Boston College: History Will Be Made
By Johnny Carey, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) --- Saturday afternoon marks what will be the single most noteworthy sporting event of the past few years for the Boston College athletic program. Hold on to your hats folks, The Clemson Tigers are coming to town, and yes, you should be paying attention. After all, BC is so close to making history! Who doesn't love a little history?
A year defined by impressive feats including zero conference wins and....well, zero conference wins, will culminate on the floor Saturday afternoon, as all "4,000"(3,000? 2,000? 1,000? 500?) fans rooting for BC at Conte Forum will undoubtedly stand up a couple of times to cheer, only to sit right back down again when something goes horribly wrong. (The students will be on Spring Break, so that's definitely why no one will be there.)
The Eagles enter Saturday night's match up as the most consistent team in the nation, losing all 17 ACC basketball (and 8 football) contests in the 2015-2016 academic year.
It was a close call Wednesday night as the Eagles almost blew their chance at history. With 1.1 seconds to go on the road at North Carolina State, BC appeared to have its first ACC win of the season in the bag. But then again, that's just not how 2015-16 has gone in Chestnut Hill. BC lost track of an NC State player directly under the basket, who kept the streak alive with an essentially uncontested layup at the buzzer. Somehow, the team managed to hit a new low.
The path to infamy marches on.
It's truly difficult to fathom just how bad BC has been this year in college's two marquee sports. I've tried to come up with the right words to describe Boston College athletics outside of hockey, (Thank you, Jerry York), and a good start for the baseball team, on this, my senior year, but they just won't come. A Thesaurus.com search of synonyms for "bad" churns out atrocious, awful, dreadful, lousy, painful, poor, rough, sad, terrible, and unacceptable among others. Each adjective is a correct representation of 2015-16 BC sports, however, in my mind, there's only one way to put it.
It's embarrassing.
Boston College is one loss away from finishing a combined 0-26 in ACC football and basketball. 0-26!!!
The last time a "Power Five" school lost every conference game in football and basketball was 1943-44 when Georgia finished off a defeated season. That year, however, Georgia only played five games in total between the two sports due to the ongoing World War.
The last team to really "accomplish" the "feat" was Sewanee in 1939-40.
Have you ever heard of Sewanee? No? Neither have I. After conducting some quick research (google), Sewanee: "The University of The South" is a liberal arts college in Sewanee, Tenneessee with less than 1,600 undergraduate students. After losing every single football game in the SEC for eight years, the Tigers now play in the prestigious Southern Athletic Association, where the team qualified for the 2016 SAA Basketball Tournament as the number two seed. What a difference 76 years makes.
The last time a school had a year as embarrassing as the one BC is oh-so-close to completing, the world was quite a different place:
The minimum wage was 30 cents.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to his third term, while Winston Churchill was named British Prime Minister.
There were only 48 states.
The average gallon of gas cost 11 cents.
The United States still had not entered World War II.
And...Sewanee went 0-for-the-SEC. Good stuff.
It isn't even just the fact that BC hasn't won one single ACC game this year that makes it especially embarrassing (although that's certainly enough), it's how the teams have managed to lose.
BC had the No. 1 defense in college football this past season, allowing only 254.3 yards per game. This total was almost 14 yards less than second place Wisconsin, yet, someway, somehow, it didn't matter.
BC gave up 20 points or fewer in five of its eight ACC games, and couldn't pull out a single win. The defense was dynamic, but apparently defense only wins championships when your offense has the ability to utilize the revolutionary forward pass.
The only schools BC has defeated this academic year in football and basketball are The University of Maine (in both sports), Howard and Northern Illinois in football, and Bentley (exhibition), St. Francis (Brookyln), Central Connecticut, Harvard, Delware, Fordham and New Hampshire in basketball. That short list includes a whopping zero wins against a team from any power five conference.
Before starting ACC play, the basketball team lost to UMass-Lowell during the infamous Chipotle Incident of 2015.
The 2015-16 academic year in BC athletics can be symbolically understood through its match-ups against Wake Forest.
Which loss to Wake Forest was worse, one of the single worst offensive basketball games in BC history? Or one of the single worst offensive football games in the history of college football?
Or
That's what this year has come to at BC.
So, for all the history buffs out there, tune in to the BC-Clemson game on Saturday if you want to witness something that hasn't been done in 76 years. Or go, I'm sure they'll be some seats available.
Johnny Carey is a senior at Boston College. You can find him on Twitter @JohnnyHeights.
