On Saturday evening, the Boston College men’s basketball team traveled down to Louisville to face the Cardinals in their final game of the 2023-24 regular season. It was senior night for Louisville, who were in a weird spot because of the looming job status of their head coach Kenny Payne. Payne was a member of the 1986 national champion Louisville Cardinals team, but his head coaching tenure has been disastrous and is expected to end in his firing shortly after the season ends, making this his last home game at UL. BC took care of business against the Cards to wrap up the regular season, winning 67-61.
The game was a tough defensive match-up from the jump with Boston College forcing 5 Louisville turnovers within the first five minutes of the game, but also dealing with some early foul trouble for their big men Quinten Post and Armani Mighty. As a result, freshman Elijah Strong came in early for BC at center, who was able to hold his own defensively. With some three-pointers and playmaking from Mason Madsen, BC was able to climb to an early 17-5 lead.
From there, though, Quinten Post continued to get in foul trouble and BC struggled to defend in the paint as a result. Louisville was basically scoring at will near the basket, including drawing an and-1, resulting in a 10-2 run that got them right back in the game. After some back-and-forth following the Louisville run, Boston College found their rhythm on offense again and opened up the scoring to take a 36-24 lead with just a few minutes remaining in the half. UL just could not match BC’s pace on offense and was overly reliant on drives into the paint, which resulted in some missed shots, turnovers, and an offensive foul. It did force BC into a lot of fouls, but the Cards were just not converting those possessions into points at an efficient rate.
But a BC drought on offense to close the half led to a 7-2 Louisville run before Claudell Harris hit a buzzer beater three-pointer at the halftime buzzer. Harris led the Eagles in scoring with 10 points as BC took a 41-31 lead into halftime.
Louisville started the second half on a 6-0 run, but BC responded with a 12-0 run themselves to keep the Cards at an arm’s length away. McGlockton and Zackery especially made an impact to get the BC offense going, moving the ball around and finding open looks. The Eagles got a little too careless with the ball at times, though, and allowed Skyy Clark to go on a 6-0 run all by himself to bring the Cards closer. Some good three-point shooting by UL made it a single-digit BC lead again, but Quinten Post was finally able to get going, too, and helped the Eagles cling onto a solid lead as the game entered the final 10 minutes.
The offenses started to fizzle out as the second half trudged on, with defensive stops being made on both sides and BC cleaning up their performance and avoiding fouls. But some lousy looks from beyond the arc resulted in empty possessions and allowed the Cardinals to hang around into the final few minutes. The Eagles came up big with some offensive rebounding down the stretch, though, and basically secured their victory by running out the clock and refusing to give up the ball. BC held off a very late Louisville push to come out with a 67-61 victory.
This was Boston College’s 4th-straight win over the Louisville Cardinals. It also was BC’s 17th win of the season, which is the highest win total for the Eagles since the 2017-18 season that featured Jerome Robinson and Ky Bowman. Despite some cold streaks this season, Earl Grant’s squad has taken care of business against weaker out-of-conference competition and the bottom-tier of the ACC, something that the program has really struggled to do in recent years. That consistency has allowed his team to claim a winning record for the first time in a half decade. BC will play next in the first round of the ACC Tournament on Tuesday, March 12th.