Four Downs: Wake Forest (2005)

The fans standing in the cold, wet rain had no way of knowing Boston College's 35-30 win over Wake Forest changed the program's guard. The exhilaration bit through their waterlogged bones, but the exuberance of rallying past the Demon Deacons felt far too shortsighted.

They only knew what everyone knew at the time. Boston College was bowl eligible for the seventh straight season after the Eagles pushed into an Atlantic Division tie with Florida State after Virginia upset the Seminoles. BC was part of a clear-cut top tier in the newly-formed division, and the win laid waste to any doubts about its ability to win in its new league.

Beating Wake Forest was both a literal and figurative passing of the torch. BC's final piece of its triumvirate of success after losing to Florida State sealed the Eagles as a front runner for the division championship.

The Wake Forest win both figuratively and literally passed the torch to a new era for the Eagles. It coupled with the Clemson and Virginia wins to seal the team into front runner status in its first year in the conference and established the groundwork for a run at the first-ever ACC Championship. All three emotional, hard-fought wins vanquished conference blue-bloods.

It opened the door to a new era through which Matt Ryan's legend walked. Earlier that season, Quinton Porter's injury against Florida State handed the starting job to the sophomore, and he led the Eagles past the Tigers in overtime. It vibrated rumblings through Chestnut Hill, even as Porter quieted the skeptics with 300 yards against Virginia.

The Wake Forest game forever altered that dynamic. Porter went 20-for-41 with 184 yards and two touchdowns, but his turnover struggles put BC in a hole. He threw three interceptions, including two in the fourth quarter, to turn a 21-20 lead into a 30-21 deficit. It forced head coach Tom O'Brien to take action, and with 3:29 left in the game, he turned to the sophomore from Pennsylvania.

"It made sense to me to go to Matt," O'Brien said after the game. "And Matt came in and did a great job, got us back into the ballgame and won the game for us."

Ryan's knack for dramatic comeback wins started specifically with that Wake Forest game. He went 7-for-9 for 134 yards and two explosive touchdowns. He hit Tony Gonzalez for the first, a 38-yard strike, then hit Kevin Challenger for 26 yards with 38 seconds remaining. It capped a four-play drive over 80 yards, and it gave BC its sixth win of the 2005 season.

"I thought we were going to win the entire time," Ryan said. "If there's any doubt that you're going to lose, then you've already lost. As a team, I don't think that we had any doubt."

"He came in fresh and ready to go," Porter said. "He's good at doing that. He was seeing things and made the big plays. The receivers stepped up with him and helped him out."

Legends retain signature moments, but greatness all has to start somewhere. In the 1980s, Doug Flutie led BC to a win over Alabama in 1983 well before he threw the Hail Mary to Gerard Phelan. Tom Coughlin and Glenn Foley beat No. 9 Penn State on the road in 1992 a full year before ending Notre Dame's national championship bid.

In 2005, long before Lane Stadium went silent, an unknown sophomore named Matt Ryan helped shock the ACC establishment.

Here's some of what else was learned from that October afternoon:

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First Down: QB Carousel

Revisionist history views Clemson and Wake Forest as Matt Ryan's breakout parties, but the truth is that he didn't become the team's exclusive starter until later that season. Porter started the Virginia Tech game after the team's bye before getting the call against North Carolina.

BC, which was 6-1 after beating Wake Forest, wound up losing both of those games. Against UNC, Porter played well, going 16-of-26 for 144 yards, but Ryan came off the bench early in the fourth quarter to throw 10-of-14 passes for 93 yards and a touchdown. It nearly led the Eagles over the Tar Heels, and it made a permanent move all the more inevitable before the NC State game.

"I think we got to a point where we were 6-1 and we thought we were a pretty good football team," O'Brien said at the time. "We haven't played for two weeks now with that edge (we had) in the first six, seven games. We have got to get that edge back. If we can do that, we'll give ourselves a chance."

Ryan led BC to wins over both NC State and Maryland, capping the year in the MPC Computers Bowl with 256 yards in a win over Boise State. He entered the 2006 season as an undisputed junior starter, starting a trajectory straight into the 2007 season.

Porter, meanwhile, finished his career as one of BC's most underappreciated passers. He threw for over 3,000 yards passing, and his 23 touchdowns outpaced even Matt Hasselbeck's numbers. He had lower career interception numbers than both Tim Hasselbeck and Paul Peterson, and he is still the fourth-most accurate passer in program history with a career percentage just under 60 percent.

He completed 63.6 percent of his passes during that 2005 season, a number still among BC's historical elites. He eventually carved out a few years in professional football and latched on with the Hamilton Tiger Cats in the CFL. In October, 2008, he threw for 429 yards and had as many touchdowns as incompletions - five - in a 44-38 win over Montreal.

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Second Down: Defensive Young Guns

BC entered the 2005 season with one of the most impressive, veteran defenses in the ACC. Mathias Kiwanuka drew a superstar's attention, but the unit drew experience from every area.

Nick Larkin and Al Washington could disrupt opposing backfields by getting to the quarterback.

Ray Henderson was an all-around machine, and Brian Toal could tackle anything that moved.

Ricky Brown possessed perfect sequencing, and the defensive backfield presence of Jazzmen Williams enabled Will Blackmon to transition into a two-way, all-around threat.

BC didn't have Kiwanuka or Washington for the Wake Forest game, though, and it lost Jake Ottolini to injury during the game. That forced younger players into more prominent roles, including names that would surface later on in BC history.

Sophomore BJ Raji had six tackles, and freshman Jim Ramella had three tackles and a sack in his sixth career game. Taji Morris recorded five tackles, while Tyronne Pruitt had four. DeJuan Tribble and Ron Brace all got on the stat sheet along with Kevin Akins and Jolonn Dunbar.

Jamie Silva, who had 14 tackles against Virginia in the game before Wake, destroyed the Demon Deacons with another 13 takedowns, including nine solo.

Every single one of those names formed the nucleus of the 2007 team's defense. Raji became a first round draft pick, and Silva enjoyed a lightning bolt career before an injury ended his career in 2009.

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Third Down: Rattling the Cage

BC's move to the ACC chased college football for the better part of 2005. Miami and Virginia Tech fit seamlessly into the league's geographic footprint, but Boston College was more than 400 miles from its nearest league opponent. It made the northern team an outlier, and there was an adjustment period for both the school and the league.

Beating Clemson, Virginia and Wake Forest softened the entire conversation, though, because all three schools represented the league's traditional, founding guard from its 1953 inception. Clemson was a traditional powerhouse dating back into both the 1960s and 1980s and two years removed from winning nine games.

Wake Forest was a mid-tier team competing for bowl eligibility throughout head coach Jim Grobe's early tenure. Virginia finished fourth in 2004 but was second among "old ACC" teams after Virginia Tech and Miami finished first and third.

Winning those games legitimized BC, even within the context of that season. Virginia was a crossover opponent from the Coastal Division, and the game in Chestnut Hill featured two nationally-ranked teams. It came after BC beat Clemson, which was bound for the national polls at the end of the season.

Even Wake Forest, which wasn't a national power, held consecutive wins over the Eagles from the 2003 and 2004 seasons.

BC's comeback win knocked that ghost clear out of Alumni Stadium. The Eagles eventually rode its record to 5-3 in conference play and 4-1 against the Atlantic Division. It lost consecutive games to Coastal Division teams, but one was Virginia Tech, which was No. 3 and finished the year with one regular season loss before dropping the conference title game to FSU.

The season began with doubts about BC's ability to succeed as "an ACC team." Questions lingered over college football realignment and how the program's transition would impact the future. Winning this game helped erase all of that and led directly to the consecutive conference championships between former Big East teams in 2007 and 2008.

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Fourth Down: That Week in College Football

That week in 2005 still resonates as one of the greatest slates in college football history. Game after game turned in classic results, and playoff atmospheres gripped almost every conference in every corner of the sport's vast reach.

In California, No. 1 USC defeated No. 9 Notre Dame, 34-31, when running back Reggie Bush shoved quarterback Matt Leinart across the goal line with three seconds left. The "Bush Push," as it became known, kept the defending national champion on a collision course with No. 2 Texas, which trounced a nationally-ranked Colorado team, 42-17.

The Trojans' crosstown rival, UCLA, avoided a near disaster at Washington State, winning 44-41 in overtime. UCLA, which was ranked No. 12 at the time, later lost to Arizona

It received top billing, but it wasn't the most exciting ending. That belonged to Michigan, which upset No. 8 Penn State, 27-25, when Chad Henne threw a game-winning touchdown to Mario Manningham as time expired. Manningham would later develop a penchant for clutch catches, including one in Super Bowl XLVI for the New York Giants that this writer only begrudgingly admits happened.

That overshadowed No. 23 Wisconsin's win over No. 22 Minnesota. The Badgers won that game, 38-34, when Justin Kucek blocked a punt with 30 seconds left, finishing off a rally back from a 27-17 deficit after three quarters. The Gophers actually led that game, 34-24, with 3:27 left on the clock before Wisconsin shocked the capacity Metrodome crowd and retrieved Paul Bunyan's Axe.

The Big East, meanwhile, reasserted itself with a triple overtime thriller between West Virginia and Louisville. The No. 19 Cardinals, who joined the league with Cincinnati and South Florida that year, were a mid-major powerhouse out of Conference USA before opening 4-1 in their first Big East season. They had an unmatched swagger that year, and they imposed it in Morgantown by opening up a 24-7 lead in the third quarter.

Louisville just couldn't stop Steve Slaton. The running back scored all six touchdowns for West Virginia, finishing with 188 yards on 31 carries. His touchdown with a minute remaining in the fourth quarter tied the game, and he scored in each overtime period, including once from 23 yards out. The Cardinals actually had the ball last and scored in the third overtime, but rules forced both teams to go for a two-point conversion. West Virginia converted; Louisville did not.

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Point After: Best Wishes

It goes without saying that we all wish we could be watching live sports right now. I truly miss being able to settle into my couch after dinner for a Bruins or Celtics game, and by now, I'd be gearing up to complain about the Boston Red Sox (which we all know I'd do even if they were defending World Series champions). That I don't have the opportunity is sobering in light of what we're all going through.

I have written about this in many different arenas, but I truly believe we will make it through all of this, together, as one people. We all have our own role to play in this, and if we all play the role as intended, we can beat this current situation with flying colors. In the meantime, I wish all of you nothing but continued good health and happiness. If we can't watch live sports, let's all gather around the campfire together and share stories from the old days, and then one day what we're living in the present will become the old days we once talked about.

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