None of the hundreds of programs dotting the American landscape have completed a competitive drive or executed a full throttle tackle to stop an opposing offense. Specialists haven’t attempted pressure-packed field goals or landed coffin corner punts. Coaches haven’t devised game plans with the bulk of their work geared towards conditioning and strength workouts mapped onto whiteboards.
The next season, the next steps for each of the 138 teams throughout the 10 bowl subdivision conferences, existed only in hypothetical conversations about the future, so the start of camp would constantly offer the unofficial beginning for the next chapter of a team’s history book. Threads organically tied the calendar together between the years, but no images allowed fans or coaches to watch their teams gel for the first game of the season.
The first day therefore shifts the attitude towards a more urgent setting. The typical physicality associated with a full football game doesn’t quite exist in a world where spiders and full padded workouts don’t exist, but none of that holds back the excitement associated with the first steps towards the first game and a score that finally counts.
“We feel like we’ve made some improvements,” Gregory P. Barber ’69 and Family Head Coach Bill O’Brien told local media during the Atlantic Coast Conference’s annual season kickoff. “When it comes to pressure and all that, I just think we have a much-improved football team. I think the coaching staff’s done a good job. Of course, we have to go out and do it. We have to go out there and have some good results, more than we did last year, but I feel really good about the chemistry of the team, the talent of the team. I feel good about the coaching, and I think we’re on the right track.”
Few details about BC’s disappointing 2025 campaign remain in place from an offseason overhaul, so a more decisive clean break delineated the end of last season from even the spring practice session preceding the summer and this week’s first practice sessions. On pure production, the Eagles changed the personnel responsible for greater than 50 percent of last year’s offense and just under half of their defensive output, and nearly every skill position transitioned to new leaders atop the depth chart.
More than a dozen players from Power Four schools highlighted a transfer class featuring 28 players who chose to continue their careers in Chestnut Hill. Standing beside them were players from the best FCS programs on both the local and national radars, and Mason McKenzie, a Division II quarterback who rushed for more yards than all but five of the non-service academy quarterbacks in last year’s FBS.
“I don’t think we want to live in the world of bringing in 20-plus transfers every year,” explained O’Brien, “[but] I felt like we had to do that based on who left the program, who graduated, all that. That was something that we had to do. Starting this year with the class of 2028 that we’re recruiting, really the classes of 2027 and 2028, you want to be at about 75 percent through high school recruiting, so you can watch them grow over two, three and four years. Then maybe you’re 25 percent in the portal. I don’t think you ever want it to be 50-50, but we have to, in this day and age when guys leave, you have to be able to replace experience with experience. It’s hard to replace a guy who leaves, that’s very experienced, with a rookie.”
Having rebuilt the roster allowed O’Brien and his front office staff to field a competitive depth chart capable of surprising experts who are already predicting an uphill battle for a BC team that didn’t finish 2025 with enough positivity, but all of that is far enough in the future to still exist in a hypothetical vacuum. This week and these first practices are about acclimating to the coaching staff and stages beyond simple conditioning drills. Scheme, language, classroom instruction and the first bruises are significant additions to any player’s first strides towards the upcoming season. Results and scoreboard-based final records are larger parts of more urgent conversations, but it’s still balanced by expanding the team beyond its current limits.
“Spring sessions, at first, I think there was a little bit of adjustment,” said McKenzie. “It’s a new offense, and playing ACC football means playing with some better guys. It’s all an adjustment to playing with guys that I’ve never played with before, so that makes it difficult at first. As spring ball went on, it got a little easier. We were still installing new stuff every day, so that side of it never really got easier. But you knew what you were getting every day, and you learned who you were playing with. We had 10 to 12 practices over the summer that were player-led practices, so we’ve definitely taken big steps. Going into fall camp, I think that we’ll be ready.”
The 2026 Boston College regular season begins on Saturday, September 5, when the Eagles travel to Ohio to play the Big 12’s Cincinnati Bearcats at 3:30 p.m. Tickets for the upcoming home schedule are available by calling 617-552-GoBC or by visiting bceagles.com.
