2024 ACC Football Kickoff: Media Meets The New BC Era - Boston College Athletics (2024)

Eagles Unlimited July 25, 2024 Dan Rubin, BCEagles.com contributor

Wednesday offered an unveiling to how the Eagles are committed to BC.

Preseason in college football isn't shy when it comes to its storylines. The detail lacks the in-season minutiae generated by games and practice schedules, but plentiful predictions accompany the buildup and run-up to the first workout, practice and game of the hot summer afternoons. November can't exist without first passing through September or October, but the question about goals or expectations revive the celebrations that often lend credence and attention to names and faces brought to the debate's overall forefront.

Kicking off the formal preseason event, in turn, lends a temperature check for the barometer within every program's state. The idea that polls or prognostications are futile simply doesn't exist, and the subsequent introduction or, in most cases, reintroduction of the players and coaches level sets the days leading to the next season or chapter of a team's history book.

At Boston College, that's often been met with the same storyline about the Eagles' rugged toughness, but on Wednesday, the formal unveiling of head coach Bill O'Brien to the gathered conference media left plenty of condensation on the Atlantic Coast Conference's overall umbrella.

"We have great guys that care about Boston College," head coach Bill O'Brien said during his media availability on Wednesday. "They go to class. They practice hard. They lift weights hard. They do things the right way. I think that is something that's never changed relative to the places I've been at."

O'Brien's stance at the podium reinforced the conference's overall belief that his appearance fundamentally altered BC's future after last season's 7-6 campaign. At the time, the Eagles rode high, and the surging optimism from "The Path" sent the team on a midseason ride to the near-top of the ACC championship picture. Nearly everyone enjoyed the process, but the lightning optimism associated with the Fenway Bowl win sustained a significant blow after Jeff Hafley created a head coaching vacancy with his acceptance of the Green Bay Packers' defensive coordinator position.

Details of Hafley's exit ultimately made sense over time, but changing head coaches in late January felt considerably worse than creating a void around Thanksgiving or Bowl Season. His late-January egress opened a mandatory transfer portal window for rostered players, but the simultaneous window for signing recruits and incoming transfers had closed weeks ahead of his shock departure. Any player could test the waters of leaving, and lacking the ability to bring in new players generated considerable uncertainty in the public sphere.

BC had just won the Fenway Bowl over the nationally-ranked Southern Methodist team, but entering a late coaching carousel meant roughly two dozen candidates were settling into new positions at the collegiate level. With the majority of NFL staffs likewise entrenched in their offseason or postseason, the rumor mill felt murkier and quieter than usual.

Everyone harbored opinions that weren't rooted in factual evidence, but the quick-moving search landed on O'Brien alongside a plethora of head coaching candidates. He'd been recently hired as the offensive coordinator at Ohio State after the New England Patriots opted to move past Bill Belichick, the greatest head coach in football history, for whom O'Brien was last season's offensive coordinator. That he became available was an additional stroke of luck from Ohio State head coach Ryan Day, a previous offensive coordinator from BC's mid-2010s run. A longtime admirer of BC, Day's flexibility allowed O'Brien to commute between Ohio and Massachusetts until the February 9 hiring announcement.

"Having Coach Bill [O'Brien], I cannot stop saying this, is the best thing to happen to my career," said quarterback Thomas Castellanos. "He's been around a lot of great quarterbacks. To be coaching me is an honor, [and] I'm very thankful…I can't really go into detail about the offense, but it will be amazing. You'll see more explosive plays down the field [with] me throwing the ball a lot more."

Hiring O'Brien legitimately shattered the clay pigeons lofted at the BC program, but spring practice and the summer offseason arrived too quickly for much of the ACC media to understand his impact. No player entered the transfer portal after Hafley's announcement, and the construction of a coaching staff built from previous assistants and new faces blended the two eras around a roster that scratched the surface of its potential during last season's undefeated month of October.

Castellanos, for example, was the first 2,000-yard passing, 1,000-yard rushing quarterback in BC program history, but he operated last season as a unicorn thrust into the starting role after the opening game loss to Northern Illinois. The Central Florida transfer hadn't been with the team during the 2023 spring ball season, and the offense largely constructed around him by adapting on the fly to his skills.

Giving him O'Brien unquestionably enabled the Eagles to spend more time building an offense around his skills with a coach who constructed success around the game's biggest names. Beyond the notable time spent coaching Tom Brady, he'd been a part of Alabama's team while coaching Heisman Trophy winner Bryce Young, and the Crimson Tide went to the College Football Playoff National Championship game in his first year before appearing in the Sugar Bowl in his second season. He was largely noted for steadying Penn State in the wake of the Nittany Lions' post-Paterno era, and he built the Houston Texans into an NFL division champion for the first time in franchise history.

Each stop required him to change his own coaching style and mentality. Bryce Young was very different from Christian Hackenberg, who was very different from Deshaun Watson, and nobody - absolutely nobody - is on Tom Brady's level. Yet the idea that BC could retain its own historical significance as the preeminent northeastern power while continuously building a winning program was never on the ACC radar in a more-swollen, 17-team league until the BC team took to the podium on Wednesday afternoon.

"Just from a team standpoint, we do a lot of trying to get in the community and make those relationships at the school," said center Drew Kendall. "Trying to engage the student body has been big for us - just bonding with them to get them to know who we are, our personality. Outside of football, helmets off, shoulder pads off, who we are as humans in the classroom, stuff like that.

"That's what Coach O'Brien preaches," he said. "Going to class, talking, actually participating. Through that, you're able to build that community with everyone else at the school."