The Other Thing You Missed

BC ftw, defending their suspect #2 national ranking.

I'll admit I didn't see the good part of tonight's game. (It's the World Series!!! For a team with BC's history in big games, this was a no-brainer. Would've been anyway.) I did see a whole ton of the bad parts, however.

They looked terrible. BC was shut out and shut down for nearly the entire game. Matt Ryan turned in 57 minutes of strictly non-Heismanesque quarterbacking. Given the weather, and the location, it's no surprise. Not that Tech didn't look lousy too, but Blacksburg is hard enough without the rain, and without forgetting to bring your A game.

Anyway, I checked in regularly until roughly the 3:40 mark of the fourth quarter, saw no progress, and retired to baseball... just in time to miss BC's first touchdown, their onside recovery, and the mini-Flutie touchdown from Matt Ryan to Andre Callender.

When I checked back in on a lark, and saw BC up four with eight seconds left, I jumped out of my socks.

I may not be a big BC fan, and I'm not claiming to be one now. But understand something: this is the ONLY game of this magnitude that BC has won since the Flutie Game, which preceded my earliest interest in football by a good 3-4 years. They've been in position to either defend or gain a top 10 ranking many times, and blown it every time. To pull out a road win in fucking Blacksburg is nothing short of stunning. Bra-vo.

(Of course, in classic BC form, their biggest win in almost 25 years will have gone virtually unseen in the Boston area. They could win the national championship, and even THEN I'm not sure anyone would really care. Boston's either really weird or really wise.)

So, does this win meant BC is legit? Hell naw! The announcers were selling "yes" in the postgame, and this was indeed a rough environment to play through, but BC is still a "no" proposition until they prove otherwise time and again. Getting lucky against a VT team that had packed it in for the evening is great, but it's not a win that answers any questions. I won't trust them until they beat the rest of the ACC's few quality teams.

Then again, they could run the table and I'd still be nervous about them going into BCS championship situation. In the [cough] absence of a [coughYOUCOCKBAGScough] playoff system, running the table does not imply, even partially, that you're a superior team. It just means you won the games to which you were assigned. Even this year's subpar Ohio State team would turn them into a soggy puddle of that frothy mixture.

But that's all hypothetical, and highly unlikely given the source. So for now... bra-vo, Eagles.