Bill O’Brien is already putting BC football back on the map originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
For no real reason on Monday morning except yardwork avoidance, I YouTubed one of the greatest games in Boston College football history, its 1993 upset of No. 1 Notre Dame.
That 41-39 victory is remembered for David Gordon’s improbable 41-yard field goal as time expired, but it was really about so much more: future NFL quarterback Glenn Foley shredded the Fighting Irish through the air, Brockton native Darnell Campbell gashed them on the ground, and irascible head coach Tom Coughlin gained sweet revenge for the previous year’s 54-7 annihilation in South Bend.
If it’s not the high point in the program’s history, it’s top three, alongside Doug Flutie’s 1984 Hail Mary and the 1941 Sugar Bowl.
I’d love to say I even knew BC was opening its 2024 season on Monday, but between the move to the ACC and the hard times since Matt Ryan graduated more than 15 years ago, the Eagles haven’t merited much attention. They’ve featured a series of feckless coaches and underwhelming results, barely registering en route to atrocities like the AdvoCare V100 Bowl, which sounds like something you attach unnecessarily to your toilet. (And which they lost to Arizona in 2013).
That changed, at least mildly, over the winter, when the Eagles made their first splash in forever by naming former Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien head coach. O’Brien couldn’t fix the dysfunction that was Mac Jones and the entire Patriots operation last year, but BC already looks like it could be a different story.
The Eagles did in fact open on Monday night, and they did so with a bang, traveling to Tallahassee and beating the tar out of No. 10 Florida State in a performance that harkened back to their glory days.
In O’Brien’s debut, the Eagles didn’t just push the Seminoles around, they manhandled them. The school once known as Offensive Line U lived up to its old reputation by rushing for 263 yards, the majority of them straight up the gut. The Eagles won the time-of-possession battle by nearly 20 minutes, and when they needed a play in the passing game, jitterbug quarterback Thomas Castellanos delivered a pair of TDs.
As a sweat-drenched O’Brien donned a headset to receive congratulations from ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt, it was hard not to see Coughlin, a similarly gruff task master who guided BC to some of its greatest heights before graduating to the NFL and winning a pair of Super Bowls with the Giants that require no further elaboration.
O’Brien arrived in Chestnut Hill determined to build a similar program, highlighting physical toughness and mental discipline. The Eagles delivered on both fronts, not only dominating both lines of scrimmage, but committing just one penalty, or 17 fewer than in last year’s near-upset of the Seminoles.
“Everything we did this offseason, it led up to this,” Castellanos told The Boston Globe. “This is what we prepared for. It all panned out.”
It’s hard to overstate just how much BC football used to matter. From the Flutie years through those fun Foley teams, the Eagles merited full-time traveling coverage by multiple TV stations and newspapers. When they briefly flirted with the No. 1 overall ranking during Ryan’s heyday, it turned out to be a last hurrah before the bottom fell out.
Part of it was leaving the Big East — why do we care about Duke or NC State? — but it was mostly just their rank mediocrity. The Eagles mastered the dark art of bowl eligibility, winning six or seven games virtually every year to end up in some version of the aforementioned commode.
Maybe that’s about to change.
BC fans of a certain age can’t miss that spots on the offensive line are manned by Drew Kendall and Ozzy Trapilo. Their fathers were BC legends. Pete Kendall spent 13 years as an NFL guard after being drafted in the first round, while the late Steve Trapilo is best remembered for hoisting Flutie aloft after he completed the Miracle in Miami.
Glance a little further down the roster, and you’ll see freshman defensive back Charlie Comella, son of Greg, who himself had a seven-year NFL career as a fullback.
Those links to the past hint at the promise of a better future, but it’s all about O’Brien. Landing him gave the Eagles a sip of relevance, and when I noticed their surprising early lead on Monday, I flipped over to ESPN. It was a hell of a thing to watch, the Eagles just running it down FSU’s throat in a performance that felt like an antidote to the cookie-cutter spread offenses proliferating at all levels.
It will take more than one game to make the Eagles worth watching, and the schedule doesn’t get any easier, with defending Cotton Bowl champ Missouri looming in two weeks. But at least there’s hope that catching some satisfying highlights won’t require a trip 30 years into the past.
We can already thank Bill O’Brien for that.
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