Boston College Athletics
Camp Begins March To Season Opener
August 07, 2020 | Football, #ForBoston Files
The first full-fledged practice coincided with the ACC's 2020 schedule release.
Boston College head coach Jeff Hafley used to lose sleep over the 2020 football season.
No, that didn't mean he wondered at night if quarterback Phil Jurkovec would receive an eligibility waiver. He also didn't think about Frank Cignetti's offense or if Tem Lukabu's defense would stop the unit in practice. He didn't wander to images of what it would take to get the Eagles over a wins plateau, and he didn't read experts' predictions, all of which seemed to slot BC at the bottom of the ACC.
He was too preoccupied with bigger questions. It was hard to lose sleep, after all, over the details of a season if there was no season at all.
On Thursday, though, Hafley was finally able to answer a question asked in earnest over the past five months. The ACC released its upcoming 2020 season, finally putting full traction into a schedule already the most unusual in college football history.
"It was great,"Â said Hafley of seeing the Eagles' schedule on Thursday. "The guys are looking forward to a date that they can play, and now it's about going to work. (The schedule) came out as we started practice, so I didn't get a chance to talk to (the players). But I know they'll be fired up to get that concrete date set."
For BC, the 2020 season will kick off on September 12 when the Eagles host Ohio at Alumni Stadium. It's the first of back-to-back, consecutive games to start the season and precedes a road game at Duke before the first of two scheduled byes.
"It's exciting to know that we're playing," tight end Hunter Long said. "Everyone is just excited. We have a pretty good schedule, and we're looking forward to getting into it and getting after it."
Those first two games will lead into a seven-week gauntlet in October that begins with home games against North Carolina and Pittsburgh. A road trip to Virginia Tech after that starts a string of three road games in four weeks, the lone home game of which is against Georgia Tech. That game, which is directly after the trip to Lane Stadium, precedes trips to both Clemson and Syracuse before Notre Dame visits Alumni Stadium for the first time since 2012.
The season is scheduled to end after BC's second bye week in November with a home game against Louisville and a road game at Virginia.
"I have friends on the Georgia Tech team," linebacker Max Richardson said. "We started calling and texting each other to talk some trash. I have friends on the Duke team, so I'm excited. And I'm excited to play some teams that I have played in the past."
The schedule resembles nothing of the original 2020 calendar handed down in January. The ACC's divisional alignment would have brought Clemson to Chestnut Hill for that game and delivered a road trip to Florida State as part of the traditional, Atlantic Division rotation. Additionally, there would have been games against both NC State and Wake Forest.
All of that upended when the COVID-19 pandemic raged through the summer. Individual conferences issued rulings on playing in light of the rolling situation, and it made playing a full season completely infeasible. In particular, the ACC issued its intention in July to scrap its typical schedule in favor of a "10+1" approach.
It did away with divisional alignments and scrapped a format in place since the 2005 season. Notre Dame joined the league for one season, its first conference affiliation in program history. The ACC Championship Game remained, but the league announced it would pit two teams against one another based on winning percentage.
BC lost its typical games against Florida State, NC State and Wake Forest and will now play six teams from the Coastal Division, four of which were not on its original schedule. It will play Duke for the first time since 2015 and Georgia Tech for the first time since the 2016 game in Ireland. Virginia, a team that has never beaten the Eagles, is on the schedule for the first time since 2017.
Pittsburgh is on the schedule for a second consecutive season. It will be just the third meeting between the former annual, Big East rivals and marks the first time the teams play in back-to-back years since realignment.
Then there's Notre Dame, which last visited Boston in 2015 when it moved the semi-annual Shamrock Series game to Fenway Park. This year marks the first consecutive meeting against the Fighting Irish since the teams played six straight years from 2007-2012 and the first game at Alumni Stadium since the final meeting in that series.
It's all very exciting, but the players and coaches all acknowledged the long path between now and then.
"It was good to see some ink on what we were expecting to be a season," Richardson said. "I think we're just trying to focus every day to get better. There are so many unknowns, and it's an odd time period. We just can control what we do when we get in the building every day, so right now, we're just trying to take a step forward."
"I told (the team) that what they've done for the last month is incredible," Hafley said. "This is just the start because it's going to get harder. I keep putting it on the team that they truly love each other and want to do it for each other. They have to protect themselves, but they have to do it for the guy next to them. It's going to get harder, and it's not even close to done. But we're off to a really good start."
It all reinforced the implemented changes at BC since the team abruptly broke spring training camp back in March. Players all wore shields on both the upper and lower portions of facemasks, and coaches all wore masks. Logistics maintained protocols for social distancing in the locker room and on the trainer's table, and a visible lack of on-site visitors stamped just how different this year really would appear.
Already, BC announced its season opener against Ohio would be played without fans. It was further unclear if or when spectators would return to Alumni Stadium for future games, a sign that personal safety remains under constant observation and primary consideration.
"We have to take it day-by-day, obviously," Long reiterated. "Things change every hour, so (we have) that mindset. You have to adapt at every level, but we've done a good job with that."
"We've got great kids," Hafley said, "and we kept telling them to control what they could control. Earlier in the pandemic, I was trying to look ahead, and my head was spinning. Then you learn you have to go day-by-day because you can't look so far ahead that you get worried about it. You have to go one step at a time and keep everyone in the moment to be at their best. That's what they've done.
"It was a good moment to see that we're playing on (September 12)," he said. "Until anyone says anything differently, we have a date to get ready for. And we're going to do our best every day."
No, that didn't mean he wondered at night if quarterback Phil Jurkovec would receive an eligibility waiver. He also didn't think about Frank Cignetti's offense or if Tem Lukabu's defense would stop the unit in practice. He didn't wander to images of what it would take to get the Eagles over a wins plateau, and he didn't read experts' predictions, all of which seemed to slot BC at the bottom of the ACC.
He was too preoccupied with bigger questions. It was hard to lose sleep, after all, over the details of a season if there was no season at all.
On Thursday, though, Hafley was finally able to answer a question asked in earnest over the past five months. The ACC released its upcoming 2020 season, finally putting full traction into a schedule already the most unusual in college football history.
"It was great,"Â said Hafley of seeing the Eagles' schedule on Thursday. "The guys are looking forward to a date that they can play, and now it's about going to work. (The schedule) came out as we started practice, so I didn't get a chance to talk to (the players). But I know they'll be fired up to get that concrete date set."
For BC, the 2020 season will kick off on September 12 when the Eagles host Ohio at Alumni Stadium. It's the first of back-to-back, consecutive games to start the season and precedes a road game at Duke before the first of two scheduled byes.
"It's exciting to know that we're playing," tight end Hunter Long said. "Everyone is just excited. We have a pretty good schedule, and we're looking forward to getting into it and getting after it."
Those first two games will lead into a seven-week gauntlet in October that begins with home games against North Carolina and Pittsburgh. A road trip to Virginia Tech after that starts a string of three road games in four weeks, the lone home game of which is against Georgia Tech. That game, which is directly after the trip to Lane Stadium, precedes trips to both Clemson and Syracuse before Notre Dame visits Alumni Stadium for the first time since 2012.
The season is scheduled to end after BC's second bye week in November with a home game against Louisville and a road game at Virginia.
"I have friends on the Georgia Tech team," linebacker Max Richardson said. "We started calling and texting each other to talk some trash. I have friends on the Duke team, so I'm excited. And I'm excited to play some teams that I have played in the past."
The schedule resembles nothing of the original 2020 calendar handed down in January. The ACC's divisional alignment would have brought Clemson to Chestnut Hill for that game and delivered a road trip to Florida State as part of the traditional, Atlantic Division rotation. Additionally, there would have been games against both NC State and Wake Forest.
All of that upended when the COVID-19 pandemic raged through the summer. Individual conferences issued rulings on playing in light of the rolling situation, and it made playing a full season completely infeasible. In particular, the ACC issued its intention in July to scrap its typical schedule in favor of a "10+1" approach.
It did away with divisional alignments and scrapped a format in place since the 2005 season. Notre Dame joined the league for one season, its first conference affiliation in program history. The ACC Championship Game remained, but the league announced it would pit two teams against one another based on winning percentage.
BC lost its typical games against Florida State, NC State and Wake Forest and will now play six teams from the Coastal Division, four of which were not on its original schedule. It will play Duke for the first time since 2015 and Georgia Tech for the first time since the 2016 game in Ireland. Virginia, a team that has never beaten the Eagles, is on the schedule for the first time since 2017.
Pittsburgh is on the schedule for a second consecutive season. It will be just the third meeting between the former annual, Big East rivals and marks the first time the teams play in back-to-back years since realignment.
Then there's Notre Dame, which last visited Boston in 2015 when it moved the semi-annual Shamrock Series game to Fenway Park. This year marks the first consecutive meeting against the Fighting Irish since the teams played six straight years from 2007-2012 and the first game at Alumni Stadium since the final meeting in that series.
It's all very exciting, but the players and coaches all acknowledged the long path between now and then.
"It was good to see some ink on what we were expecting to be a season," Richardson said. "I think we're just trying to focus every day to get better. There are so many unknowns, and it's an odd time period. We just can control what we do when we get in the building every day, so right now, we're just trying to take a step forward."
"I told (the team) that what they've done for the last month is incredible," Hafley said. "This is just the start because it's going to get harder. I keep putting it on the team that they truly love each other and want to do it for each other. They have to protect themselves, but they have to do it for the guy next to them. It's going to get harder, and it's not even close to done. But we're off to a really good start."
It all reinforced the implemented changes at BC since the team abruptly broke spring training camp back in March. Players all wore shields on both the upper and lower portions of facemasks, and coaches all wore masks. Logistics maintained protocols for social distancing in the locker room and on the trainer's table, and a visible lack of on-site visitors stamped just how different this year really would appear.
Already, BC announced its season opener against Ohio would be played without fans. It was further unclear if or when spectators would return to Alumni Stadium for future games, a sign that personal safety remains under constant observation and primary consideration.
"We have to take it day-by-day, obviously," Long reiterated. "Things change every hour, so (we have) that mindset. You have to adapt at every level, but we've done a good job with that."
"We've got great kids," Hafley said, "and we kept telling them to control what they could control. Earlier in the pandemic, I was trying to look ahead, and my head was spinning. Then you learn you have to go day-by-day because you can't look so far ahead that you get worried about it. You have to go one step at a time and keep everyone in the moment to be at their best. That's what they've done.
"It was a good moment to see that we're playing on (September 12)," he said. "Until anyone says anything differently, we have a date to get ready for. And we're going to do our best every day."
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