The Opening Tip: Tulane (Shriners Children's Charleston Classic)
November 22, 2025 | Men's Basketball, #ForBoston Files
BC looks to assert itself with another bounceback performance.
The make-miss game is one of basketball's more infuriating scenarios. By its nature, a final score isn't determined by a lack of execution or a flawed gameplan, and as its name implies, the win or loss is more the result of a team's inability to simply score points. It sits at basketball's most basic level that states that teams need to outscore their opponents to win games, but its immunity from the usual frustration points centered around shot selection or even a lack of effort insulates it from coaches, film and analytics.
Already this season, Boston College head coach Earl Grant was forced to face down a make-miss game when his Eagles dropped a 60-59 loss to Central Connecticut State. The one result that seemingly never disappears, even the most trusted analytics and statistics bureaus couldn't find flaws in BC's overall ability to create more advantageous looks or plus-based shot opportunities, so they all chalked the loss into a luck factor defining the make-miss explanation.
Less than two weeks later, Friday's loss to Davidson ended with Grant once again referencing the make-miss game. For the second time this season, Boston College lost a game in which its opponent scored less than the 65-point threshold that produced an 11-game situational winning streak. BC hadn't lost a game in which its opponent scored less than 65 since Florida State's 63-62 victory on February 6, 2024, having wrapped the 2023-2024 season with five straight wins and a stretch of games that dominated Miami, Louisville, Clemson and Providence, yet already this season, two games lost after an opponent scored less than 65 points is enough to age the BC head coach through a point now oozing with the fringe tinge of frustration.
"59 points is an unbelievable effort for us," said Grant. "There was a lot of effort on the defensive side of the ball, and it came down to a make-miss again. We didn't make a lot of perimeter threes, and their guards controlled the game in the middle of the second half when it became a two-possession game and turned into a four-possession game. But that's just a two-minute patch. We turned it over one time against a 1-2-2 [zone defense] that allowed the score to get to five, and then they just made some shots that got [the lead] to nine, and it stayed at nine."
Lobotomizing a make-miss game to within an inch of its gray matter isn't particularly helpful, but playing a second game in approximately 48 hours makes it significantly easier for Grant to transition BC into its next opponent. The shortened number of hours and pure volumetric limitations leave little doubt about how quickly a team needs to turn its page, to which the already-baked proof of winning after a disheartening loss illustrates the growth of a program that's looking for its next stride.
"There's a process and a journey where you can get better," said Grant. "Having a lot of new guys [to the program], I would imagine that we can get better. So as we continue to play non-conference games, certainly we want to win them, but we want to get better and continue to grow by being able to execute at the highest level that we can and continuing to defend the way that we're capable of [defending]."
With that in mind, Sunday's game against Tulane arrives at a critical juncture before the Eagles return to Chestnut Hill for the Thanksgiving holiday. Here's what to expect when BC plays the Green Wave:
****
Tulane Storylines (White Men Can't Jump Edition)
Sidney Deane: You can put a cat in an oven, but that don't make it a biscuit.
The dynamic between Billy Hoyle and Sidney Deane as the two main characters of White Men Can't Jump defined far too much trash talk in pickup games across the entire sport's landscape. No matter where I went, we'd play 2-on-2 or 3-on-3 with a hint of the way that the two of them spoke to opponents - and to one another - in a way that fostered bonds as deep as the shots we took on each other. The original was so good and so culturally relevant to a kid who remembers the fashion and music of the early 1990s that I still outright refuse to watch the remake with Jack Harlow despite hearing that it was actually pretty good. Hoyle is ironically mentioned as having played for Tulane before becoming a street hustler, so of course I'd use this movie for this game's preview.
Back to Tulane for a second, though, because the Green Wave are a unique case study in a team that's moved through college basketball history as an interesting footnote to the realignment history within the game. They were members of the Southern Conference and the SEC during the older confederation-based days that truly preceded the modern structure, and their decision to form the Metro Conference in 1975 set the stage for a 40-year affiliation that survived the split into the Great Midwest Conference and the subsequent reformation into Conference-USA before the 2014 move to the American Athletic Conference. Yet their membership in those leagues and their tendency to put together reasonably successful stretches failed to produce more than three NCAA Tournament berths over a four-year span in the 1990s.
Summarizing the story into a more succinct explanation, Tulane is ideally the program that hasn't yet figured out how to combine all of its parts to become a high-major basketball powerhouse, but hiring Ron Hunter in 2019 began a shift to overcome the hurdles. More recognizable as the coach that led his son's Georgia State team into the 2015 Round of 32 - he was the coach who fell off the scooter after he tore his Achilles during the Sun Belt Conference championship celebration - he slowly built the Green Wave into a 20-win team that missed the 2023 postseason before going 19-15 with a trip to the College Basketball Crown tournament field.
It's not much, but consider that Tulane hadn't played in a postseason tournament since current Citadel head coach Ed Conroy advanced the Green Wave to the College Basketball Invitational tournament in 2014. Two other trips to the old CollegeInsider.com Tournament weren't much to recognize, but those are also the only postseason berths since Perry Clark led them to those NCAA berths.
Junior: We goin' Sizzlah. We goin' Sizzlah.
Nothing in Tulane's past carries weight for the team's present or future, especially now that the American is built around a large bulk of teams from the Green Wave's Conference USA timeline. Even on Friday, the team that lost by 19 points put a nationally relevant Utah State program on the ropes during a 40-40 first half before the Aggies decided to turn their own make-miss game into a positive with a 68 percent second half field goal percentage that included going 10-for-14 on three-pointers, and a three-guard formation built around Rowan Brumbaugh, Asher Woods and KJ Greene opened the floor on both ends by either creating field goals or by getting to the basket for fouls after spreading the ball through the rest of the offense.
"We've been able to defend at a really high level," said Grant. "Offensively, we haven't made a lot of perimeter shots, but [Friday] was a make-miss game, and it's now a situation where we have to continue to try to execute by yielding the highest quality shots that we can [create] for our personnel while continuing to build on defense."
Tulane is currently the worst Division I team at creating offensive rebounds on missed shots, so preventing the Green Wave from creating second chance opportunities is a straightforward way for the Eagles to generate those high-yield opportunities. Beyond the second half breakout, Utah State scored 22 points on the fast break and went 14-for-18 on layups and dunks while scoring 1.5 points per possession after making 42 scoring plays across 65 opportunities.
Billy: I'M IN THE ZONE.
The conversation surrounding Boston College and its inability to consistently hit three-point shots is not yet a larger debate within the program's inner mechanisms. The earlier indication that the team is good enough to shoot around 25 three-point attempts played out in earnest with the 27 attempts against Hampton and 21 attempts against Davidson, but Grant's long emphasized that the outside shot is only useful if his players illustrate the skill set necessary to splash the basket.
"[We need to] find different combinations with our roster that can give us the best opportunity to sustain our defense but, at the same time, score," he said after Friday's loss. "You have to score more points than the opponent to win, right? So that's what we have to do [because] we need to maintain the defense and continue to figure out the rotations that can help us become efficient offensively as well."
BC's success rate at holding opponents under their offensive output started to gain significant traction in college basketball after Davidson's notorious three-point shooting offense stumbled into an anemic 5-for-20 night at the office. The staggering success of playing to the No. 31 defense against two-point shots stands as a pillar foundation for the block percentages now being produced by the frontcourt, and nearly every metric sits at or near the national average even after defensive turnovers are split into steals and non-steal percentages.
Failing to produce an outside shot against any of the first six opponents is therefore a talking point ahead of the Tulane game on Sunday. As good as BC's defense played, the effective field goal rate of the team's offense is underwater because its three-point field goal percentage is so notably bad, but that entire conversation requires additional context because even the KenPom rating system has BC at No. 338 nationally in terms of a "luck" rate that's comparable to the weighted averages used within the Torvik system (it essentially takes 13 games to effectively press the numbers).
*****
Question Box
What does Tulane's interior look like?
Ron Hunter's more successful Georgia State teams revolved around dueling back court threats, and even the 2014-2015 team that advanced to the NCAA Tournament's Round of 32 didn't have a truly dominant big man outside of six-foot, eight-inch Jonathan Hollowell or six-foot, six-inch Malik Benlevi.
Last year's team was an exception after Brumbaugh and Woods split production against Kaleb Banks and Gregg Glenn III, but Banks transferred to DePaul and Glenn tragically died in July. In their place, Tyler Ringgold is assuming more of a starting role after playing predominantly as a reserve.
Where does Jayden Hastings fit into this conversation?
Hastings finally broke out of a shell after his 11-point, 10-rebound double-double against Davidson erased the enigmatic minutes from the Hampton and Temple wins. It initially appeared as if Shaw was taking the reins of the frontcourt's spiritual leader, so shooting 5-for-6 while adding an assist, a block and a steal while finishing under a foul-out is a massive improvement for a player that ceded minutes down the stretch of the previous matchups.
Grant still hasn't totally deployed a traditional five-player setup with two guards and three forwards, but there's a path forward where Hastings is able to produce the offense that allows Shaw to filter into a more defensive posture. Thinking strictly about the possible combinations, if BC chooses to ever abandon the outside shot for more high percentage looks at the basket, Hastings and Boden Kapke are a combination that could internally produce enough offense to allow Shaw to primarily serve as a rebounder and shot blocker.
Why are sub sandwich combinations so good when they're put on a pizza?
There's a restaurant near my wife's old hometown that features a chicken bomb sub on its menu. I hadn't ever eaten it before a friend recommended getting it, but it quickly became a staple whenever we would stop for a quick bite or a drink after visiting my in-laws because the idea of combining teriyaki chicken with cheese, peppers, onions, mushrooms and ham essentially created the perfect hoagie. Then I had the bright idea to throw all of those toppings on a cheese pizza, and a legendary large man glutton fest was born.
I've since gotten in the habit of looking for sub sandwiches that translate to pizza toppings. I never totally latched onto the idea of a meat lover's pizza, so I'm essentially combining shaved steak with all of the above toppings and both salami and hot peppers. Anyone who says that they wouldn't crush that pie is lying (is that a double negative? I apologize if it is).
*****
BC-Tulane X Factor
Because there ain't no 4's. -Antoine Walker
I'm beating the proverbial dead horse, so I'll keep it much more succinct when I boil down Boston College's three-point shooting approach.
If the players illustrate a willingness to get good looks, and if those same players find the good looks before taking good shots that just aren't going in, BC shouldn't change a thing.
"As they say in football, sometimes teams are three yards and a cloud of dust," said Grant during his preseason media day appearance. "Defenses can rest a little bit because they run the ball and get two or three yards. For us, my upbringing has always been to defend, rebound and take care of the ball. If you defend, rebound and take care of the ball, you're probably going to be in fast break basketball a lot because you're getting stops."
Grant later discussed how the addition of film and analytics forced him to change his approach to that coach-by-feel mentality. The three-pointer was the primary beneficiary to that alteration because he adapted a slower and more methodical approach to fit the more modern times. Having the numbers capable of changing that thought process didn't hurt.
That explanation based everything on the overall totality of his approach, so there's really no other way to change things. If BC is proving in the film and analytics that make-miss is really how things are happening, then eventually the averages will shift to make.
*****
Scoreboard Watching
Feast Week got off to a real weird start when USC beat Troy on a buzzer-beater in Los Angeles. I readily admit that I didn't know about Troy's double-overtime win over San Diego State on Tuesday night, or I could have maybe seen that one coming. In any event, the triple overtime result against the Trojans left Troy with five collective overtimes over a three-day stretch, and a complete net-zero plus-minus between the two games led the team to align next to Davidson in the analytics rankings.
Other scores on Friday kept the college basketball news cycle churning, though it really wasn't for the reasons that I expected. At the Baha Mar Championship, No. 1 Purdue smoked No. 15 Texas Tech to clinch a fifth straight MTE championship for the Boilermakers. In Salt Lake City, meanwhile, Wisconsin dropped a 28-point loss to BYU while playing on the Utah NBA Cup court that left everyone with a headache.
On the local radar, Boston University's one-point win over Harvard in the Basketball Hall of Fame Showcase gave the Bay State some notoriety after UMass lost to Green Bay in the U.S. Virgin Islands Paradise Jam, though Providence separately defeated Penn State by 12 and Northeastern's seven-point win over Duquesne nearly pushed both teams upwards of 100 points.
Even with Feast Week tournaments winding down, Sunday's schedule shapes up nicely with some early championship games. For the ACC, Clemson's game against Georgia in the Charleston Classic's Palmetto Bracket is an opportunity to claim a major non-conference victory while Virginia's trip to West Virginia for the Greenbrier Tip-Off pits the Cavaliers against Butler at 2 p.m.
On the national scope, the Palmetto Bracket's consolation bracket features Xavier and West Virginia before Northwestern plays South Carolina at 5 p.m. in the Greenbrier Tip-Off.
Outside of the power conferences, Portland hosts St. Thomas two games after the Tommies defeated Northern Colorado on a buzzer-beater, and Middle Tennessee plays Murray State in the Cayman Islands Classic. Later on, the Utah State-Davidson game in BC's Lowcountry Bracket is a game between two undefeated teams.
*****
This Random Day In History
The Games of the Third Olympiad - aka the third edition of the Summer Olympics - kicked off on July 1, 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri with 13 participating nations and 648 athletes. Sixteen sports handed out medals, and nations weren't as clearly defined as the modern era. In Tug-of-War, the Milwaukee Athletic Club defeated the Southern Turnverein of St. Louis's No. 1 team before clinching the gold medal by beating the New York Athletic Club, but the Southern Turnverein No. 1 team actually wound up playing the No. 2 team in a silver medal semifinal before the No. 2 team won bronze. That No. 2 team was technically a unified mixed team of Olympians because German Frank Kugler competed with four Americans. The medal was later reallocated to the United States.
The schedule for the Olympics left the Games stretched over a four-month span as opposed to the two-week timeframe now employed by the host city, and the majority of events were hosted by Washington University's Francis Field. The final day of the Olympics closed on November 23, at which point the next set of games shifted back to Europe and a more centralized London locale. It wasn't until the Swedes hosted in 1912, though, that the games shortened to two weeks, and the London games were actually longer than the ones hosted by St. Louis.
*****
Pregame Quote and Final Thoughts
Excellence is not a singular act but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do. -Shaq
Preseason Atlantic-10 Conference pollsters chose Davidson as eleventh place team in a 14-team conference, but the Wildcats continued to prove doubters wrong by beating Boston College on the neutral court. In doing so, they joined Richmon, Saint Louis, George Washington, George Mason and St. Bonaventure with undefeated starts within a resurgent A-10.
The American hasn't had that kind of luck, and Tulane's 3-2 start is sandwiched into a number of teams that are either at or around the .500 mark. Memphis is shockingly out to a 1-4 start to its season, and a good basketball conference needs to score a marquee out-of-conference victory before the calendar slides into December.
BC's 3-3 record is admittedly not the most glamorous ACC start when the league is bragging about virtually never losing a game. Tulane, though, would love to walk out of Charleston with a victory over the Eagles while BC would love to assert itself with another bounceback win.
Boston College and Tulane tip-off at 6:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon from TD Arena in Charleston, South Carolina. The game can be seen as part of ESPN2's nationally televised coverage with streaming available through ESPN's direct-to-consumer platform on Internet and mobile device apps.
Already this season, Boston College head coach Earl Grant was forced to face down a make-miss game when his Eagles dropped a 60-59 loss to Central Connecticut State. The one result that seemingly never disappears, even the most trusted analytics and statistics bureaus couldn't find flaws in BC's overall ability to create more advantageous looks or plus-based shot opportunities, so they all chalked the loss into a luck factor defining the make-miss explanation.
Less than two weeks later, Friday's loss to Davidson ended with Grant once again referencing the make-miss game. For the second time this season, Boston College lost a game in which its opponent scored less than the 65-point threshold that produced an 11-game situational winning streak. BC hadn't lost a game in which its opponent scored less than 65 since Florida State's 63-62 victory on February 6, 2024, having wrapped the 2023-2024 season with five straight wins and a stretch of games that dominated Miami, Louisville, Clemson and Providence, yet already this season, two games lost after an opponent scored less than 65 points is enough to age the BC head coach through a point now oozing with the fringe tinge of frustration.
"59 points is an unbelievable effort for us," said Grant. "There was a lot of effort on the defensive side of the ball, and it came down to a make-miss again. We didn't make a lot of perimeter threes, and their guards controlled the game in the middle of the second half when it became a two-possession game and turned into a four-possession game. But that's just a two-minute patch. We turned it over one time against a 1-2-2 [zone defense] that allowed the score to get to five, and then they just made some shots that got [the lead] to nine, and it stayed at nine."
Lobotomizing a make-miss game to within an inch of its gray matter isn't particularly helpful, but playing a second game in approximately 48 hours makes it significantly easier for Grant to transition BC into its next opponent. The shortened number of hours and pure volumetric limitations leave little doubt about how quickly a team needs to turn its page, to which the already-baked proof of winning after a disheartening loss illustrates the growth of a program that's looking for its next stride.
"There's a process and a journey where you can get better," said Grant. "Having a lot of new guys [to the program], I would imagine that we can get better. So as we continue to play non-conference games, certainly we want to win them, but we want to get better and continue to grow by being able to execute at the highest level that we can and continuing to defend the way that we're capable of [defending]."
With that in mind, Sunday's game against Tulane arrives at a critical juncture before the Eagles return to Chestnut Hill for the Thanksgiving holiday. Here's what to expect when BC plays the Green Wave:
****
Tulane Storylines (White Men Can't Jump Edition)
Sidney Deane: You can put a cat in an oven, but that don't make it a biscuit.
The dynamic between Billy Hoyle and Sidney Deane as the two main characters of White Men Can't Jump defined far too much trash talk in pickup games across the entire sport's landscape. No matter where I went, we'd play 2-on-2 or 3-on-3 with a hint of the way that the two of them spoke to opponents - and to one another - in a way that fostered bonds as deep as the shots we took on each other. The original was so good and so culturally relevant to a kid who remembers the fashion and music of the early 1990s that I still outright refuse to watch the remake with Jack Harlow despite hearing that it was actually pretty good. Hoyle is ironically mentioned as having played for Tulane before becoming a street hustler, so of course I'd use this movie for this game's preview.
Back to Tulane for a second, though, because the Green Wave are a unique case study in a team that's moved through college basketball history as an interesting footnote to the realignment history within the game. They were members of the Southern Conference and the SEC during the older confederation-based days that truly preceded the modern structure, and their decision to form the Metro Conference in 1975 set the stage for a 40-year affiliation that survived the split into the Great Midwest Conference and the subsequent reformation into Conference-USA before the 2014 move to the American Athletic Conference. Yet their membership in those leagues and their tendency to put together reasonably successful stretches failed to produce more than three NCAA Tournament berths over a four-year span in the 1990s.
Summarizing the story into a more succinct explanation, Tulane is ideally the program that hasn't yet figured out how to combine all of its parts to become a high-major basketball powerhouse, but hiring Ron Hunter in 2019 began a shift to overcome the hurdles. More recognizable as the coach that led his son's Georgia State team into the 2015 Round of 32 - he was the coach who fell off the scooter after he tore his Achilles during the Sun Belt Conference championship celebration - he slowly built the Green Wave into a 20-win team that missed the 2023 postseason before going 19-15 with a trip to the College Basketball Crown tournament field.
It's not much, but consider that Tulane hadn't played in a postseason tournament since current Citadel head coach Ed Conroy advanced the Green Wave to the College Basketball Invitational tournament in 2014. Two other trips to the old CollegeInsider.com Tournament weren't much to recognize, but those are also the only postseason berths since Perry Clark led them to those NCAA berths.
Junior: We goin' Sizzlah. We goin' Sizzlah.
Nothing in Tulane's past carries weight for the team's present or future, especially now that the American is built around a large bulk of teams from the Green Wave's Conference USA timeline. Even on Friday, the team that lost by 19 points put a nationally relevant Utah State program on the ropes during a 40-40 first half before the Aggies decided to turn their own make-miss game into a positive with a 68 percent second half field goal percentage that included going 10-for-14 on three-pointers, and a three-guard formation built around Rowan Brumbaugh, Asher Woods and KJ Greene opened the floor on both ends by either creating field goals or by getting to the basket for fouls after spreading the ball through the rest of the offense.
"We've been able to defend at a really high level," said Grant. "Offensively, we haven't made a lot of perimeter shots, but [Friday] was a make-miss game, and it's now a situation where we have to continue to try to execute by yielding the highest quality shots that we can [create] for our personnel while continuing to build on defense."
Tulane is currently the worst Division I team at creating offensive rebounds on missed shots, so preventing the Green Wave from creating second chance opportunities is a straightforward way for the Eagles to generate those high-yield opportunities. Beyond the second half breakout, Utah State scored 22 points on the fast break and went 14-for-18 on layups and dunks while scoring 1.5 points per possession after making 42 scoring plays across 65 opportunities.
Billy: I'M IN THE ZONE.
The conversation surrounding Boston College and its inability to consistently hit three-point shots is not yet a larger debate within the program's inner mechanisms. The earlier indication that the team is good enough to shoot around 25 three-point attempts played out in earnest with the 27 attempts against Hampton and 21 attempts against Davidson, but Grant's long emphasized that the outside shot is only useful if his players illustrate the skill set necessary to splash the basket.
"[We need to] find different combinations with our roster that can give us the best opportunity to sustain our defense but, at the same time, score," he said after Friday's loss. "You have to score more points than the opponent to win, right? So that's what we have to do [because] we need to maintain the defense and continue to figure out the rotations that can help us become efficient offensively as well."
BC's success rate at holding opponents under their offensive output started to gain significant traction in college basketball after Davidson's notorious three-point shooting offense stumbled into an anemic 5-for-20 night at the office. The staggering success of playing to the No. 31 defense against two-point shots stands as a pillar foundation for the block percentages now being produced by the frontcourt, and nearly every metric sits at or near the national average even after defensive turnovers are split into steals and non-steal percentages.
Failing to produce an outside shot against any of the first six opponents is therefore a talking point ahead of the Tulane game on Sunday. As good as BC's defense played, the effective field goal rate of the team's offense is underwater because its three-point field goal percentage is so notably bad, but that entire conversation requires additional context because even the KenPom rating system has BC at No. 338 nationally in terms of a "luck" rate that's comparable to the weighted averages used within the Torvik system (it essentially takes 13 games to effectively press the numbers).
*****
Question Box
What does Tulane's interior look like?
Ron Hunter's more successful Georgia State teams revolved around dueling back court threats, and even the 2014-2015 team that advanced to the NCAA Tournament's Round of 32 didn't have a truly dominant big man outside of six-foot, eight-inch Jonathan Hollowell or six-foot, six-inch Malik Benlevi.
Last year's team was an exception after Brumbaugh and Woods split production against Kaleb Banks and Gregg Glenn III, but Banks transferred to DePaul and Glenn tragically died in July. In their place, Tyler Ringgold is assuming more of a starting role after playing predominantly as a reserve.
Where does Jayden Hastings fit into this conversation?
Hastings finally broke out of a shell after his 11-point, 10-rebound double-double against Davidson erased the enigmatic minutes from the Hampton and Temple wins. It initially appeared as if Shaw was taking the reins of the frontcourt's spiritual leader, so shooting 5-for-6 while adding an assist, a block and a steal while finishing under a foul-out is a massive improvement for a player that ceded minutes down the stretch of the previous matchups.
Grant still hasn't totally deployed a traditional five-player setup with two guards and three forwards, but there's a path forward where Hastings is able to produce the offense that allows Shaw to filter into a more defensive posture. Thinking strictly about the possible combinations, if BC chooses to ever abandon the outside shot for more high percentage looks at the basket, Hastings and Boden Kapke are a combination that could internally produce enough offense to allow Shaw to primarily serve as a rebounder and shot blocker.
Why are sub sandwich combinations so good when they're put on a pizza?
There's a restaurant near my wife's old hometown that features a chicken bomb sub on its menu. I hadn't ever eaten it before a friend recommended getting it, but it quickly became a staple whenever we would stop for a quick bite or a drink after visiting my in-laws because the idea of combining teriyaki chicken with cheese, peppers, onions, mushrooms and ham essentially created the perfect hoagie. Then I had the bright idea to throw all of those toppings on a cheese pizza, and a legendary large man glutton fest was born.
I've since gotten in the habit of looking for sub sandwiches that translate to pizza toppings. I never totally latched onto the idea of a meat lover's pizza, so I'm essentially combining shaved steak with all of the above toppings and both salami and hot peppers. Anyone who says that they wouldn't crush that pie is lying (is that a double negative? I apologize if it is).
*****
BC-Tulane X Factor
Because there ain't no 4's. -Antoine Walker
I'm beating the proverbial dead horse, so I'll keep it much more succinct when I boil down Boston College's three-point shooting approach.
If the players illustrate a willingness to get good looks, and if those same players find the good looks before taking good shots that just aren't going in, BC shouldn't change a thing.
"As they say in football, sometimes teams are three yards and a cloud of dust," said Grant during his preseason media day appearance. "Defenses can rest a little bit because they run the ball and get two or three yards. For us, my upbringing has always been to defend, rebound and take care of the ball. If you defend, rebound and take care of the ball, you're probably going to be in fast break basketball a lot because you're getting stops."
Grant later discussed how the addition of film and analytics forced him to change his approach to that coach-by-feel mentality. The three-pointer was the primary beneficiary to that alteration because he adapted a slower and more methodical approach to fit the more modern times. Having the numbers capable of changing that thought process didn't hurt.
That explanation based everything on the overall totality of his approach, so there's really no other way to change things. If BC is proving in the film and analytics that make-miss is really how things are happening, then eventually the averages will shift to make.
*****
Scoreboard Watching
Feast Week got off to a real weird start when USC beat Troy on a buzzer-beater in Los Angeles. I readily admit that I didn't know about Troy's double-overtime win over San Diego State on Tuesday night, or I could have maybe seen that one coming. In any event, the triple overtime result against the Trojans left Troy with five collective overtimes over a three-day stretch, and a complete net-zero plus-minus between the two games led the team to align next to Davidson in the analytics rankings.
Other scores on Friday kept the college basketball news cycle churning, though it really wasn't for the reasons that I expected. At the Baha Mar Championship, No. 1 Purdue smoked No. 15 Texas Tech to clinch a fifth straight MTE championship for the Boilermakers. In Salt Lake City, meanwhile, Wisconsin dropped a 28-point loss to BYU while playing on the Utah NBA Cup court that left everyone with a headache.
On the local radar, Boston University's one-point win over Harvard in the Basketball Hall of Fame Showcase gave the Bay State some notoriety after UMass lost to Green Bay in the U.S. Virgin Islands Paradise Jam, though Providence separately defeated Penn State by 12 and Northeastern's seven-point win over Duquesne nearly pushed both teams upwards of 100 points.
Even with Feast Week tournaments winding down, Sunday's schedule shapes up nicely with some early championship games. For the ACC, Clemson's game against Georgia in the Charleston Classic's Palmetto Bracket is an opportunity to claim a major non-conference victory while Virginia's trip to West Virginia for the Greenbrier Tip-Off pits the Cavaliers against Butler at 2 p.m.
On the national scope, the Palmetto Bracket's consolation bracket features Xavier and West Virginia before Northwestern plays South Carolina at 5 p.m. in the Greenbrier Tip-Off.
Outside of the power conferences, Portland hosts St. Thomas two games after the Tommies defeated Northern Colorado on a buzzer-beater, and Middle Tennessee plays Murray State in the Cayman Islands Classic. Later on, the Utah State-Davidson game in BC's Lowcountry Bracket is a game between two undefeated teams.
*****
This Random Day In History
The Games of the Third Olympiad - aka the third edition of the Summer Olympics - kicked off on July 1, 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri with 13 participating nations and 648 athletes. Sixteen sports handed out medals, and nations weren't as clearly defined as the modern era. In Tug-of-War, the Milwaukee Athletic Club defeated the Southern Turnverein of St. Louis's No. 1 team before clinching the gold medal by beating the New York Athletic Club, but the Southern Turnverein No. 1 team actually wound up playing the No. 2 team in a silver medal semifinal before the No. 2 team won bronze. That No. 2 team was technically a unified mixed team of Olympians because German Frank Kugler competed with four Americans. The medal was later reallocated to the United States.
The schedule for the Olympics left the Games stretched over a four-month span as opposed to the two-week timeframe now employed by the host city, and the majority of events were hosted by Washington University's Francis Field. The final day of the Olympics closed on November 23, at which point the next set of games shifted back to Europe and a more centralized London locale. It wasn't until the Swedes hosted in 1912, though, that the games shortened to two weeks, and the London games were actually longer than the ones hosted by St. Louis.
*****
Pregame Quote and Final Thoughts
Excellence is not a singular act but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do. -Shaq
Preseason Atlantic-10 Conference pollsters chose Davidson as eleventh place team in a 14-team conference, but the Wildcats continued to prove doubters wrong by beating Boston College on the neutral court. In doing so, they joined Richmon, Saint Louis, George Washington, George Mason and St. Bonaventure with undefeated starts within a resurgent A-10.
The American hasn't had that kind of luck, and Tulane's 3-2 start is sandwiched into a number of teams that are either at or around the .500 mark. Memphis is shockingly out to a 1-4 start to its season, and a good basketball conference needs to score a marquee out-of-conference victory before the calendar slides into December.
BC's 3-3 record is admittedly not the most glamorous ACC start when the league is bragging about virtually never losing a game. Tulane, though, would love to walk out of Charleston with a victory over the Eagles while BC would love to assert itself with another bounceback win.
Boston College and Tulane tip-off at 6:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon from TD Arena in Charleston, South Carolina. The game can be seen as part of ESPN2's nationally televised coverage with streaming available through ESPN's direct-to-consumer platform on Internet and mobile device apps.
Players Mentioned
F
/ Men's Basketball
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/ Men's BasketballMen’s Hockey: Maine Press Conference (Head Coach Greg Brown - Nov. 22, 2025)
Sunday, November 23
Men’s Hockey: Maine Press Conference (Nov. 21, 2025)
Saturday, November 22
Men's Basketball: Davidson Press Conference (Nov. 21, 2025)
Friday, November 21
From the Desk of Blake James: Episode 4
Friday, November 21
