CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – That sound you just heard was Boston College’s chances at grabbing a little of the spotlight going right down the drain.
As is often the case, crowds at Conte Forum have been anemic all season. Boston is a notorious pro sports town, to the point where in January and February, sports fans would rather call talk radio and talk about hot stove baseball, who the Patriots might draft, or pitchers and catchers reporting than the college basketball games in town that actually count in the standings. That probably won’t change now, although there was a little more of an opening than there has been in a while with the Patriots out of the playoffs. That means neither the Patriots nor the Red Sox don’t play a meaningful game until a national champion has been crowned in college basketball.
Wednesday night’s crowd at Conte Forum didn’t look any bigger than most of the Eagles’ games thus far this season. It doesn’t help that students are still away until next week. Even so, the crowd gave them the biggest cheers all season when they came out, and you could sense the place was a little different. A win over North Carolina can do that for a team.
But seemingly just as quickly as the Eagles became ranked – although whether or not they’re really one of the 25 best teams in the land is very debatable – they came home and didn’t look like they wanted to be on the court. It showed in the result, as a banged-up Harvard team came in and beat them more convincingly than the 82-70 final score would indicate.
And with it went any real chance of being relevant to the average Boston sports fan. They might have been a little interested after the win at North Carolina, but now they’ll resume the normal, if a little ridiculous, activity of being obsessed with off-season transactions of the Red Sox and Patriots and perhaps occasionally paying attention to the Celtics and Bruins.
“We just didn’t get ourselves ready to play the way we should have,” said head coach Al Skinner. “We just thought it would be enough to show up, and things would go our way. Obviously, they did not.”
Indeed, BC looked lifeless all night long. There were a couple of stretches where the offense looked ready to come alive, but Jeremy Lin and Harvard had answers at every turn. They were careless with the ball most of the night, and the Crimson made them pay.
It was a classic case of a letdown, and a big one at that. The Eagles went from beating the team some think can go undefeated, and at their place no less, to losing at home to a team that can only make the NCAA Tournament as an automatic qualifier. That’s really part of what this team is, and Skinner was not all that surprised even though he undoubtedly would rather this not have happened.
“That is who we are. We are capable of being this team, and we are also capable of being another team,” said Skinner. “That’s the youth that you’re dealing with, and you have to work hard to guard against that.”
The sports fan base around here is such that this loss probably carries bigger repercussions for the team from that standpoint than it does for their NCAA Tournament hopes. The Eagles’ profile for the tournament is now just okay after this loss. For teams on the bubble, it’s a given that they can lose games, but the win over North Carolina carries some weight because it proves they can beat good teams. If they wind up at .500 in ACC play, that win might carry more weight than the Harvard loss on the whole and look like an aberration. Losing to Harvard, along with other things they have shown, isn’t indicative of a team that is capable of going .500 in ACC play.
No matter what, though, it’s going to take a lot for them to recapture the casual fan’s attention in these parts again. Other than the February 15 game against Duke, it would be a surprise to see a sellout in Conte Forum the rest of the way unless the Eagles suddenly run off several wins in a row, which isn’t very likely. The bar is set ridiculously high for college teams around here because sports fans don’t care about the sport, and just as BC looked like it might clear that bar, they trip over it and fall.
Further proof is that this happened at a time when the football program has gone through a sudden coaching change that made a lot of national news. While that took some attention away from the basketball team’s big win at North Carolina, this loss is severe enough that fans and the general public will take notice of it more. That’s unfortunately what the dynamic is around here.
Skinner has learned to live with that, and in fact he probably didn’t mind that the basketball team was the underdog to the football team in recent days save for the football news being of a negative nature. He surely wishes it didn’t have to come this way, but after Wednesday night’s loss, his team will go back into irrelevance in the Boston sports world.
