Siena Athletics Hall of Fame
Taaffe played quarterback on Siena's club football team for three seasons after transferring from Clemson. Taaffe holds the record for the most touchdown passes in a game (5) and is second on the team's career passing yardage list (3,310 yards). He went on to have an illustrious coaching career from 1973-2014, most notably winning a conference championship while at the helm of The Citadel in 1992, for which he won the Eddie Robinson Award as the top football coach in NCAA’s 1-AA division. He also served as the head coach of two different Canadian Football League teams (Montreal Alouettes, 1999-00 & Hamilton Tiger-Cats, 2007-08) and ended his career with a five-year stint as the Offensive Coordinator at the University of Central Florida, where he helped the Knights to a Fiesta Bowl upset in 2013 and helped quarterback Blake Bortles to be drafted third overall in the 2014 NFL Draft. Taaffe was inducted into The Citadel Athletics Hall of Fame in 2011 for his career as the program's winningest football coach. He died at the age of 69 on October 29, 2019.
