College Football Morning: Boston College Isn’t a Mid-Major (Yet)

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Oregon State and Washington State are not the first power conference schools to lose that title (or the relevant era’s equivalent). When the Big East became the AAC in 2013, Cincinnati and South Florida dropped into what was newly known as the Group of Five. When the Southwest Conference split in 1996, TCU and Rice fell out of the Bowl Alliance. Way back in 1940, when Sewanee: The University of the South left the SEC, it skipped out on quite a different hypothetical future. This is far from an exhaustive list.

Universities have entered and exited the mid-major ranks since long before such terminology was commonplace. Some, like Cincinnati and TCU, found their way back. Others, like Rice and Sewanee, remained among different tiers of littler guys. Conference realignment is not a new phenomenon. The Pac-12/10/8 was not a 100-year-old conference when it passed. Even the Ivy League is far from eternal: The phrase wasn’t used until the 1930’s, and the conference wasn’t officially formed until 1954.

College football fans tend to view all college football before their time as prehistoric. History begins when they were seven or eight years old. To a fan who came of football-following age in 1998, the Big 12 South was eternal. To a fan who came of football-following age in 1992, the Big 12 South was a sick departure from the glory days of the SWC. This is all well and good. Youth is often the time when sports’ mystique peaks. Of course we remember our first college football seasons with adoration, accepting the alignment we first encountered as eternal. And in the end? Whether it feels normal or bizarre for Penn State to play in the Big Ten doesn’t really make a difference in the world outside our heads.

Still, we find a lot of the realignment rage odd, and disingenuously ignorant from some in the media. Arizonan membership in the Pac-12 was no more sacred in my childhood than Arizonan membership in the Big 12 will be in my son’s.

That all said…

It sure wouldn’t be fun to be Oregon State or Washington State right now.

This is where realignment matters: At the level of individual schools. What kind of school will you be? What kind of student will attract? What kind of relationship will you enjoy with your alumni for the rest of their earthly lives? Rightly or wrongly, much of this question hinges on what college football conference you manage to call home.

So.

Boston College.

How are we feeling these days?

Among the 68 current power conference football schools, none is less securely a member of that caste than the school which produced Doug Flutie. Smaller than many of its peers, located far from the heart of college football country, and 17 years removed from its last 10-win season, Boston College might be the single biggest afterthought in Power Four football right now. They’re not the worst team, and their all-time history is respectable, but they’re not good enough to escape their disadvantages, the two largest of which—fan support and recent history—are quicksands partly of their own creation.

To be fair to Boston College, there are cultural factors working against them. College sports are losing popularity on the West Coast and in BC’s native Northeast. This is the largest reason the Pac-12 died: Had the Pac-12 Networks’ conflict with cable providers taken place in the SEC or the Big Ten instead, consumers in those markets would have demanded a provider get those channels on their damn TV’s. The Pac-12 didn’t die because of this, but the fiasco emblemized the problem. Fans didn’t like the product enough to keep it financially competitive. There’s a reason Washington, Oregon, Stanford, and Cal all had to take a discount to join their new conferences. Boston, like the Pacific Northwest and the Bay Area, has a big population that cares about sports. But does that population care about college sports? It’s impossible to parse how much Boston College’s struggles come from headwinds and how much they come from mistakes. Whatever the proper ratio of blame, BC lost its grip on its fanbase sometime in the last few decades.

Boston College has one of the bigger endowments in the Power Four, outranking Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and a host of other recruiting behemoths. Endowments and booster-driven recruiting budgets are different in their nature. To reference calculus (college football fans’ favorite subject, I’m aware), NIL budgets are more like the curve on a graph while endowments are more like the integral, the area under the curve. NIL budgets tell you how much booster support an athletic program has at one point in time. Endowments tell you how much booster support an institution has ever had, with the dueling effects of interest and inflation leaving past and present weighted somewhat comparably. Boston College, the university, has enjoyed a lot of support over the years. Its football team doesn’t have a lot of support right now. That’s why there are only nine former four-star recruits on its roster, a number lower than those of basketball schools like Kansas and Indiana, northeastern schools like Syracuse and Maryland, and academic schools like Cal and Vanderbilt.

This wasn’t always the case. In 2003, in the middle of a fifth straight winning season, Boston College announced it would follow Miami and Virginia Tech to the ACC, leaving the Big East behind. If you’re thinking back to realignment, yes. Boston College was too good a brand for a specific BCS conference. It wasn’t this simple, of course. Cable markets drove realignment more in the 2000’s and early 2010’s than they do today, football hadn’t grown so much bigger than basketball, and Boston College was seeking stability, much like Colorado would when the Buffs—far from the Big 12’s biggest brand—fled to the Pac-12 out of fears of being left behind. But the ACC wanted Boston College back then, and Boston College delivered, continuing that winning season streak for what would become a twelve-year stretch. Boston College hasn’t even been that bad in recent years. Jeff Hafley was only four games below .500 in his time in Chestnut Hill. Steve Addazio won the same number of games he lost. But an absence of significant peaks like 2007’s 8–0 start combined with a few very bad seasons to, in a cauldron of cultural apathy, drive BC into an anxious college football middle class. Boston College. Cal. Syracuse. Wake Forest. These are the schools who most fear a Florida State victory in FSU’s lawsuit against the ACC.

Boston College would be a great fit for the Big Ten Supercontinent, should realignment’s plate tectonics indeed lead us to a binary Big Ten vs. SEC world. Strong academically and as northern culturally as it is geographically, Boston College would fit well in a Junior Big Ten alongside Rutgers, Indiana, and Virginia. To become desirable, though, Boston College needs to either reclaim national notoriety—making its football or basketball program a big competitive prize—or reinvigorate its fanbase to the point where it moves the needle for streaming services like Peacock. The best way to do either of those things, of course, is to win.

One effect of doing both those things is that Boston College could help reinforce the ACC, making departure less likely from Miami or North Carolina when the grant of rights chains finally do come off. There is nothing permanent about realignment, and that works in a few ways. TCU didn’t disappear when it missed the Big 12 lifeboat in the 90’s. The ACC doesn’t have to relinquish its powers or its power conference status as these next few years play out. But whether BC wants to find a better new home or help rebuild the one they have, the solution is the same: Go win football games. That’s the task ahead of Bill O’Brien in his BC debut tonight.

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The game itself? We don’t really know what to expect. Florida State should be a fine, top-25 team based on what we saw in Dublin, but additional problems could present themselves, and we harbor questions about the program’s culture that may or may not be fair. Boston College would be happy to make another bowl game this year, but they do bring a lot of last season’s roster back despite the coaching turnover, making some improvement theoretically possible. O’Brien hasn’t been a head football coach since 2020, and he hasn’t been a college head coach since 2013, when he helped steer Penn State through the post-Paterno wreckage. He’s always gotten a lot of credit for the job he did in Happy Valley. This one in Massachusetts might be harder.

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I understand the reasoning behind all the Brian Kelly-induced victory dances last night and today from otherwise neutral parties. But I’m not sure that was all that bad a loss for LSU? Miller Moss picked them apart, but Lincoln Riley’s quarterbacks have picked apart plenty of respectable defenses over the last decade. Garrett Nussmeier earned strong reviews, and LSU had the better rushing game. It was a game the Tigers should have won, yes, but even that’s a bullish indicator. LSU didn’t play all that badly, and now they get five whole weeks against mediocrity to iron things out and prepare for Mississippi, against whom they’re still favored even after this weekend’s proceedings. An SEC title is unlikely. A trip to the SEC Championship is possible if they can win enough 50/50 games.

We talked before the Miami/Florida game about how the loser would be deservedly outraged while the winner would probably be undeservedly high on their own potential. That isn’t exactly what happened—Miami turned it into a different kind of game and is somewhat deservedly excited right now—but that was the idea going in. Coming out of this USC/LSU game, the situation feels like the opposite. LSU shouldn’t be all that unhappy with itself. USC should be absolutely thrilled.

In our model’s latest simulations, the results are admittedly frustrating for the Tigers. Their expected regular season win count drops from 9.1 to 7.9. Their playoff probability drops from 29.0% all the way to 9.5%. Their ranking, though—how good Movelor thinks they actually are—only shifts from 10^th to 12^th, and Movelor thought less of USC entering the game than betting markets or the popular narrative, implying it should be the one having the stronger reaction than either of those entities.

As for USC? They’re still not exactly a playoff contender, up against possibly the single hardest schedule in the country (they still have to visit Ann Arbor and host both Penn State and Notre Dame). But the Trojans legitimized themselves. Miller Moss inserted his name into the thick of the early Heisman horse race. The Trojans increased their projected win count from 5.6 victories to 6.9, meaning they moved from teetering on the edge of projected bowl ineligibility to anticipating a 7–5 mark. This might not sound like much, but again, that schedule comes with very few layups. Like LSU, a lot of USC’s schedule is built of games that look 50/50 from where we currently view them (in addition to the LSU game and the games above, Riley’s team travels to Maryland and Washington while welcoming Nebraska and Wisconsin to Los Angeles).

It was a great game filled with mind-bending athletic feats, and the team who played better football won it. That doesn’t mean they’re the better team, though. USC should be thrilled, but they have plenty of work left to do, and their position within the top 25 is tenuous. LSU has plenty of work to do, but it shouldn’t view all hope as lost.

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