Boston College Athletics
Football Prepares For Nittany Lions
September 05, 2004 | Football
Sept. 5, 2004
Millions of eyes will be focused on Chestnut Hill Saturday evening as the Boston College Eagles play host to the Penn State Nittany Lions in the home opener at Alumni Stadium. The game, which will kick off shortly after 8 p.m. EDT, will be televised by ABC. Both teams enter the game with 1-0 records. The Eagles opened the season with a 19-11 win at Ball State on Thursday, September 2. The Eagle defense registered five sacks against the Cardinals, led by 2003 Big East sacks leader Mathias Kiwanuka, who had two on the night. Tim Bulman, Nick Larkin and Larry Anam also registered sacks. L.V. Whitworth seemed to lay claim to the starting tailback position, coming off the bench to rush for 129 yards and a touchdown on 21 carries. But the redshirt freshman went down with a left knee injury in the second half and will miss the Penn State game. Starting offensive tackle Jeremy Trueblood also got a scare when he suffered a left knee injury in the first half and also will miss the Penn State game. Senior quarterback Paul Peterson got the starting nod for the 2004 season and connected on 12-of-23 attempts for 135 yards and a touchdown throw to tight end Chris Miller (the junior's first career reception). The following are excerpts from Coach Tom O'Brien's media conference call on September 5, 2004 TOB: We're happy to be 1-0. We had a little extra time, due to the Thursday night game. We got an extra practice in yesterday (Saturday) and we looked at ourselves and tried to make ourselves a better football team. We will get back on the practice field and start for Penn State knowing that it will be an exceptional game Saturday night. We look forward to Penn State coming to town. They have a tremendous tradition. Coach Paterno is one of the best coaches in the history of college football, and he's bringing a good team to town. So it will be a great challenge for our program, and we're looking forward to playing the game Saturday night. Q: Any updates on Whitworth and Trueblood? TOB: Whitworth will probably be out a month, Trueblood, we're not sure. Q: What were the main things you had to work on, coming off the Ball State game? TOB: We had to get the offensive line together because of the injury to Trueblood. We worked hard to make those guys a good cohesive group. We wanted to move (James) Marten to guard, but now he has to go back to tackle. Defensively, they threw us a couple of different things we hadn't seen before, so we wanted to go over the things that needed to be corrected. I think maybe we could have done a better job. But you look at the game, the defense gave up 211 yards, that wasn't a bad night. Offensively, the biggest situation we had was having five possessions that started inside the six (due to the Ball State punter). Going back, in 2002, we only had four possessions the whole year that started inside the six, and in 2003, we had five the whole year that started inside the six. So we had a year's worth of starting inside the six-yard-line. Their punter was absolutely tremendous. Q: How did you think your freshmen kickers did in the Ball State game? TOB: Other than dropping the ball on the first possession because he took his eye off it, Ayers did a good job. Ohliger was a little nervous on his first two kickoffs, but he came out and kicked the ball much better in the second half. There are a lot of freshmen out there who have a little bit of jitters. That's to be expected. We're going to have to live with that. Hopefully that's over, and we'll go on. I think they both are very talented individuals and will end up being great kickers, but there's going to be a bit of a learning curve here now. Q: Do you view this (Penn State) game as being something special for BC fans? TOB: Absolutely. School starts here on Tuesday, so the students just got back on campus. It's like the first function of the year for Boston College, so we get to kick it off with a nationally televised football game. I think it will help show our program and the strides we've made the past five years, the direction the program's going. There are a lot of good things about playing on national TV, especially against a storied program such as Penn State.
