Boston College Athletics
This Week is About the Eagles
August 24, 2015 | Football
Chestnut Hill, Mass. – Next week at this time, the Boston College football team will have a bit less on its plate. By next Monday, the Eagles will be fully involved in game preparation for the 2015 opener against Maine (Saturday, Sept. 5, 1 p.m. at Alumni Stadium | Buy Tickets), and will have sectioned off large swaths of the playbook for later in the season.
But between this Monday and next Monday, head coach Steve Addazio aims to perfect his team – make sure the Eagles take care of their own plays and packages – and also create consistency and urgency.
“We all know that we’re playing in less than two weeks,” Addazio said. “I’m sure there are a lot of teams in the country who are in the same boat. We need a sense of urgency and that’s where I feel where we are right now. It’s a race against the clock to get this team ready to play. It’s the way it is. I’ve been there before. We knew there’d be a lot of work to do. We knew there would be a lot of new faces trying to get cohesion. And that’s what we’re doing.”
This week is about completing the Eagles’ season-long look and feel. Ahead of Wednesday’s final scheduled intra-team scrimmage, the Eagles will make sure they’ve run through every play, every package and every option as they go against each other every day in practice. That will all change on Friday when the focus shifts to the season’s first opponent: the Black Bears.
“Right now, we’re finishing our installation, we’re finishing our package, we’re finishing the evaluation of who we think will be starters,” Addazio said. “We’re doing all of those things, then we shift and then it becomes all about our opponent. And it’s a whole different deal.”
And next week, that’s when the work shifts focus. It doesn’t change – it just shifts.
“Starting Friday, we’re working against Maine fronts and not BC fronts,” he explained. “We’re cutting down the menu of plays. Right now we’re installing; we’re looking at a broad variety of concepts and plays. When we go into the Maine game, that thing is going to shrink by two-thirds. So it’ll be a smaller menu against a smaller menu, so it’s totally different. We’re game planning something. We’re not game planning right now. We don’t spend one minute talking about if the defense runs this blitz and this blitz, or this is what we want to do here. There’s not one thought that goes into that.”
Not an adjustment unique to Addazio and his staff, the Eagles’ head coach knows this happening all across the country.
“So right now, I talk to a lot of my friends who are head coaches out there and everybody’s in the same boat. Everyone’s scrambling right now; scrambling to try to get ready for the season.”
Addazio likens this last week to crisis planning – Making sure the Eagles have planned and game-tested everything so they are ready when the whistle blows next Saturday. Why? Because that’s just who BC is.
“You can make it a crisis now or you can kid yourself and deal with the crisis later. I tend to make that crisis happen right now. It’s just how I’m wired. I’m going to create the crisis right now as opposed to waiting until week three or week four.
“Some teams are so talented that they’ll breeze by easy opponents … that’s not who we are. We’re not wired like that. We take on every team, every challenge. Everything is the same for us.”
The reputation of Boston College football is often said to be tough-nosed, smart and fundamental. It’s exactly how Addazio wants it.
“To me, I can’t just say we have these freaky athletes and we’ll go make enough plays and over the next few weeks ,we’ll get our team ready to play. We need to be ready to play right now. If we don’t fire all together at BC right now, we’re not very good. We’re not going to beat anybody with throwing it to some freak wideout who’s going to go stab it out of the air, no matter what you do. That’s not what we are. We have to be a team now. Not three weeks from now. So that’s why there’s a real sense of urgency with me getting this thing oiled up so we have some cohesiveness.”
