All of that was gone when the Eagles returned to the building for practice at the start of this week. Knowing that the next game awaited Boston College, O’Brien quickly reminded the team to get back to work for the next opponent, and by Tuesday morning, the sounds of last week’s victory were nowhere to be found. Their replacement: a Maine team representing the opportunity for a second win and anything but a token FCS opponent arriving in Chestnut Hill for Saturday’s annual inter-divisional showdown.
“We’re just looking to stay 1-0,'” said defensive back Marcus Upton. “Maine’s a good team. We have to watch film and stay on top of things to make sure that we prep the right way. This is just like every other game, so we need to make sure we take baby steps at a time while working hard and taking Maine seriously. You don’t look at any opponents differently. We need hard work to get ready to go.”
The relationship between college football’s bowl subdivision and its championship counterpart significantly changed after the higher level adopted a permanent 12-game schedule in 2006. Until then, football teams who competed for bowl games played an 11-game regular season with games exclusively scheduled against their own Division I-A subdivision while championship teams played with less resources and fewer scholarships in Division I-AA, and the NCAA didn’t allow the “bigger schools” to regularly count wins against the lower division schools because of the schism that occurred in the 1980s.
The 2006 expansion changed that landscape by building upon a late-1990s reinterpretation of the rulebook. Starting in 1998, FBS teams counted one victory over FCS opponents towards their bowl eligibility as long as the FCS team met specified financial and scholarship thresholds. The 2006 change allowed FBS schools to schedule FCS opponents alongside an extra game that hadn’t been allowed under the former unit, but 60 percent of its games and at least five regular season home games required FBS opponents. As such, the exception unofficially morphed into one FCS opponent per year, a rule that was eventually explicitly hardened by the late-2010s.
By this point, FBS games against FCS opponents occurred on a regular basis, and the Eagles were able to schedule games against the vast majority of regional opponents. A lone 2010 matchup against Weber State coincided with Mark Herzlich’s return from cancer and took an FCS opponent outside of New England for the first time since the rule began evolving, and a 2013 game against Villanova harkened to a regular matchup from the 1960s and 1970s. A 2015 scheduling quirk left Boston College with two FCS opponents for the first time in program history, and the eventual eligibility of the Patriot League allowed a semi-revival of the Holy Cross rivalry.
Maine, for what it’s worth, opened the 2015 season and previously played the Eagles in 2012 and 2014 before taking a seven-year hiatus from playing the Eagles. Its lone victory over a power conference team occurred in 2004 when a Black Bear team ranked No. 15 in I-AA beat Mississippi State, 9-7, during a season in which the Bulldogs defeated nationally-ranked Florida, and the current crop of Black Bears battled to the cusp of .500 seasons in each of the last two years with a win over No. 5 Villanova and multiple games against FBS opponents.
With respect to this year’s team, quarterback Eddie Buehler passed for 199 yards and two touchdowns in the season-opening win over Towson, and nearly replicated his yardage in a game against an FBS-level Appalachian State. Running back Rashawn Marshall likewise produced decent numbers in the win over the Tigers after averaging five yards per carry on last year’s team, and backfield mate Nick Laughlin joined wide receiver Evan Wallace atop the team’s receiving charts after both provided options for explosive plays in both the Towson win and last week’s game against Merrimack.
“They do a great job [at Maine],” said O’Brien. “They’re well-coached. I think defensively, they’re very good. They’re stout. They have good players. Offensively, the quarterback can run. They have a good back. They have good receivers that can run. They have good specialists. They spend a lot of time on special teams. We better be ready [for them], and it’s a big challenge.”
“They’re a good team from what I’ve watched,” said tight end Zeke Moore. “They have some really good players. FCS has a bunch of talented players that might just get overlooked, and they’re going to come in here with a great attitude. They’re going to want to [beat] us, so we have to take that same attitude that this is just like any other game and [become] extremely focused. I don’t think anyone’s looking at this one any differently than any other game.”
