The Replay: Pittsburgh

Boston College felt a little bit like the Mighty Casey in Earnest Thayer's 20th century baseball poem as the fourth quarter drew nearer to a close on Thursday night. The Eagles had been the infamous Mudville nine for most of their game against Pittsburgh, but despite an outlook that was anything but brilliant, they found themselves at the proverbial plate with a chance to win the game when quarterback Thomas Castellanos assumed the offense's controls.

A good whack at the dish by Castellanos would erase the memories of struggling through the first three-plus periods of football, and the last opportunities, the ones that only presented themselves in the last two minutes of close games, put BC exactly where it thrived. A cardiac-style victory and a seventh win crested on the horizon, and with it would come the spoils associated with a righted ship after the previous week's loss to Virginia Tech.

The sneer was gone from Casey's lip, but where the favored sun was shining bright and where men and children shouted, there would be no joy in Chestnut Hill. The Eagles would not score and would not win, and in the aftermath of a 24-16 loss to the Panthers, they would be left to wonder and analyze how to reclaim the magic that disappeared on the Acrisure Stadium turf.

"We're very disappointed," said head coach Jeff Hafley. "I don't think we played well enough to win the game. We had multiple opportunities to do so. Whether it was on defense and backing them up twice, turning the ball over on the one-yard line, settling for field goals, we just didn't play well enough and certainly didn't coach well enough to win the game. We need to play better than that, and this was a missed opportunity."

Pregame paper number pointed to a decisive Boston College victory on Thursday night, but the season-long quest for a seventh or eighth win rested on beating a team determined to play with its hair on fire in its final home game. Pitt didn't care about their eight losses or recent losing streak, and an offense that dealt with significant issues over the course of the season punched BC directly in its nose with the emergence of new quarterback Nate Yarnell behind an offensive line that finally gelled after a season-long quest for consistency.

Neither was tasked with doing much in the early periods, but Pitt managed to establish its own pace by bleeding the clock with an eight-minute drive that spanned the end of the first quarter and much of the second quarter's start. The 15-play, 85-yard trail essentially handed BC's style of play right back at the Eagles' defense, and the touchdown it produced subsequently knocked the team out of sync and forced Castellanos and BC to play reactionary football, to which three straight drives following a touchdown in the early third quarter produced an interception, a punt, and a field goal despite racking 160 yards

"It was some of the same stuff that we saw on film," Castellanos said, "and some of the things that we went over. We just didn't do a good job of executing and handling things. It's on us. We'd gone over everything and watched the film, practiced it. We just had to do a good job of executing."

All of that relieved the pressure facing Yarnell and enabled him to gain comfort behind the offensive line. He was largely efficient in passing the football for high percentage throws, but the 11-for-19 performance broke open as BC lost its momentum during the third quarter after scoring a 24-yard touchdown pass to Lewis Bond. A busted coverage and missed tackle later, Bub Means was in the end zone with a 61-yard pass, and on the following drive, Castellanos threw an interception which flipped the game back to the Panthers for a fourth quarter where Rodney Hammond, Jr. capped the scoring with a 66-yard touchdown run.

"On the long touchdown pass, one of our players dropped his man for a reason that I don't know," Hafley said, "and it led to a big touchdown which shouldn't have ever happened. On the run at the end, we had a flat wall defense. A player came up and missed the tackle, another player missed the tackle, and their guy made a good play. I saw it happen so clearly, which is why it was so disappointing. We've made those plays."

In the end, the loss took an eight-win season away from the Eagles. They are still bound for a bowl game, but the last two losses raised Hafley's internal monologue about fixing the issues with one game left against Miami. There is still a path to an eight-win season, but it requires the Eagles to self-evaluate, as they regularly do, to win the regular season finale before entering the bowl selection process. And even though that feels like a disappointment at its surface level, the fact remains that the work isn't over until the final whistle on Friday afternoon.

"We have to score more points," said Hafley. "That's a fair statement because we have to score more than 16 points. So we'll look really hard at that. The coaches and players will get back to work, but it's disappointing because we need to score more."

Players Mentioned

Lewis Bond

Thomas Castellanos

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