sure. For sure. And let me tell you, it was a big joke when people found out I was pregnant. It was such a blessing.”Jerry Boyes had brain cancer before the 1994 season, when he was 40. He had a tumor behind his left ear. It was removed in a seven-hour operation at Sisters Hospital, costing him the hearing in his left ear. Boyes says he was lucky to have a gifted surgeon. It was a humbling event for a humble man.
It had to feel like new life. Eight years later, Zac came along. Amid the teasing from their friends, there was a profound joy. Jerry had become Buff State’s athletic director in 1999 and quit coaching a year later, thinking he was hurting the team. But he came back in 2008 to revive the football program again.
Zac became a fixture at practices and games. So did Ryan Bitka, who was the same age. “That was our day care,” Zac said. “Going to Buff State, we were there all day for camp. That’s where a love for football began for me, and for Ryan I guess. We were around it so much, we saw the process and how hard our dads worked, and how much fun they had.”
“Zac is so much a chip off of Jerry,” Sue Boyes said. “He was the youngest one, He spent so much time with Jerry at Buff State, watching film. He’s like 8 years old, for God’s sake, watching film. They say one of his greatest strengths is he knows what’s going on, and he enjoys doing it. A student of the game.”
Jerry Boyes understood how Zac’s physical limitations caused him to be under-recruited. But there are things that can’t be calculated by a tape measure. They’ve never devised an instrument to measure an athlete’s competitive heart.
“Right,” Jerry said. “I’ve always said that if there was a way to measure a person’s grit, boy you’d be all set.”
Heart. Grit. How else do you explain Zac’s extraordinary run under the most intense pressure during Cortland State’s title run last fall? In Cortland’s final three games in the Division III playoffs, he completed 75.2 percent of his passes for 1,028 yards and 13 touchdowns. He didn’t throw a single interception — against three previously undefeated opponents.
In the Stagg Bowl, he had 472 yards of offense — 349 passing and 123 rushing. The last of his five second-half TD passes put the Red Dragons ahead with 1:41 to play. Cortland stopped a potential game-winning two-point conversion to hold on against the tournament’s top seed.
Sue Boyes said it seemed like fate. Cortland won its second game of the tourney, 25-24, when Zac led them to a TD and two-point conversion with 1:23 left. The Grove City kicker missed a 37-yard field goal that would have won it and ended Cortland’s run three games before the Stagg Bowl.
On the morning of the championship game, Sue and Jerry woke up and heard on the radio that it was National Underdog Day, which is celebrated on the third Friday of December. Can’t make this stuff up.
“They had like a .2 percent chance,” she said. “They were that big of an underdog. For those kids to come out and do what they did, it was unbelievable. They kept their calm and played it through.”
Now, Cortland State, which opens the 2024 season on Saturday against Hilbert at St. Francis High, will try to do it again. Boyes will be one of 35 seniors, though he will be without his tandem of 1,000-yard receivers from a season ago — Cole Burgess and JJ Laap.
Some teams might become complacent after winning a national championship and reaching the ultimate goal. Complacency won’t be an issue with Boyes, a supreme competitor playing his final season and determined to repeat.
“No, no,” he said. “That’s been our main message from Coach and from us. We can’t let complacency creep into our program and our preparation. Because once you have that entitlement, you have no shot. We’re not entitled to win any games. No one’s going to look at us and lay down. Teams are going to play their best. They want to take down the top dogs. We can’t be complacent as a team. Last year’s team wasn’t as good in week 1 as it was in week 15.
“It’s a long season and we have to keep getting better and better, and right now we’re not where we need to be. The only way to get there is get game reps, play a different opponent, get some film and learn from our mistakes.”
Zac knows the Cortland freshmen will be watching. He sets the standard. If he’s complacent, they’ll think it’s OK to do it, too. He’s an aspiring football coach and son of a coach, who believed you can never cut corners. Zac can’t believe his career is nearing the end, and he wants to make the most of it.“It’s a different feeling going into your last year,” he said. “There’s not a day that I want to cut any corners or cut any time out of football. I don’t want practice to end. I want this ride to go for as long as it can. It’s embracing every minute and every second, just to show these young guys everybody’s time comes to an end.
“It’s what you do with your time, how you will be remembered.”
Boyes wants to leave his mark at Cortland. He’s well on his way, but he wants to go out the right way. There were schools that tried to lure him away for his final season, which is commonplace in the era of the college athletics portal.
“I was never going anywhere, man,” he said. “It’s my last year here. It wouldn’t be fair to my teammates, because I wouldn’t have anything close to the place I was without them. We have 35 seniors this year. I want to enjoy the last ride with them. I didn’t want to get up and leave after one year of success.
“I want to leave a legacy. I want people to remember my name and what I did when I was in school.”“I think he could play for a lot of scholarship teams,” Fitzpatrick said. “But knowing Zac and how loyal he is to our team, I think he wants to create a legacy here at Cortland. He already holds every record there is, but there’s something to be said for being the best that’s ever done it at a particular school, especially one with 100 years of football history and tradition like Cortland.”
Zac never discussed leaving with his dad. He’s his father’s son, after all. People who know have said Jerry Boyes could have moved on to bigger things. He was that good a coach. But he was an even better father, who wanted to be around for his kids. You don’t jump to the next big thing for your ego.
Like his dad, Zac discovered how wonderful it is being the big man on campus in a small town, where you earn the lasting regard of a community.
“You can’t walk around without being recognized,” he said. “It comes with playing quarterback at Cortland. I love it. I embrace it. But it did change when we won the national title. Before that, I might have a couple of people saying hi and everything. But there’s a different energy now.”
In today’s changing college sports universe, there’s even a little financial benefit. Some of that NIL money came his way after the national title.
“I got a little bit from a couple small companies in Cortland,” he said. “My biggest one was a little commercial for a car dealership. That was a really cool thing. I’m definitely not making Shedeur Sanders money or anything. We got a couple free meals. It’s pretty good, though, pretty good.”
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