Better Know an ACC Opponent: Boston College

We begin a long off-season project with the furthest flung of Cal's new conference mates.

In case you’ve blissfully forgotten, the Pac-12 is dead and Cal is now in a conference named after the other side of the country. If you’re reading this, it means that this new reality is not a deal breaker for you. Over the rest of the off-season, we’ll profile each and every member of this conference that Cal has joined, that will definitely 100% exist it its current form for years if not decades.

Hey, if this is what college sports is now, we’re going to enjoy the absurdity of it all. First up? Boston College!

Give me the basics

Boston College is, in many ways, the stereotype of what a college is supposed to be in the broad American psyche. Big fancy gothic buildings, religious but lowkey about it, in Boston but not IN Boston . . . it’s not the Ivy League but it’s pretty damn close. Or, at least, that’s what it looks like to me, 3,000 miles away on the West Coast. Maybe I’ve offended BC fans, or Ivy Leaguers, or both? I dunno, I have trouble distinguishing all of those college in Boston.

This one has Doug Flutie and a really famous play that often competes for the title of 2nd greatest play in college football history, so they’ve got that.

BC are relative newcomers to the ACC, joining in 2005 at the end of a round of poaching and legal wrangling with the Big East, which sounds depressingly familiar. I really miss the days when all this conference wrangling was largely confined to west of the Rockies.

Do they have any interesting history with Cal?

No, they do not. Cal football is 0-1, with an unremarkable road loss in Joe Kapp’s final 2-9 season in 1986. Cal basketball is 0-3, and the most recent loss was when a bad BC team beat an even worse Cal team in San Francisco in Mark Fox’s debut season. Cal women’s basketball is 1-1, and I don’t have any memories of either game. We’ll do a full review after getting to know every ACC team, but I think there’s a decent chance that this is the single team that Cal has the LEAST amount of pre-existing history against. I vaguely remember being frustrated when Cal MBB lost in 2010-11 but that was the year after Jerome and company graduated and my expectations were low.

You may remember me from such Pac-12 teams as:

This is a tough one. In terms of athletics success, the closest match would probably be Oregon State - mostly blah in both basketball and football, but with one non-revenue sport that is generally excellent and gets a lot of local attention. But big city, private school BC is hardly a match for rural land-grant Oregon State.

Honestly, culturally BC just isn’t very similar to ANY Pac-12 school. And maybe that makes sense - after all, this is the FBS team that is literally the furthest away from Cal and the west coast more generally.

I want to get on their good side. I should agree with them about:

The brutal beauty of hockey as an athletic endeavor, and its perfect cultural expression during The Beanpot. If you can find a way to insult the Boston University Terriers along the way, all the better.

If you’re looking for more football-based fun, you can praise BC as ‘offensive lineman U’ and then agree that BC is by far the best catholic university in the country no matter what those Golden Domers claim.

I want to troll them incessantly. I should make fun of them for:

I think the lazy answer would be something about how fans in New England don’t care about college football, but I can’t say that trolling BC fans with the same insult we get hurled at us is particularly appealing.

There’s also all of the various Boston stereotypes, but per BC’s website, only about 30% of BC’s student body is from New England. Maybe that would make your lazy Dunkin Donuts Boston accent joke all the more enraging?

Rivalries?

I kinda feel bad for BC here, because Wikipedia seriously lists Virginia Tech as a football rival because it dates back to 1993. Syracuse is probably the best answer in terms of frequency and longevity at the FBS level, and Notre Dame for cultural/religious reasons, but BC just doesn’t seem to have a notable football rival.

What should I know about their current coaches?

Jeff Hafley somewhat surprisingly left BC for the defensive coordinator position with the Green Bay Packers, leading to some hand-wringing about how the modern reality of college football is driving away coaches. That didn’t stop Bill O’Brien from accepting the job, and we’ll soon find out if the former Penn State and Houston Texas head coach breaks BC out of their .500 stasis, either in a good way or a bad way.

I couldn’t find much to say about MBB coach Earl Grant other than to note that he’s got a strong suit game.

Which alumni keep them stuck in the past?

I assume it must be Doug Flutie, patron saint of undersized NFL success stories and noted Nugenix pitchman.

I’m sure Matt Ryan is plenty beloved as well, and at least there’s one super-distant Cal connection - Ryan and BC took over the #2 spot from Cal in the insane 2007 season following Cal’s loss to Oregon State, which would last into early November.

Which alumni will they pretend they’ve forgotten?

Wayne LaPierre, former chairman of the NRA, may well be hated by both sides of the aisle, after a career spent ensuring that the United States leads the western world in gun deaths while ALSO defrauding his organization out of millions!

What non-revenue sport do they care about most?

Ice Hockey takes the cake . . . and I suppose it would be an exaggeration to suggest that BC fans care about hockey more than football, but the Hockey team absolutely outdraws the MBB team, and why shouldn’t they? There have been 76 editions of the Frozen Four, and BC has participated in 26 of them, winning five. The Eagles just lost in the men’s hockey championship game this past weekend in a heartbreaking end to a dominant season.

Should I go see Cal play a game there?

Boston is a major city that’s easy to access and with a ton of history, and if Cal draws a road game during the right time of fall, you’ll get to enjoy the famous New England fall foliage. BC sports may not be much of a draw themselves, but the city is one of the best in ACC country.

Is Cal better than them at sports right now?

Broadly? Probably. But let’s talk specifics.

Boston College basketball answers a question so horrible that none have dared ask it: What if Wyking Jones & Mark Fox, but for twice as long? Behold, perhaps the worst power conference MBB team in the nation:

To be fair, Earl Grant has BC slowly improving and the Eagles managed 20 wins for the first time since 2011 this past season. On the downside, their best player is out of eligibility and five dudes are in the portal so it’s probably the start of another rebuild on Chestnut Hill.

The women’s basketball program hasn’t made the NCAA tournament in 18 years that included an eight year run of below .500 overall records, which YIKES.

To their credit, Boston College’s football program has been remarkably consistent, though I don’t know if BC fans are super thrilled about the nature of that consistency. Since 2013, when Steve Addazio took over as coach, BC has managed 6 or 7 wins and a bowl appearance in 9 out of 11 seasons.

On the downside, BC has not won more than 7 games in any of those seasons, and much like Cal has not produced a season over .500 in conference play since 2009.

Cal will visit BC in 2025 and 2029 and get a return trip from the Eagles in 2027. Is there any value in trying to predict how good either program will be in two, four, and six years? Probably not. But get your bets in right now on whether or not Cal and BC will still even ben in the same conference once 2029 rolls around!