The Irish Roundup

A couple days ago I wrote a post about how, contra the beliefs of some, Backup Boston College is viewed less as a rival than as an annoyance in the eyes of ND fans. Apparently what I said hurt some feelings among the Moldy Golden Eagle faithful, as a BC-loving reader accused me of “go[ing] to the gutter” by referring to his beloved team as “Fredo.” Meanwhile, over at the BC football blog “Eagle in Atlanta,” fans refer to the Irish faithful as “irrationally arrogant homers,” while at the same time complaining about being called “turds” by the BGS writers. (I’m not even going to get into the argument that the fact that Weis called ND-BC an “obvious rivalry” bears significantly on this issue. Can anyone say “message board material”?) And over on the IrishEnvy boards we had a BC troll claim that “[t]he only reason BC folks care about this game is because they know it really DOES gnaw at Domers that their team has beaten you so badly as of late, and that they should obliterate ND this Saturday.” (Riiiiiight …)

But a more recent comment on my “Shut up, Fredo” post puts the complaint that I want to address here in a helpfully explicit way:

Question, why all the hate? Yes, ND football is the most storied program in College sports. Yes 90% of BC students applied to ND and wished they could have gotten in. But why the hate?

This is a good question, actually, but I think that this post on the Rock Report already got the answer right:

No one wants to lose to BC again, but it’s for reasons off the football field as much as on. From their players trashing of the visitor Dame locker room, defecating in the locker room, tearing up ND turf like a high school team and intentionally disrupting pep rallies to BC fans pouring beer on kids, throwing garbage and spitting on ND fans (at Notre Dame,) BC has shown a disdain for Notre Dame and its traditions unlike any school on the schedule in recent years.

For me, and I think for most others, that’s really the answer. It’s not so much the fact that ND has been losing to BC of late, or that two of those losses were big upsets that derailed undefeated seasons, or even that last time ND played the Beagles Eagles I nearly ended up with pneumonia. Rather, the sticking issue that makes me react so disdainfully to Backup Boston College is the disdain that its players - as well as fans, though it’s really the players who get to me - have shown for ND . The above-mentioned commenter alludes to this, of course, and says that “[w]e all know that was wrong and not to be tollerated [sic],” but for some reason that just isn’t enough for me.

For the record, though, let’s not overestimate the extent to which ND fans dislike BC: they’re the opponent du jour right now, after all, and heck - a few weeks ago even PURDUE was the subject of an ND blogger’s lengthy rant, calling them the “whiny bitch of Indiana.” If we can’t mock and hate on the team we play this coming Saturday, then whom can we go after? Moreover, a quick run through the “Teams you hate?” thread we had going at IrishEnvy a while ago revealed a total of 19 people who put BC near the top of their lists, out of over a hundred total responses. (Of course, I was one of those nineteen, though as you’ll note the disrespect was the first thing I cited as grounds for hatred.) It’s hard to imagine that a similarly low proportion of BC fans would list ND anywhere but #1.

So come on folks, get off your high horses. The Irish get hated on week-in, week-out, not only by fans of opposing teams, but by empty talking blathering heads like Mark May, Pat Forde, and Stewart Mandel. Can you blame us for giving some grief to a school with both a long winning streak against us and a history of disrespect to our field, our stadium, and our fans? Stop whining, and take your blows - low as they may be - like men.

When the unbeaten Boston College Golden Eagles take the field at Notre Dame Stadium on Saturday, they’ll bring with them a 6-0 record and a #4 ranking that is one of the highest in the program’s less-than-illustrious history. But they’ll also be riding a winning streak compiled against the likes of Army, North Carolina State, Bowling Green, and Div. 1-AA UMass - a schedule tough enough to be ranked only 78th in the nation by Jeff Sagarin, compared to Notre Dame’s #3-ranked schedule.

Jason Kelly’s excellent column in today’s South Bend Tribune makes this point quite effectively:

The Eagles will be a case study on the subject of mirage vs. reality.

Other than a win on the road at Georgia Tech, Boston College got to 6-0 without the strain of travel or any opponent more imposing than a pop quiz (and Notre Dame makes seven, perhaps).

In other words, the “0″ rings a little hollow. Yell into it and the echo of vanquished opponents — Army-my-my, Bowling Green-een-een, UMass-mass-mass — is faint and uninspiring. Again, not that Notre Dame merits much more respect than that right now, but the circumstances reek of a set-up.

But do the 1-5 Irish really have a shot against a team that ranks eleventh in the nation in passing yardage and third against the run? Looking more closely over the numbers, here are some reasons for hope. (Note: all statistics via NCAA.org.)

Let’s start with the BC offense. While senior signal-caller Matt Ryan has led BC to 314.2 passing yards per game, good for eleventh in the nation as noted above, the Eagles’ running game is considerably less dynamic, as their 140.7 yds/game average ranks only 70th overall. Moreover, when we look at the quality of BC’s opponents at stopping the run, we see that only two of the six teams the Eagles have played have been at all stout in this respect so far this year: Georgia Tech ranks sixth in the nation with an average of 68.5 yards given up, and Wake Forest ranks 27th with an average of 111.0. (I’m discounting UMass, whose average of 90.8 looks imposing until you remember that they play in 1-AA, and have compiled that average against the likes of Holy Cross, Colgate, Towson, and Maine.) Against those two teams, the Eagles totaled only 146 yards on the ground, though to be fair they did gain 92 yards against Georgia Tech in week three, well above the Yellowjackets’ average. If we leave out the games against NC State (ranked 114th in the nation against the run) and Army (ranked 78th), in which BC totaled 433 yards, the Eagles have yet to put together a genuinely dominant game running the ball. To be sure, an Irish defense that gives up 189.8 yards a game on the ground, good only for 96th nationwide, might be a nice opponent to pick up a third such game, but the point at present is only that BC’s stats so far this season make it far from indubitable that this will happen.

The Eagles’ vaunted passing attack actually shows a similar trend: they’ve played against only two statistically solid pass defenses - NC State (192.2 yds/game, good for 25th nationally) and (again, Div. I-AA) UMass (214.4 yds/game) - and have struggled against both, totaling only 346 yards against the two of them. Meanwhile, while the Eagles did put up 371 passing yards against Army’s 40th-ranked pass defense (so ranked, of course, thanks in part to having played Akron, Rhode Island, Temple, and Tulane), their other three opponents respectively rank only 69th (Bowling Green), 71st (Georgia Tech), and 83rd (Wake Forest) nationally in pass defense. The fact that BC’s air attack has been really effective only against teams that have shown little ability to defend against the pass this season gives reason to hope that an ND squad that ranks fourth nationally in passing yardage given up and 22nd in pass efficiency defense might be able to slow the Eagles down.

Here are those numbers in a bit more detail (my apologies for not being as much of a tech-wiz as the show-offs at HLS):

When we look in some depth at the numbers put up by BC’s defense, we find a similar trend. As noted above, the Eagles’ run defense ranks third in the nation, giving up a scant 49.7 yards per game: but while they have clearly been able to hold teams below their season-long averages, they’ve faced only one opponent with a rushing game ranked higher than 71st nationally in Div. I-A. Moreover, the fact that BC has been able to get out to some nice leads against these inferior opponents has meant that they’ve simply faced fewer situations in which teams can run the ball against them: the Eagles have rushed the ball 208 times to their opponents’ 158, and have given up a less than dominant average of 2.9 yards per carry. This isn’t to say that BC’s run defense is weak: it clearly isn’t, and it will be a big challenge for an ND rushing attack that ranks last in the nation with only 33.0 yards per game. But it is to say that the Eagles’ schedule so far hasn’t faced them with much of a threat in this department: against Georgia Tech, which is the one team they’ve faced with a top-flight running game, BC was up 14-0 at the half and 21-0 going into the fourth quarter, and the Yellowjackets threw 39 passes and were able to run the ball only 28 times.

Meanwhile, the Eagles’ passing defense has looked downright bad so far this year, giving up 290.8 yards per game, good for only 110th in the nation. To some extent this might also be a product of teams’ having to throw the ball more once they fall behind, but every BC opponent except UMass (none of whose other opponents were I-A teams) has exceeded their season-long passing average against the Eagles, in many cases by large margins. On the season, BC’s opponents have completed 59.4% of their passes for an average of 6.3 yards per attempt, making for numbers that aren’t far behind Heisman candidate Ryan’s 62.7% completion rate and 7.3 yard average. Defending the pass is by far the Eagles’ biggest weakness: they gave up 368 passing yards to Wake Forest and 351 to NC State, and while they settled down a bit by giving up an average of only 209 passing yards per game against Georgia Tech, Army, and UMass in weeks 3-5, they followed that up by reverting to early-season form and allowing Bowling Green to throw for 401 yards against them last week. If the Irish offense can recapture the form that led to a 65.4% completion rate and 377 passing yards against a similarly mediocre Purdue pass defense, there’s no reason to think that ND won’t be able to move the ball downfield against BC.

Once again, here are those numbers in a bit more detail for the stat junkies:

Like I said when I offered a similar breakdown before the game against Purdue: I have plenty of doubts as to whether the Irish can win this one. But there’s clearly hope for an upset that would, as Kelly wonderfully puts it once again, “tear down one of the new McMansions dotting the college football landscape.”

Ohh, you mean THAT rivalry …

While doing some research into the infamous 2002 “Neon Jersey Game,” in which Tyrone Willingham inexplicably had his 8-0 Fighting Irish team dress up like limes to face 4-3 Boston College, I came across these charming quotes from post-game interviews with BC personnel:

BC head coach Tom O’Brien: “The kids were excited when we saw the green jerseys. They took the green jerseys as a sign of great respect, as if we were something to be reckoned with.”

Sophomore tight end Sean Ryan: “I felt ‘Wow’, we really are playing Notre Dame. They really respected us. They really thought that we were a challenge for them and that meant a lot to me and a lot to our teammates, too.”

The Irish lost that game, of course, as they fumbled the ball away three times, threw two interceptions, and gained only 184 total yards against a banged-up BC defense. Afterwards, Golden Eagles players tore apart the visiting locker room at Notre Dame stadium celebrating their victory.

This was the beginning of the end for Willingham, as his Irish finished the ‘02 season with a squeaker at Navy, an easy win over Rutgers, and consecutive blowouts on the road at USC and in the Gator Bowl against NC State. The next two seasons featured two more awful losses to BC: a 27-25 loss on the road in Chestnut Hill in 2003, and a 24-23 loss back at Notre Dame Stadium in 2004 that infamously featured a Notre Dame punt on 4th-and-5 from the BC 30-yard line with three-and-a-half minutes to go in regulation, and a comically inept field goal attempt as time expired.

(I was there for the ‘04 game, and it was probably my lowest-ever moment as an ND fan: I’d driven 700 miles back to South Bend after spending fall break on the East coast, tailgated in the pouring rain for hours until I was drunk enough to think that Willingham might not blow it, screamed, shouted, sang, danced, cursed, and shook my keys just like I was supposed to, and then (in an admittedly Fredo-esque move) nearly came down with pneumonia after the game thanks to one of the worst colds of my life. Thanks, Ty.)

Anyway, though, let me set the record straight: Notre Dame DOES NOT CARE about Boston College. Nor do we “respect” them in any significant sense. This is why BC’s nickname - which they share, by the way, with a certain illustrious former U.S. Attorney General - recalls the stupidly inept brother who was sickly as a child, failed to avenge his father’s death when given the opportunity, betrayed his family to a Cuban gangster, and then was unceremoniously shot in the back of the head and dropped at the bottom of Lake Tahoe. The fact that BC fans get as geared up for Notre Dame as teenage girls do for a Justin Timberlake concert does not entail that this attitude is reciprocated.

Perhaps these bits from Eric Hansen’s latest column in the South Bend Tribune will help to put the ND-BC “rivalry” in a bit more perspective:

• BC has only been ranked higher than its current No. 4 slot three times in its history, all during the 1942 season. It spent three weeks at No. 3 that year and one week at No. 1, losing to Holy Cross 55-12 as the nation’s top-ranked team.
• This is only the third time in the 17 meetings between the two schools in which BC has been the higher-ranked team.

So no, Fredo, you can’t come back in the family. You’re stupid and incompetent, and we know you’re doing an okay job right now running that casino out in Vegas, but we also know that your head’s getting too big and soon you’re going to start doing stupid things like beating your wife, getting hooked on coke, banging hookers, and attacking software engineers in local sports bars. We don’t love you, we don’t want you, we don’t care about you, and as soon as mom passes away we’re going to blow your brains out and tell everyone you died in a boating accident. No matter what you keep telling yourself, that’s the only reason you’re off the ND schedule after 2010: this is not a rivalry game, you’re no more relevant than Cincinnati or Rutgers, and Notre Dame needs you far less than you need them.

Enjoy the undefeated season and the #4 ranking while they last: if the past is any guide, it might not be much longer.

(Via bamfshirts.com)