Why Do Boston College Sports Barely Matter Here?
A lot went down this weekend in the Boston College sports world. The men’s basketball team took part in ESPN’s Puerto Rico Tip-Off tournament; they beat New Mexico before losing by 10 apiece to West Virginia and Dayton. On Saturday, the football team took undefeated, third-ranked Florida State down to the final three seconds before falling, 20-17, in Tallahassee. And Sunday marked the 30th anniversary of Doug Flutie and Gerard Phelan’s “Miracle in Miami,’’ the most important play in the school’s history.
So this would have been a very big weekend for BC sports, if there were any such thing as a big weekend for BC sports. But Boston College, despite its membership in the nationally prominent Atlantic Coast Conference and its lack of local competition in the major sports, consistently fails to command the Commonwealth’s attention. Outside of a few excellent hockey programs and UMass’s occasional basketball surges, Boston College is our only big-time intercollegiate athletic operation, and as such should own this state, as far as sports allegiance goes. But, for whatever reason, that’s never really been the case.
Part of this is surely attributable to New England’s relative antipathy toward college sports; we’re more into the pro game around here. But that doesn’t explain why Boston College isn’t even relatively popular among the local sporting classes. TicketCity data indicates that Harvard, not BC, is the most popular college football team in the state.
The Crimson run a very good mid-level NCAA football operation; you probably already know they beat Yale Saturday in a 31-24 thriller to win the Ivy League. But it is in no way downplaying Harvard’s success or reputation to say that in 49 other states, the BC-FSU game would have been the talk of the town, not a Football Championship Subdivision clash between a couple of schools that don’t give out athletic scholarships.
I used to work weekends at a bar in Cambridge, and a few times a year I’d have to fake my way through conversations with fat, happy southern dudes who drawled, “I hope y’all aren’t gonna refuse to serve me on account of our boys whuppin’ your boys today,’’ at which point I’d take a glance at their sweatshirts to ascertain just which visiting team had rolled through Chestnut Hill that afternoon. I like college football, and I have no particular animosity toward BC, but I just don’t pay much attention.
And neither does anyone else. Who remembers that Andre Williams ran for 2,177 yards last year, the fifth-highest single-season total in NCAA history, on the way to becoming a Heisman Trophy finalist (he finished fourth, one spot ahead of Johnny Manziel)? Boston College football attendance last season was actually down from 2012’s, plummeting to 33,000 per game, or 74 percent of Alumni Stadium capacity.
I realize that Boston College places at least slightly more emphasis on education than it does sports, at least as compared to most of its ACC peers, which will always limit its roster options. And the school can’t be blamed for being in a nice part of an uptight town, which precludes the sort of 36-hour tailgating bacchanals that drive college football popularity in other parts of the country.
OK, so there are perfectly legitimate reasons why Boston College will never be LSU. I think I speak for most of the region’s sports fans when I say we’re fine with those trade-offs. In many parts of the country, college-sports obsession is out of control. A creepy devotion to teenage athletes has utterly corrupted Tallahassee, which in addition to being the capital of our fourth most populous state, is also Jameis Winston and company’s private lawless playground.
Florida State’s football team is almost cartoonishly out of control, to such an extent that it might even be funny—if so many of their excesses and abuses didn’t lead to tragedy for the second-class citizens of Tallahassee who don’t even have the decency to be varsity athletes. This is why, when I absentmindedly noticed that they were playing BC Saturday, I thought, “Oh good, the one time a year I actively root for BC.’’
Why don’t I care about BC football the rest of the season? Why have I never been to Conte Forum when I live a few miles away and college basketball’s my favorite sport? I really can’t explain it, but I think we have to at least consider the possibility that something about Boston College as an institution is off-putting to outsiders. And remember the stats about being less popular than Harvard and only drawing 33,000 fans per game: We’re not talking about one guy’s indifference. This isn’t about “Why don’t I like BC?’’ but rather “Why doesn’t anybody like BC?’’
I realize this is completely anecdotal, but in bouncing around town I tend to hear a lot more complaints about Boston College than I do other local schools, and most of these gripes have a central theme of unearned arrogance. Harvard students and alumni might act like the masters of the universe, but, well, they are the masters of the universe. But what makes BC so special? It’s a very good school—I freely admit I probably wouldn’t have been accepted had I applied—but those aren’t in short supply around here.
And the Jesuit affiliation never really slowed anyone down in Boston, so I don’t think the school and its teams are being discriminated against on religious grounds. Besides, Massachusetts is lousy with Notre Dame fans, so it’s not as if we can’t get behind a private, Catholic school with a good academic reputation.
Are Boston College students and alumni really so obnoxious that they’re driving away potential fans? Or is the lack of interest instead rooted in a more benign reaction to the school’s perceived blandness and homogeneity? Maybe we’re not actively turned off by BC so much as we just forget that it’s around; 82 percent of undergraduates live on campus (for which the school is to be commended), and total cost of attendance is just a hair under $63,000 a year, two factors that would tend to isolate BC from the rest of the region’s reality.
Perhaps there’s a local media bias against BC that prevents the sort of free promotion big-time college programs can typically count on. High-level sports exist mostly in the media and in our imaginations, not in our concrete day-to-day lives—which is why local devotion shouldn’t hinge on how pleasant the students are or how easy it is to park near campus. Should Boston.com have installed a “Countdown to FSU’’ clock in the upper-right hand corner of the home page for the week preceding the game?
Whatever the source of our indifference—be it an off-putting school, a hostile media, or simply the public exercising its right not to care—there’s something fishy about a major Division I NCAA athletic program located 5 miles away from Boston City Hall not being able to generate any local support.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com