Exactly 16 years ago today, March 20th, 2009. Minneapolis, Minnesota. The first round of the NCAA basketball tournament. As a 7-seed, Boston College lost to 10-seed USC by 17 points. Taj Gibson, DeMar DeRozan, and Dwight Lewis led the Trojans past an Eagles squad that featured Tyrese Rice, Corey Raji, Joe Trapani, and a freshman Reggie Jackson. Since that day, Boston College has never been invited back to the Big Dance.
Head coach Al Skinner had BC in a good place at that time, having journeyed through the Big East to ACC transition with ease and making March Madness appearances in five of his final seven seasons at the helm, including an appearance in the 2006 Sweet Sixteen. But alas, a 15-16 record and no postseason in 2010 resulted in Skinner’s premature firing, and the program has never been the same since. New head coach Steve Donahue quickly took Boston College directly into the dumpster, achieving just one season above .500 with Skinner’s roster, and now Eagles fans have been cursed to watch terrible-to-mediocre basketball for over a decade.
So is there any reason to be optimistic? Not many that I can find. The ACC as a basketball conference is weaker than its ever been, even with 18 teams, yet BC can’t even an earn a trip to Charlotte as a 15-seed in the conference tournament. The new Hoag Basketball Pavilion was a much needed upgrade in facilities, but it doesn’t seem to have had any impact on recruiting after its first few years in operation. Boston College is such a basketball wasteland that they can barely even grab one or two starting-quality players in recruiting or the transfer portal.
Even after their best season in years, in which they went above .500 for the first time in 13 years and finally looked like they were on an upward trajectory, the BC roster completely imploded. When their most talented player, Quinten Post, went off to the NBA Draft, hardly anybody even bothered to stick around to try and build something on the Heights. And who can blame them? These guys only have a few years to play college basketball, and the NIL deals are much more lucrative elsewhere if they can get into a better program. Or they could take a step down and actually win some games for a mid-major school. Boston College is the worst of both worlds: no money and no winning.
The only solution to a situation like this is to find someone who can completely disrupt the system. Even if you find a solid, traditional-style coach, there is no way they are going to succeed at Boston College with the level of stink that surrounds this basketball program and the utter lack of financial resources. Earl Grant has been doing a noble job of trying to instill his culture and build from the bottom-up, but at some point you have to realize that it is not sustainable to be getting raided in the transfer portal after any semi-successful season. And his in-game coaching decisions don’t help his case either.
One avenue BC could take is to hire a coach of a mid-major program that brings in all of their guys and remakes the Boston College team in their own image. Look at what Louisville did this season! After nosediving to the bottom of the ACC for a few years, their new head coach brought in a ton of his own guys and they made the NCAA Tournament in his first year. Boston College doesn’t have the same kind of resources that Louisville can offer, but they can at least try to use that strategy to become decent again and build from there.
Alternatively, they could pursue a coaching staff with some kind of bold strategy that will disrupt the ACC. You see that happen in football all the time with the triple-option or the Air Raid offense, where a team can jump from the gutter into being competitive in a short span of time, even if their new playbook isn’t necessarily competitive at a national level. Is there some version of that in basketball? Maybe run the classic Georgetown offense? Or take a page out of the Celtics playbook and shoot as many three-pointers as possible? This suggestion is a lot more open-ended, and is less likely to work, but it at least would be something different.
So it’s been 5,844 days since Boston College last played in March Madness. And with the way things are going right now, it’s going to be thousands more before we ever see them there again.