On Saturday, year two of the Bill O’Brien Era officially got underway at Chesnut Hill, as Boston College hosted Fordham for their 2025 season opener.
And while the 66-10 final score makes it seem like this game was never really close, that’s not necessarily the case.
With the Eagles opening the game with two decisive touchdown drives to give themselves a 14-3 lead with 3:19 to go in the first quarter, it felt like this was going to be a walk in the park for an FBS team on the rise over an FCS team that went 2-10 last season.
But on their following four offensive possessions, BC was forced to punt. And on three of those four possessions, the Eagles went three-and-out.
Had they not capped off their first half with a 10-play, 82-yard touchdown drive to make it a 21-3 game with 26 seconds remaining in the second quarter, that all-too-familiar mood would have crept back into Alumni Stadium.
You know the one - the oxygen disappears and the crowd goes silent as the Eagles play down to lesser competition, sometimes even losing to said competition in baffling fashion.
We saw it under Steve Addazio. We saw it under Jeff Hafley.
But under O’Brien, that has yet to be the case.
While he told me postgame there wasn’t any sort of specific edict given at halftime to spark his team’s 38-0 run to open the second half, you have to imagine some colorful language was delivered to the locker room via “Teapot” with his ACC offense being bottled up for most of the first half by a below average CAA opponent.
On paper, 66-10 looks awesome. But O’Brien knows his team can play better.
He expressed as much postgame when asked how he thought starting quarterback Dylan Lonergan looked in his BC debut.
“Look, it's the first college football [game],” said O’Brien. “He played in some blowout games in Alabama, but [this was his] first start. Look, I thought he did a lot of good things. There's a lot to work on. He'd be the first to tell you that.
“Gotta be more consistent overall. Not just him. But offensively, kind of got a little sluggish there with a few series there in the first half. And I thought we played well, played much better complementary football as a team in the second.”
Lonergan’s final line looked like the final line of a Crimson Tide transfer who sported a four-star recruiting ranking coming out of high school - 26 of 34 for 268 yards with 4 TDs and no picks. The arm talent was obvious, and it’s already clear the redshirt sophomore has chemistry with redshirt senior Lewis Bond, who came down with 11 grabs on the day for 138 yards.
Again, it looks great on paper. But it’s tough to ignore that big chunk of the first half given the far-too-recent history of this program. And with a whopper of a schedule moving forward, O’Brien’s not allowing complacency to set in.
“I thought we did a good job of getting into a rhythm eventually,” said O’Brien. “But there were three or four series there that we got to look at, and we got to fix those. Because those can't happen in these games coming up.
“You know, we have to do a good job of overcoming that. We can't have [three] three-and-outs in a row. So we got a lot to work on in that regard. But I was happy overall with how they, you know, dealt with the adversity and came back.”
Things get infinitely tougher for the Eagles in Week 2, as they hit the road for East Lansing to take on Michigan State (1-0).
The Spartans might not be the Spartans-of-old, but it’s still a Big Ten opponent with a tough road environment to deal with after a sleepy home opener in front of an announced crowd of 41,221 (whoever came up with that number needs to be hooked up to a lie detector test and share the results with me).
Capacity at Spartan Stadium is 74,866. And after the Eagles upset MSU in the “Red Bandana Game” last year, they should expect an extremely unfriendly sea of green next Saturday night.
After that, it doesn’t get any easier.
Here’s what stands out to me:
- Week 3 @ Stanford (0-1), where the biggest challenge may be the 7:30 p.m. PDT kickoff when their entire sideline will still be sporting an EST body clock - a source tells me BC isn’t planning to arrive in Palo Alto until the day before the game
- Week 7 vs. No. 4 Clemson (0-1), a team heavily favored to win the ACC that BC hasn’t beaten since 2010
- Week 8 vs. UConn (1-0), a regional rival that travels well coming off a 9-4 season that ended with a victory in the Fenway Bowl over North Carolina (pre Belichick, of course)
- Week 9 @ Louisville (1-0), an ACC rival with a FanDuel O/U win total set at 8.5 heading into the season
- Week 10 vs. No. 6 Notre Dame (0-0), a traditional rival coming off a loss in the National Championship Game sporting a local fanbase that sadly rivals BC’s
- Week 11 vs. No. 16 SMU (1-0), an ACC opponent coming off a playoff appearance in 2024
A stretch of four straight punts against any of those teams, outside of Stanford, could be a nail in the coffin. For BC to have a chance at making a third consecutive bowl game for the first time since the 2010 season, it needs to be a buttoned-up year offensively.
That 2010 season was the last of a program-record 12-season run of bowl appearances, which included eight straight bowl wins from 2000 to 2007. The first seven of those eight bowl-winning seasons came under longtime head coach Tom O’Brien. And since he left for the NC State job ahead of the 2006 Meineke Car Care Bowl (an instant classic), BC is 4-8 in bowl games.
The current O’Brien is here to help bring back the bowl-winning ways of that former O’Brien, and that starts with playing consistent offense on a week-by-week basis, regardless of the opponent.
Kickoff in Week 2 at East Lansing is set for 7:30 p.m. ET, with pregame coverage on 850 WEEI-AM starting at 7:00.
Listen to every snap of Boston College Football this season on WEEI, the Audacy app, and across the BC Eagles Van Wagner Sports Network.