Boston College Athletics
Photo by: Rob Davis
Historic Birdball Season Ends With Second Loss To Liberty
May 31, 2026 | Baseball, #ForBoston Files
The 2026 season ended with a second loss in the Athens Regional.
Baseball is built on repetition, so elimination games in the NCAA Tournament are especially cruel for teams ending their season on a sour note. By their nature, the winner-take-all mentality and the notion of losing a playoff chase in a single game is antithetical to a season-long quest for excellence, and the teams normally involved are particularly built on shucking disappointment by stringing together multiple wins and positive outcomes.
Throughout the 2026 season, both Boston College and Liberty avoided losing multiple games in quick succession. Both were at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament because of their ability to claim bounce-back wins during their regular season runs, and neither team regularly lost consecutive games between March and May. For BC, consecutive losses to Florida Gulf Coast and North Carolina stood as the only occurrences of multiple defeats against a single opponent, while the Flames similarly lost two games to West Virginia and Missouri State in February and March before playing near-flawless baseball through May.
Neither team expected to bow out of the Athens Regional before the final possible game of the bracket, but both faced real percentages of missing a Regional Final matchup against top-seeded Georgia throughout the early stages of their Second Round elimination game. A repechage for both teams after the Flames beat BC and lost to Georgia, it instead produced a melancholy realization that one team wouldn't advance to an afternoon session with the No. 3 national seed, and after BC took an early 2-0 lead, a five-run third inning sent Liberty into a second immediate rematch with an 8-3 victory that ended a Birdball season firmly entrenched in the program's history books.
"Boston College kind of got us for a couple in the first couple of innings," admitted Liberty head coach Bradley LeCroy after his team's victory. "The big inning in the third was huge, and then what [relief pitcher Jake Potts] did once he came in and kept throwing up zeroes, it was huge…Give Boston College a lot of credit for a fantastic year. Todd [Interdonato] is doing a great job there, and i'm sure they're going to be back in the regionals next year."
Liberty entered Athens with two front-end starters and one of the best back-end relief tandems in college baseball, so the third game of its tournament journey stuck out as a potential sore spot after Josh Swink's usage in the Georgia loss forced Jaxon Lucas into a featured rotation role. Even as a third weekend starter for much of the season, his well-documented struggles throughout late April and early May forced LeCroy to remove him from the rotation ahead of the C-USA Tournament. Outside expectations predicted he'd eventually have to throw meaningful innings at some point, but the process accelerated to Sunday's game against BC after Swink replaced Bradley Zayac - a clear second ace after Ben Blair - in the Georgia game.
BC's offense, meanwhile, reinvigorated its bats during both of its two prior games in Athens and specifically staged its building blocks by finding momentum at the dish and on the base paths between the Liberty loss and the LIU win. Power started to emerge from different pieces of the order at a stadium constructed around an egg-shaped right field alley, and those first two innings emerged as a proving ground for the team's ability to run on catcher Kyke Hvidsten after Ty Mainolfi launched a first inning home run to stake a 1-0 lead.
An unfortunate backfiring, though, laid waste to that forward momentum after Gunnar Johnson overslid the third base bag in the top of the second. Prior to that moment, a Luke Gallo legged-out double and a fielder's choice to the right side plated a runner from third on Johnson's single to left, and Colin Larson's single to the right side kept the merry-go-round moving with one out in the inning. The threat to push a third or fourth run across the bag never materialized, however, because Johnson's successful stolen bag during Carter Hendrickson's plate appearance disengaged third base as he slid through the foul line. Retiring him on the play led to Hendrickson's eventual third out and a fizzled threat ahead of Julio Solier and the top of the order.
None of that seemed to matter when Brady Miller plowed through three straight outs in the bottom of the inning, but two errors, a hit batsman, a missed pickoff attempt and two unearned runs sandwiched around Jordan Jaffe's triple essentially popped the BC balloon. No runners advanced to second with less than two outs until Jack Toomey walked and moved on Gallo's grounder to third in the eighth, at which point the Eagles trailed by an 8-2 score. Even in the ninth, a pair of fielder's choices ensured that two runners on first wouldn't advance, a statistic stamped by Potts throwing five innings of three-hit baseball to earn his fourth win of the season.
"We had seen over the last handful of starts that [Miller] had an ability to bounce back [from bad innings]," said Interdonato. "That inning where we had three misplays, two free passes, that happens. I don't think we caught bad luck, and I don't think we were cursed, but I think we just played bad baseball for that frame. We really believed in [Miller's] ability to bounce back, and even though he went out and gave up a solo home run, I thought his execution was really good outside of four or five plate appearances. When you're playing good complementary team baseball, he has the ability to not execute for four or five [hitters]. And if you play minus-3 on defense and your pitcher executes, then you can play through it, but those two things happened at the same time."
Ending BC's season in Athens left Interdonato with two very different branches of a storyboard that ended before the No. 2 seed Eagles received an opportunity to play the No. 1 seed Bulldogs. Spending most of the season in the top-25, they lost an opportunity at hosting a Northeast-based regional when a 2-9 finish included a weekend loss to Clemson and a first game exit in the ACC Championship. A late-season split with NJIT and a midweek loss to Maine were two losses against Quadrant 4 teams in the Ratings Performance Index at a time when the bracketology started coming into focus, and a trip to Georgia to play Liberty, which was a strong No. 3 seed, could have potentially been avoided in favor of a regional at Mississippi State, Kansas or West Virginia if those games had been flipped.
Winning 37 games and advancing to the national tournament for the second time in four years, though, was a massive accomplishment for a program that previously spent seven years between modern era tournament berths. A fourth place finish in the ACC after spending most of the year in third is also a major accomplishment in a league with nine NCAA berths - and especially after BC was the preseason last place team. In addition, five teams seeded No. 3 or No. 4 won their way to the Regional Final without a loss while the majority of No. 2 seeds lost their First Round matchups to third-seeded competition. Of those teams, two other teams were eliminated immediately, as was the No. 9 national seed after Southern Mississippi dropped games. As of Sunday evening, an increased number of No. 3 seeds were advancing towards the Regional Final, and Arizona State, East Carolina and Louisiana were already qualified for a later game on Sunday afternoon.
"You can feel emotional [about losing]," said Interdonato. "The 2-9 finish doesn't take away from what we did, but at the same time, how well we played through March and April doesn't make us feel better about the way we finished. I try to look at those two things equally. You can compartmentalize them. I feel like every year that I've done this, I have the same thought at the end of the year, which is that we need to get better. Whether it's a 20-win season, a 37-win season or a 42-win season with a conference championship, that's how my brain works. As soon as the year ends, we have to get better, and for us, in my entire career, that starts with developing the players in the program. So my main thought [entering the offseason] is about how we can get our current players better, how we can develop those guys, and how we can get more out of those guys."
Throughout the 2026 season, both Boston College and Liberty avoided losing multiple games in quick succession. Both were at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament because of their ability to claim bounce-back wins during their regular season runs, and neither team regularly lost consecutive games between March and May. For BC, consecutive losses to Florida Gulf Coast and North Carolina stood as the only occurrences of multiple defeats against a single opponent, while the Flames similarly lost two games to West Virginia and Missouri State in February and March before playing near-flawless baseball through May.
Neither team expected to bow out of the Athens Regional before the final possible game of the bracket, but both faced real percentages of missing a Regional Final matchup against top-seeded Georgia throughout the early stages of their Second Round elimination game. A repechage for both teams after the Flames beat BC and lost to Georgia, it instead produced a melancholy realization that one team wouldn't advance to an afternoon session with the No. 3 national seed, and after BC took an early 2-0 lead, a five-run third inning sent Liberty into a second immediate rematch with an 8-3 victory that ended a Birdball season firmly entrenched in the program's history books.
"Boston College kind of got us for a couple in the first couple of innings," admitted Liberty head coach Bradley LeCroy after his team's victory. "The big inning in the third was huge, and then what [relief pitcher Jake Potts] did once he came in and kept throwing up zeroes, it was huge…Give Boston College a lot of credit for a fantastic year. Todd [Interdonato] is doing a great job there, and i'm sure they're going to be back in the regionals next year."
Liberty entered Athens with two front-end starters and one of the best back-end relief tandems in college baseball, so the third game of its tournament journey stuck out as a potential sore spot after Josh Swink's usage in the Georgia loss forced Jaxon Lucas into a featured rotation role. Even as a third weekend starter for much of the season, his well-documented struggles throughout late April and early May forced LeCroy to remove him from the rotation ahead of the C-USA Tournament. Outside expectations predicted he'd eventually have to throw meaningful innings at some point, but the process accelerated to Sunday's game against BC after Swink replaced Bradley Zayac - a clear second ace after Ben Blair - in the Georgia game.
BC's offense, meanwhile, reinvigorated its bats during both of its two prior games in Athens and specifically staged its building blocks by finding momentum at the dish and on the base paths between the Liberty loss and the LIU win. Power started to emerge from different pieces of the order at a stadium constructed around an egg-shaped right field alley, and those first two innings emerged as a proving ground for the team's ability to run on catcher Kyke Hvidsten after Ty Mainolfi launched a first inning home run to stake a 1-0 lead.
An unfortunate backfiring, though, laid waste to that forward momentum after Gunnar Johnson overslid the third base bag in the top of the second. Prior to that moment, a Luke Gallo legged-out double and a fielder's choice to the right side plated a runner from third on Johnson's single to left, and Colin Larson's single to the right side kept the merry-go-round moving with one out in the inning. The threat to push a third or fourth run across the bag never materialized, however, because Johnson's successful stolen bag during Carter Hendrickson's plate appearance disengaged third base as he slid through the foul line. Retiring him on the play led to Hendrickson's eventual third out and a fizzled threat ahead of Julio Solier and the top of the order.
None of that seemed to matter when Brady Miller plowed through three straight outs in the bottom of the inning, but two errors, a hit batsman, a missed pickoff attempt and two unearned runs sandwiched around Jordan Jaffe's triple essentially popped the BC balloon. No runners advanced to second with less than two outs until Jack Toomey walked and moved on Gallo's grounder to third in the eighth, at which point the Eagles trailed by an 8-2 score. Even in the ninth, a pair of fielder's choices ensured that two runners on first wouldn't advance, a statistic stamped by Potts throwing five innings of three-hit baseball to earn his fourth win of the season.
"We had seen over the last handful of starts that [Miller] had an ability to bounce back [from bad innings]," said Interdonato. "That inning where we had three misplays, two free passes, that happens. I don't think we caught bad luck, and I don't think we were cursed, but I think we just played bad baseball for that frame. We really believed in [Miller's] ability to bounce back, and even though he went out and gave up a solo home run, I thought his execution was really good outside of four or five plate appearances. When you're playing good complementary team baseball, he has the ability to not execute for four or five [hitters]. And if you play minus-3 on defense and your pitcher executes, then you can play through it, but those two things happened at the same time."
Ending BC's season in Athens left Interdonato with two very different branches of a storyboard that ended before the No. 2 seed Eagles received an opportunity to play the No. 1 seed Bulldogs. Spending most of the season in the top-25, they lost an opportunity at hosting a Northeast-based regional when a 2-9 finish included a weekend loss to Clemson and a first game exit in the ACC Championship. A late-season split with NJIT and a midweek loss to Maine were two losses against Quadrant 4 teams in the Ratings Performance Index at a time when the bracketology started coming into focus, and a trip to Georgia to play Liberty, which was a strong No. 3 seed, could have potentially been avoided in favor of a regional at Mississippi State, Kansas or West Virginia if those games had been flipped.
Winning 37 games and advancing to the national tournament for the second time in four years, though, was a massive accomplishment for a program that previously spent seven years between modern era tournament berths. A fourth place finish in the ACC after spending most of the year in third is also a major accomplishment in a league with nine NCAA berths - and especially after BC was the preseason last place team. In addition, five teams seeded No. 3 or No. 4 won their way to the Regional Final without a loss while the majority of No. 2 seeds lost their First Round matchups to third-seeded competition. Of those teams, two other teams were eliminated immediately, as was the No. 9 national seed after Southern Mississippi dropped games. As of Sunday evening, an increased number of No. 3 seeds were advancing towards the Regional Final, and Arizona State, East Carolina and Louisiana were already qualified for a later game on Sunday afternoon.
"You can feel emotional [about losing]," said Interdonato. "The 2-9 finish doesn't take away from what we did, but at the same time, how well we played through March and April doesn't make us feel better about the way we finished. I try to look at those two things equally. You can compartmentalize them. I feel like every year that I've done this, I have the same thought at the end of the year, which is that we need to get better. Whether it's a 20-win season, a 37-win season or a 42-win season with a conference championship, that's how my brain works. As soon as the year ends, we have to get better, and for us, in my entire career, that starts with developing the players in the program. So my main thought [entering the offseason] is about how we can get our current players better, how we can develop those guys, and how we can get more out of those guys."
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