The Tailgate: Connecticut

I'm a huge fan of Friday Night Lights.

It's legitimately one of the best television shows I ever watched, and I'm prone to watching it annually whenever I come across the series on any one of a thousand streaming services. It's not a perfect show, but it captures the unique combination of teenage drama opposite the real-life problems associated with compelling sports stories. It appropriately glamorizes Texas high school football, but the main characters' lives intertwine with the positives and negatives of the team coached by Eric Taylor.

The last two seasons of the show take Coach Taylor out of a high-priced comfort zone associated with the highly-touted Dillon Panthers and place him in the long-dormant, underfunded East Dillon High School, and the strongly-written episodes fully underpin the challenges of building a new program at a high school considered less-than-adequate by its peers. From a football standpoint, a bookend episode in the fifth and final season serves as a callback to the first game of the fourth season where the East Dillon Lions forfeit to a team from South Kingdom High School. By the time the superpowered Lions face South Kingdom in that fifth season episode, their fortunes have changed to the degree that they're on the road to a state championship game with one of the best football players in the state.

Coach Taylor has a specific quote for that second game where he warns against playing into a revenge storyline. Revenge games, he says, unwind a player's self-control and places them on a path towards undisciplined penalties, and if we're drawing parallels to a Boston College team that's playing with heart, desire and passion, there is no way this week's game against Connecticut can turn into one of those hate-filled, black-hearted revenge games if the Eagles want to continue building their narrative.

"There will be no [added] motivation needed," said head coach Jeff Hafley of this week's game. "I don't need to talk about it, but there's zero motivation needed to play this game. We're excited to play it. We'll pour everything that we have the last few weeks, but this is a team with a lot of confidence, a lot of momentum, that is enjoying playing football. We're getting better, and we need to still get better, so there will be no motivation [needed] for this week."

It goes without saying that last year's 13-3 loss to UConn rang throughout the BC program. The Eagles lost to the Huskies for the first time in program history in a game that nobody, myself included, expected them to lose. The result admittedly lingered and hovered over the rest of the season, and the never-ending stream of Houdini-like escapes against local competition faded into the memory of watching Boston College chase ghosts around Rentschler Field. The disappointing ending and score stuck to BC like a glue board, and a 45-year streak of beating regional competition ran out of magic during a lost season.

There was no way around it, but going through the game doesn't mean the Eagles have to prove a point other than winning on Saturday. This year's BC team doesn't possess the same roster from last year's ride home from East Hartford, and the growth over the last three wins stamps the significant differences between the years. Comparisons are naturally unavoidable, but linking the two seasons to BC's on-field product does this season a disservice to an extent since it doesn't even feel like the same team that beat Holy Cross in September, let alone the one that lost to UConn last year.

"This is a new group," Hafley emphasized. "This is a new team, and this is a new offensive line. We rushed for 308 yards last week and rushed for 320 yards the week before. We averaged 60 yards per game last year, and in back-to-back weeks, we've run for over 300 yards. So it's a totally different offensive line, a totally different quarterback, a totally different offensive scheme. This is a different team and a different offense from the one that played UConn last year and the rest of the teams that we played."

That UConn game will always trigger something within the deep-seeded regional hatred that exists between the two schools, and the Eagles would be lying if they ignored last year altogether. The attitude that it somehow dismisses this matchup because of some other form of success certainly doesn't diminish the personal importance of a game, but the elements that went into the past aren't the primary driving factor for a team seeking to put its best product on the field.

That didn't happen last year, but the blood oath seeking revenge against UConn shouldn't exist outside of a reminder of what happens when a team isn't prepared and doesn't put its best foot forward. This year is altogether different, and if there's any emotion lingering, it needs to compartmentalize for the end of the game to prevent last year from ever happening again.

Here's what to watch for when the Huskies make the trip over from I-87:

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Game Storylines (David Ortiz Edition)

I just come do what I've got to do and play my game. I don't worry if anybody likes it.

Let's make one thing clear about UConn's season: the Huskies are better than their 1-6 record indicates. They hung with NC State during a 10-point loss at home in the first game of the season and followed it up with a seven-point loss to Florida International two weeks later. They had a 17-0 lead over Utah State before the Aggies staged a comeback, and the Huskies scored an apparent tying touchdown in the last minute of the fourth quarter before a blocked extra point cost them a 34-33 defeat. Having finally won a game by beating Rice, 38-31, a return home in its last game ended with UConn opening an 11-point lead in the fourth quarter before South Florida rallied for a 24-21 win.

"They've mostly played one-possession games since the Duke game," said Jeff Hafley of the Huskies. "It's a very similar team to last year. They have their defensive line back, their offensive line back, the quarterback was the starting quarterback last year before he got hurt. The running backs are back. It's a good team. They play really hard, and they're really well-coached."

Looking back at last year's UConn team illustrates the difference one or two plays make when they start breaking in opposite directions. A team that was once 1-4 won consecutive games over Fresno State and FIU before a three-game winning streak began by beating Boston College, and the subsequent wins over UMass and Liberty got the Huskies into their first bowl game in seven years.

"You always look at the previous time you played an opponent," Hafley said. "If you look back at last week, I watched every game we ever played against Georgia Tech. You try to look at things they did successfully against us, what was open, what they didn't hit and what they came back to [running]. You ask what runs were there and maybe what read they might want to come back to, what blitzes you liked. So you always study the past, and this week is honestly no different. We watched the game multiple times in all three phases, and I'm sure they did the same thing."

Last year very clearly offered watershed moments for the UConn program under Jim Mora, and this year's regression only exists because the bounces apparently ran out of good luck. Regardless of that, though, this is still a team that can hang with anybody, and even with six losses, the direct path to bowl eligibility has to start with a win over a Boston College team attempting to reclaim its mantle as the preeminent New England powerhouse.

I showed people that it's not about guessing what people can do. It's about saying, 'Here, show me what you can do.'

It's easy to sit back and talk about quarterbacks as higher performing players when they complete more passes, but UConn's Ta'Quan Roberson is the kind of high-risk, low-efficiency passer that's started to build a reputation as a better thrower over the past few weeks. His 1,145 yards are better than Virginia Tech's Kyron Drones, Duke's Riley Leonard, and NC State's Brennan Armstrong, and the names behind him on the national list around both current Bowling Green quarterback and former Mizzou passer Connor Bazelak and within shouting distance of Mississippi State's Will Rogers.

His eight touchdowns seem low, but Roberson didn't play in the first game against NC State and didn't take over QB1 responsibilities until Joe Fagnano was lost for the season with a shoulder injury sustained against Georgia State. Working into the starting role, it's not surprising that his two best performances came in two of UConn's last three games when he completed more than 70 percent of his passes in the loss to Utah State and the win at Rice.

"He's effective," Jeff Hafley said. "His completion percentage is pretty high, and he's accurate. He gets rid of the ball extremely quick, and he's really athletic. You can see it in the South Florida game when he pulled one on a stretch read and outran everybody. He's quick on his feet. He's a very, very athletic quarterback who can stay in the pocket and throw the ball, and he's gotten better each week. They think highly enough of last year when he was the starter, and I have a ton of respect for him."

Roberson has his limitations, but UConn built a passing attack around his ability to spread the ball to three main targets. Each of them - graduate receiver Brett Buckman, redshirt junior receiver Cameron Ross and sophomore tight end Justin Joly - have at least once game with seven receptions to their credit, and the matchups they present are challenging enough to force a defense out of its comfort zone. The fact that Mora is capable of rolling six to seven different tight ends into formations that resemble old school football is equally difficult, and the constant threat from running back Victor Rosa adds dimensions to an offense that can gash a defense if it's not prepared.

Through the years, I've been getting better and better and better, and it's what you learn through the seasons.

Beating up defenses has kind of become BC's thing lately, though. Both teams average over 30 yards per game because their respective offenses can sustain drives, but where UConn rebuilt its offense around a quarterback who attempts to play a high-reward, efficient passing attack, the Eagles are instead adding new wrinkles to an offense now completely geared around Thomas Castellanos, the nation's leading quarterback rusher.

"You can continue to build [all season]," said Jeff Hafley, "and we didn't run everything we worked on in the bye week [against Georgia Tech]. There are certain things we ran in that game that we have to find things that complement them and continue to move forward and progress, and I think that's the one thing the offensive staff has done a really good job of with the players."

Castellanos didn't assume the full-fledged QB1 role until the Holy Cross game, but his first seven games as a starter redefined the BC offensive scheme. His 1,398 yards have him in a club that features Glenn Foley and Shawn Halloran, and his numbers as a sophomore are comparable to Doug Flutie's first seven games as the Eagles' starting quarterback during the 1981 season. His 628 yards are already the second-most single season tally by a quarterback, and it stands to reason that he could close the gap on Tyler Murphy's 1,184 yards from the option offense in 2014. Perhaps more than anything, his 10 touchdown passes are four less than Phil Jurkovec's first season in 2020, a year that stands out for how it redefined the offense at the time.

None of this means that Castellanos is going to surpass Flutie or Foley in the BC record books, but his production is a byproduct of how the Eagles forced an adaptation to a new offense. The modern era is built around mobile quarterbacks who can spot deep throws, and the program itself has never really had a player under center who could do both. The long history of pocket passers aside, Jeff Smith was an option offering before he switched to wide receiver, and Murphy never threw for 200 yards as a starting quarterback during the 2014 season when he nearly matched his output as both a runner and a passer.

"The offense is starting to gel," said Hafley, "[but] I think there's a lot of room for improvement. You're seeing it in the run game, the various formations, all the different personnel groups that we're coming out in with extra linemen and multiple tight ends and people lining up all over the place. They're getting more comfortable, Thomas is getting comfortable, the line is getting more comfortable, and the backs are seeing things better. In the pass game, you'll continue to see us do some different things that [Thomas] is very comfortable with, and we'll take advantage of the receivers that we have."

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Question Box

Can the offensive line bore holes in UConn's run defense?

UConn is an exceptional run-stopping defense that averages 156 yards per game, and while that number seems high, there's a four-game swing in the middle of the first half of the season where the majority of teams failed to crack or barely cracked 100 yards. FIU and Duke were stuck at 80 yards apiece against the Huskies, and Utah State gained 101 yards because they ran the ball 32 times against the UConn defense.

The numbers are offset by two 200-yard games at the beginning of the season and a 260-yard mauling by USF in the Huskies' last outing that held UConn's offense to 66 overall plays. The plus-22 advantage resulted in about 100 extra yards for the Bulls, so how the Eagles attack the defensive front four is going to determine who tilts field position and time of possession in a game where three-down success is required.

"Every team is different," said offensive lineman Ozzy Trapilo. "They all sort of do their own thing, so it's kind of a week-to-week thing. It really starts as soon as the game ends, and everything you learn from the week before, there might be some carryover, but a lot of times, it's just completely new. You have to know the nuances of a defense that you're going against that week."

Which team raises the bar on weird or unique formations in the red zone?

UConn flashed back to college football's golden era when it lined up defensive tackle Jelani Stafford in its backfield for a goal line offense, and the different formations in which he played caused defenses nightmares for trying to halt a 300-pound interior player with a head of steam.

BC, meanwhile, trotted eight offensive linemen onto the field against Georgia Tech, and motioning an offensive guard is something that hasn't been seen since Chris Lindstrom played a number of snaps as an extra H-back blocker during the 2015 season.

Both teams have multiple tight ends and big wide receivers who can block.

Personally speaking, I'd like someone to go into the old school, offset veer that I used to use in Bill Walsh College Football on Sega Genesis. To this day - and yes, I have a Sega Genesis - it's unstoppable.

Is warm apple cider still an appropriate breakfast drink if it's 75 degrees out?

Yes. We're in apple season, and it doesn't matter if the temperatures spike into the 80s or not. This is apple cider donut season. Fresh-pressed apple cider is always a welcome addition to a morning drink, and caramel apples are the perfect dessert ending on a cool night. It could be August-like humidity, and I'd still pour myself a thick glass of sugary delight.

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Meteorology 101

The walk from my car to the press box for the first game against Northern Illinois was not an enjoyable day at the office. It was muggy and hot out, and the notorious winter guy that exists in my soul immediately burst into a deep sweat from the sunshine radiating through the Alumni Stadium bleachers. The air conditioner churned behind me, but I probably drank several bottles of water because the deep-rooted heat crept through my body at a time when I would rather have sat in an ice bath.

Nearly two months later, we're finally going to receive full sunshine for another game day. The lightning delay from the Holy Cross game and the hurricane-that-wasn't against Florida State bled into the whacky, changing conditions for the Virginia and Army games, but Saturday's kickoff against Connecticut is calling for temperatures in the 70s with bright sunshine basking across the greater New England area.

It feels like forever since I've been able to say that, and even with rain lurking at the start of next week, no rainy days are otherwise in sight for the weekend. Nothing can come early or linger around, and the cloudless conditions should be perfect for a morning apple cider or two before heading to the game. The cool night is a great way to relax after watching the game, and I have a feeling that a barbeque grill or two will stick around in my nostrils after this one's done.

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BC-UConn X Factor

Balancing the unbalanced.

UConn is the fourth consecutive team to list a nose tackle on its depth chart, but after facing balanced defensive lines in each of the first four games, the Boston College offensive line seemingly revamped itself around the little changes that need to happen when a player lines up directly over the center. The unbalanced defensive line causes guards to pass block or open rushing lanes by lending support to the middle or outside of the line, but the gaps hinge on both the tackles' ability to contain the edge and the center's ability to absorb a post-snap quick rush over his own head.

"It's definitely different," said Jeff Hafley. "I'm sure the centers don't like it as much as they do when teams play balanced lines, and I'm sure the guards like it in passing situations because they don't have a guy and are usually uncovered."

That was the extent of Hafley taking my bait when it came to discussing the unbalanced line, but it's also not difficult to see how the guards support the blocking scheme when the tackle is directly over the center. In a four-man front, one guard is left uncovered because the two defensive ends are rushing one-on-one against the offensive tackle while the second defensive tackle is lined up over one guard, and keeping an extra tight end in the formation can open up a lane for play action or a run-pass option for a mobile quarterback like Thomas Castellanos.

"[Defensive ends] are becoming very mobile," said Ozzy Trapilo. "They're very twitchy and very athletic, so there's naturally a kind of mismatch there in terms of athleticism. If I have 60 pounds on a guy, I'm not going to be as fast-footed as he is, so we have to adjust our technique. We have a good set and don't really fall for a lot of the fakes or any of that stuff, and because a lot of times, they're going to be faster than us, you just have to make up for that with technique."

UConn has to be wary of creating too much space in its gaps by rushing to the outside, but maintaining inside control is going to create flat pass and wheel route opportunities. It's a lethal combination, but it all stems from the bull rush through the middle. If the nose tackle can get home, a fifth rusher or an end is going to have an extra hole to fly through because, in that instance, the harmony on the interior is gone.

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Around College Football

The single-division race within the ACC expected to tighten regardless of the outcome from the Duke-Florida State game, but Virginia's win over North Carolina really notched the belt one or two more spots on teams situated near the top of the conference standings. An overall disregarding of a team's overall record started to happen, and the number of teams launching into the second half of the season with conference championship games hopes numbers well above the annual two-team or four-team race of the divisional years past.

This week's game is irrelevant to BC's spot in that race, but the ACC is very much going to move and shift around the Eagles' last non-conference game of the season. Thursday night's game Syracuse-Virginia Tech included a team that entered this week with one league loss, but it set the prelude for the other games dotting the ACC's day on Saturday afternoon.

Every game carries an impact towards the rest of the season, and it begins with No. 4 Florida State's trip to Wake Forest. The undefeated Seminoles are very clearly setting the pace within the league, but a loss here would open the door for all of the one-loss teams to jump into the race for the "home spot" in the conference title game while simultaneously opening the door further for teams like BC, Georgia Tech, and Clemson.

Georgia Tech is home against UNC this week following the Tar Heels' loss to the Cavaliers, who play at a Miami team that's still wounded from its own collapse against the Yellow Jackets. Those games line up against one another on ACC Network after the BC game with Miami kicking off at 3:30 p.m. and UNC-Georgia Tech starting at 8 p.m., and they'll offer complements to the 3:30 p.m. kickoff between Duke and Louisville and the 2 p.m. kickoff between Clemson and NC State.

Elsewhere in college football, No. 13 Utah hosts No. 8 Oregon in a massive game in the Pac-12, and No. 7 Texas plays its lone Big 12 game against Brigham Young. No. 6 Oklahoma and No. 10 Penn State are both in early games against Kansas and Indiana, respectively, but there are no other true games of note involving ranked opponents. No. 19 Air Force has an in-state, Mountain West Conference rivalry game for the Group of Five against Colorado State, but outside of No. 1 Georgia's annual matchup against Florida or No. 21 Tennessee's trip to Kentucky, there aren't a ton of games worthy of making noise.

That inevitably means that Colorado is going to beat UCLA, though the night owls also get a shot at some decent football with No. 11 Oregon State's trip to Arizona and the midnight kickoff between San Jose State and Hawaii.

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Dan's Non-Sports Observation of the Week

My friend and I had a spirited debate about tailgating earlier this week, but my original intention to press the argument into the public sphere suddenly felt insignificant after I woke up to the horrifying news that more than a dozen people were murdered in a mass shooting on Thursday night in Lewiston, Maine.

I wish I knew where to begin, but there are no words capable of easing a shattered community's pain. I thought about birthday parties at arcades and bowling alleys from my childhood and how much I loved getting rolled by my then-girlfriend, now-wife because she was in a candlepin league before she met me. I think specifically about how I treasure those memories and how the innocence surrounding nights with friends can easily explode into the world's worst horrors.

For years, stories about mass violence felt all too close, but Friday morning brought the reality to a place that's incredibly regional to the Greater Boston area. I have friends and family in Maine, and I know plenty of great people who vacation in Portland and points north. It's an incredibly scenic state that offers rustic pieces of New England that simply don't exist in the major metropolitan areas, and people lead simpler, salt-of-the-earth lives.

This one hits close to home, and while I certainly don't hold the answers to ever prevent this from happening again, I know my prayers and thoughts are with everyone impacted by this week's violence. I treasure Maine as a valued piece of the region - it was part of Massachusetts before separating into its own state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 - and as one of its southern neighbors, I know I can speak for every New Englander in offering my support and assistance to helping reclaim the soul of "the way life should be."

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Pregame Quote and Prediction

Stay away from dumb, gentlemen. -Eric Taylor, "Friday Night Lights"

I have good reason to return to Coach Taylor for the last part of this week's preview. BC is a heavy favorite on Saturday for the first time this season, but no team can rely on paper previews by the time kickoff rolls around. Even at 1-6, UConn is a wounded animal that's within a few possessions of being a .500 football team. The Huskies led South Florida by 11 in the early fourth quarter before the Bulls staged a two-touchdown comeback last week, and the loss to Utah State two weeks ago occurred after an apparent tying touchdown's PAT was blocked with less than a minute remaining.

UConn held a 17-0 first half lead before the Aggies rolled through 17 unanswered, consecutive points after halftime, and the losses to NC State and Florida International indicate the battle-hardened fight within this team's season. There's no sleeping on UConn, and BC still needs to continue cleaning its mistakes even after three straight wins pushed the Eagles to a 4-3 overall record.

There's been plenty of noise this week about a "revenge game," but I'm not hearing any of it. BC needs to handle its business because a win in this week's game gets the Eagles to within one game of bowl eligibility. That's more critical than anything else, and the best way to get there is to go through UConn - for better and, in last year's case, for worse.

Boston College and Connecticut kick off on Saturday at 12 p.m. from Alumni Stadium in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Television coverage is available on national television via the ACC Network with online streaming available through ESPN's platform of online and mobile apps. Radio broadcast is also available through the BC Learfield IMG Sports Network with local coverage available on WEEI 93.7 FM and satellite options available on SiriusXM channel 390. Streaming audio is also available through the Varsity Network.

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