Four Downs: West Virginia (2004)

A looming shadow consistently lingered throughout the entire 2004 football season. Miami and Virginia Tech departed from the Big East for the ACC, and the Hurricanes' absence created a vacuum atop its former league. Three remaining teams all possessed identical or similar records from 2003, and all finished within a game of each other in the year before that. There was no obvious, clear-cut heir apparent to Miami, and the storyline shaped 2004 as a wide-open, muddied race for a Bowl Championship Series automatic bid.

Boston College's presence further framed the race as a murky affair. The Eagles consistently ranked as one of the league's second-tier teams behind Miami

Everyone knew one team would enter the void, and Boston College seemed ripe for the choosing. The Eagles reliably and consistently won seven or eight regular season games over the Tom O'Brien era, and their Big East record reflected an ability to compete at a high level. BC lost to Miami annually (most teams did in that era) and usually absorbed a second, unexpected loss to a team, but it always offset with big wins and guaranteed victories over the league's lower tier to finish third.

It opened a brilliant opportunity for the Eagles to win the Big East in their last season before joining the Hurricanes and Hokies in the ACC. To do so, BC would need to win the strategic games, including one at a place it almost always lost: West Virginia.

"This is big for our program and our school," head coach Tom O'Brien said after the Eagles lowered a 36-17 boom stick on the Mountaineers. "Like I told our guys all week, 'You weren't part of those other BC teams.' They really believed they could win."

BC's win shifted tectonic plates for its last month as a Big East football team. West Virginia started to assume Miami's mantle when it opened the year with an 8-1 record, and its undefeated conference record had the Mountaineers poised for a winner-take-all Backyard Brawl game against Pittsburgh to finish the season. It instead watched the Eagles steal the center stage spotlight.

"We're still in the Big East," quarterback Paul Peterson said. "I don't know how other teams are feeling about us leaving. I'm sure they're not happy, but what can we do? We're just going to go out and play. We're still in the Big East. The ACC is next year. That's all I can say about that."

It was BC's first win in Morgantown in 14 years and improved its overall record to 7-2 on the season. It handed the Eagles the inside track to the Fiesta Bowl with two games remaining in its Big East tenure. The good vibrations crashed and burned in horrifically fantastic fashion two weeks later, but in that moment, Tom O'Brien capped one of his finest moments as head coach. It lit up Chestnut Hill and struck a defiant tone after the controversial buildup of the ACC's expansion and the Big East's realignment.

"From the beginning, there were a lot of four-letter words (thrown at us)," Mathias Kiwanuka said afterwards. "You love it, but it's one of those things where it's so intense, it can take you out of your game if you let it.

"Any time you can come in here and get a stadium full of this many people to sit down and be quiet, that's a thrill."

Here are the other takeaways from BC's 2004 victory over West Virginia:

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First Down: Special Win

It wasn't difficult to derive uniqueness in Boston College's win over West Virginia because five of its seven scores came from special teams. Both DeJuan Tribble and Will Blackmon returned punts for touchdowns, and kicker Ryan Ohliger went 3-for-3 on field goals with two boomers from beyond 40 yards.

"I had more confidence after that first one," Ohliger said. "I just felt good. Everything was going."

Ohliger's day etched his name into BC's Big East record book alongside other legendary kicking names. In 2002, Sandro Sciortino kicked three field goals in four different games, including two perfect performances against Toledo and Temple, to tie David Gordon's Big East era record set against Army in 1994. All of those performances were one short of tying Brian Lowe's three-time record of four kicks set against Army and West Virginia in 1986 and against Georgia Tech in 1989.

He didn't miss a kick during the rest of that regular season, but Ohliger missed an extra point and a field goal in BC's bowl win over North Carolina at the end of 2004. The inconsistency plagued him through 2005, and his kicking career at BC ended with an undisclosed violation of team rules in 2006. The inglorious end bridged into the story of Steve Aponavicius, but it's impossible to ignore his impact in the win over West Virginia.

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Second Down: The Stormin' Mormon

Boston College's quarterback history tends to bridge one player to the next. Glenn Foley led to Mark Hartsell and Scott Mutryn before the Hasselbeck brothers passed the torch to Brian St. Pierre. Every player rolled into the next in an offense consistent with its ability to rebuild, redesign and, eventually, reload to churn out victories before Matt Ryan came along and rewrote everything.

The only exception is an odd gap between 2003 and Ryan's ascension in 2005. The offense apexed in 2001, and St. Pierre left the offense in Quinton Porter's hands after 2002. Porter started 2003 as the starting quarterback, but his inconsistency forced O'Brien to play Paul Peterson against West Virginia late in the season. He became the starter and supplanted Porter to remain in the role through 2004.

"You couldn't ask for someone to come off the bench and be so composed," Mathias Kiwanuka said after the 2003 West Virginia game.

Peterson's antithetical background converted him into this weird foreign commodity at BC. Foley and Mutryn grew up outside New England, but New Jersey and Ohio were fertile Chestnut Hill recruiting grounds.

Hartsell, the Hasselbecks, and St. Pierre all grew up in Massachusetts. Porter was the best athlete in Maine. Peterson was from Utah and served two years on a Mormon mission after high school. He transferred from Snow College, also in Utah, where he led the NJCAA in passing and touchdowns. It was all so mysterious.

He won the starting job at the end of 2003 and remained in the role in 2004 while Porter redshirted. Against West Virginia, he went 18-of-30 for 162 yards and two touchdowns but didn't throw an interception. His touchdown pass to L.V. Whitworth rolled the offense to its first score, and he did just what he needed to do to keep BC from letting West Virginia back into the game.

Peterson's style of play drew injuries at the end of the season, and his career ended with the same quick flash under which it began. His broken hand against Temple forced him out of the Syracuse game (more on that in a bit), and he broke his leg in the Continental Tire Bowl win over North Carolina - despite winning game MVP honors.

He barely played a full season's worth of games but remains a brief, shining, lightning bolt of greatness. He threw for more yards than both Porter and Mutryn, and he posted comparable numbers to both Hartsell and Tim Hasselback. His 28 career passing touchdowns were two less than Shawn Halloran.

His 2004 touchdown numbers equaled St. Pierre's 2002 total, and his 2,594 yards are right in line with Doug Flutie's total for both 1982 and 1983. It's more yards than three of Glenn Foley's seasons and more than Matt Hasselbeck's 1997 total.

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Third Down: Bet on Blackmon

In the first quarter, defensive back DeJuan Tribble made reservations for six on a 41-yard punt return. In the fourth quarter, Will Blackmon did the same by going 71 yards for the final score of the day.

In addition, Brian Toal returned a kick 43 yards, and punter Johnny Ayers booted a 76-yard punt as part of a 344-yard day averaging over 49 yards per kick. Safety Jamie Silva recovered a Vaughn Rivers fumble on the opening kick of the third quarter. It was a monster day for the special teams, one that helped the Eagles score 36 points despite only 243 yards on offense.

"Special teams were a decisive factor," Tom O'Brien said after the game. "Last year, (West Virginia) had a kickoff return and an interception return for a touchdown that ended up being the difference. This year, we had two punt returns and some great kickoffs that were the difference."

That's not including the dominant defensive play. Quarterback Rasheed Marshall threw for 224 yards and hit wide receiver Chris Henry for a touchdown but fired an interception to Ryan Glasper in the second quarter. Ray Henderson and TJ Stancil both had 10 tackles, and Mathias Kiwanuka recorded two sacks. Tribble added six tackles, as did Glasper, who had three solos.

West Virginia's offense still gained a dump truck's worth of yards, but BC largely bottled up its reliance on big plays. Marshall, the first of West Virginia's legendary dual-threat college quarterbacks, had 100 yards rushing on 20 carries, and Chris Henry had 118 yards on eight receptions. Running back Kay-Jay Harris bruised his way into a 100-yard game. BC just offset the performances on defense with big plays at the big moments from big-time players.

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Fourth Down: Crash and Burn

The 2004 win over West Virginia installed belief in BC as a Big East championship contender and touched off delirium across Massachusetts. The Eagles had a front row seat to the Fiesta Bowl if they could win their last two games, and neither opponent seemed like all that much of a challenge. All that remained was a game at Temple and a home game against Syracuse, and neither posed much of a risk.

Temple was also in its last year in the Big East, but unlike BC, the league kicked the Owls out because they lacked competitiveness. The program's well-documented failures produced no more than four wins since the conference formed in 1991, and adding Connecticut alongside future members Cincinnati, Louisville and South Florida provided the opening to reconfigure without the team. Temple hadn't beaten Boston College since 1999, one of two wins over the Eagles in the Big East era. The lack of intrigue produced an easy BC win, 34-17, despite Paul Peterson's hand injury.

That left Syracuse as the only hurdle between BC and the Fiesta Bowl. The Orange lost every game against ranked opponents that year after opening the season with a 51-0 blowout by Purdue. The offense later sputtered against West Virginia on the road, and the team limped into Chestnut Hill with a 1-4 record on the road after losing to, of all teams, Temple.

On the first play from scrimmage, running back Damien Rhodes sprinted 69 yards for a touchdown to give Syracuse an early lead. He suffered an injury on the play and forced head coach Paul Pasqualoni to switch hands to a backup named Diamond Ferri. Ferri was a defensive back for the Orange and hadn't been a full-time running back since Everett High School crushed Bedford in the Massachusetts state Super Bowl during his senior year of high school.

We're already here, so let's just keep this party going.

Ferri rushed 28 times for 141 yards on offense and scored twice. He had six tackles and a pick-six on defense. He returned two punts and somehow managed to run into both a padded wall and an aluminum bench for good measure. He led the Orange over BC and into bowl eligibility, and Syracuse, an original Big East school that almost went to the ACC with BC during that round of realignment, laughed last for the conference.

That was fun.

I don't know if it's a positive for that game, but Peterson's injury forced a scrawny backup named Matt Ryan into starting action. He went 24-for-51 for 200 yards and a touchdown, but he threw three interceptions.

Ryan went onto enjoy immense success, and the Eagles pressured for a BCS game immediately upon joining the ACC. BC played for two conference championships and played for a divisional title as recently as 2018. Time softens the blow of that 2004 ending, but it still bears mentioning. Utah beat Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl that year, leaving everyone with a feeling of what could have been.

Let's never speak of this again.

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Point After: The BCS

College football always dealt with an issue surrounding national championships by forming bowl coalitions (one even called itself the Bowl Coalition) to determine national champions. They each had positives and negatives, but the Bowl Championship Series really was the first all-bowl system designed to pit the two best teams against one another. It used pure mathematics, and an algorithm spit back a number to rank the teams. Certain conferences had certain bowl tie-ins, but it assured the two best teams of playing or a national championship in one of the four biggest bowl games.

It led to memorable matchups in its early years, including Florida State's 2000 Sugar Bowl win over Virginia Tech and Ohio State's 2003 win over Miami, but it was almost always beset by controversy. The mathematical formula averaged the rankings against strength of schedule, and teams quickly learned they needed to blow out certain teams in order to position for a national championship. Even then, it wasn't enough for other teams, and the 2001 Orange Bowl and 2002 Rose Bowl served as prime reminders of how computers removed emotion for worse, not for better.

The 2004 season was a completely different animal, though. USC and Oklahoma finished the year undefeated and ranked No. 1 and No. 2, so their BCS national championship game determined who hoisted the trophy while Auburn, Utah, and Boise State all watched. Auburn, which won the SEC, wound up playing No. 8 Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl because of tie-ins and rules, and No. 7 Utah, which won the Mountain West Conference went to the Fiesta Bowl to play Pittsburgh, which wound up winning the Big East. The Utes' presence wound up preventing Boise State from playing in a BCS game altogether, and the Broncos, who won the WAC, played Louisville in the Liberty Bowl. It was a disaster compounded by California, which was ranked No. 4 the entire season before Texas passed it at the very end. Cal, which would have replaced USC as a traditional Pac-12 team against the Big Ten champion, instead went to the Holiday Bowl, which wasn't a BCS game.

In the end, the No. 13 and No. 20 teams in the nation went to the BCS while teams ranked fourth in a major poll, seventh, eighth, and tenth all went to other games.

I never really hated the BCS as much as other people because I always felt it was the first system to incorporate all the conferences into determining a national champion. The first edition, to me, is always the one that requires refinement. It also led directly to the creation of the first College Football Playoff and a system that is debated today. The system is almost always undergoing refinement and tinkering, and it will ultimately lead to the future systems that we will debate and tinker with. I can never really be mad at that, so I won't be. Instead, I'll just enjoy the story and the history lesson and hope that the next improvement continues to push forward this great game that we all enjoy.

Boston College Athletics

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