The Bay State is the Bad State when it comes to one of America’s most-followed sports.
This type of futility would be cause to declare a state of emergency elsewhere. It would bring proverbial pitchforks and fretting about lost pride and prestige. With the Patriots’ renaissance, it goes unnoticed like a sock wandering off in the wash, barely a blip on the local sports radar.
It’s a far cry from Alabama, where before a $1.8 billion Powerball drawing in September, a woman declared she would use the winnings to buy out the contract of Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer. Her Crimson Tide are fourth in the College Football Playoff rankings.
In Louisiana, Governor Jeff Landry interjected himself into LSU’s search for a new head coach after Chelsea’s own Brian Kelly was ousted last month. Landry used his political pull to force out LSU’s athletic director. Thankfully, Maura Healey remains focused on more consequential matters.
BC isn’t a state school. It’s a private institution. And, save for the days of Coach Cal and the UMass men’s basketball team chasing Final Fours, our flagship doesn’t traditionally inspire the type of statewide reverence and allegiance other state universities enjoy.
Still, a possible 0-for-FBS season is an unthinkable and unacceptable nadir. Ineptitude of this magnitude is unheard of since UMass joined BC at the FBS level in 2012.
Adding insult to ignominy, UConn is bowl eligible with seven wins and defeated BC this season. This futility is confined to our commonwealth, a college football wasteland. The only way it could look worse is if Bill Belichick coached college ball here. Trademark Chestnut Bill.
BC wasn’t supposed to struggle this badly. Former NFL head coach and Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien was a great get. In 2024, his first season at the Heights, O’Brien guided the Eagles to a 7-6 record and a bowl win.
In his previous college stint, he rebuilt Penn State after the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal took down the legendary Joe Paterno. The bet is that this is a one-off for O’Brien, a favorite son of Andover.
This season has been a nightmare, with the Eagles unable to get untracked while playing more than two dozen freshmen. Impacted by injuries and depth deficiencies, BC’s defense was 124th out of 136 FBS schools in yards allowed (431.7 per game) and 126th in points allowed (34.5) before Saturday. Only four schools had allowed more touchdowns than BC’s 44, including UMass, ranked last with 50.
Luke Kuechly isn’t walking through that door.
Quarterback Dylan Lonergan, an Alabama transfer, flamed out and got benched. O’Brien has yo-yoed between Lonergan, who started against Georgia Tech and threw for 362 yards, and Grayson James.
In the NIL and transfer portal era, college football is a quarterback-dependent enterprise and fortunes change fast. BC needs to find its version of Diego Pavia, the portal savior who propelled SEC doormat Vanderbilt into CFP consideration. The question is whether BC can marshal the financial resources to compete for the players it needs, relative to its ACC brethren. Massachusetts isn’t fertile recruiting ground. Money impacts O’Brien’s margin for error shopping for players.
The Eagles’ lone opportunity for an FBS win is Nov. 29 at Syracuse.
UMass feels like a more dire situation, despite the trumpeted announcement by athletic director Ryan Bamford that the school is overhauling its approach to fielding and funding an FBS football program.
No one can blame first-year coach Joe Harasymiak. He’s a hero for simply taking the job. UMass is the pigskin Pompeii, unrecognizably buried under the volcanic ash of incapability and delusions of gridiron grandeur. This is a program that won a Division 1-AA national championship in 1998 and played in another title game in 2006, the first season the division was reclassified as FCS.
It hasn’t won more than four games in a season since ascending to FBS in 2012. The Minutemen own a 26-132 (.165) record since then, the worst during that span.
UMass has lost 21 FBS games in a row, its last victory coming against Army on Oct. 28, 2023. The Minutemen have lost 14 straight contests overall. This year, it fell to FCS opponent Bryant University. Patriots fans remember that school as Bryant College, where the Patriots used to hold their training camp.
In its first season as a full member of the Mid-American Conference, UMass is dubiously mortgaging its basketball tradition and potential for a football home after scuffling as an independent from 2016-24.
Unfortunately, UMass has become a punchline. The school was skewered on social media for lighting off fireworks to celebrate a fourth-quarter field goal while trailing, 45-0, in a 45-3 loss to Northern Illinois on Wednesday in front of 6,155 at McGuirk Alumni Stadium in Amherst. The pitiful pyrotechnics display became symbolic of how far the program looks from respectability.
It marked a second facepalm celebration for UMass. In a 28-21 loss to Buffalo on Oct. 18, a UMass defensive back waved goodbye to celebrate the putative game-sealing interception. Buffalo got the ball back, then beat the same defensive back for the winning score with 19 seconds left.
The Minutemen can’t win, literally and figuratively. Their final two opportunities come at Ohio on Tuesday and home against Bowling Green on Nov. 25.
Fittingly, the poem that made the fictional town of Mudville a sports failure metaphor du jour, “Casey at the Bat,” was written by a Massachusetts native, Ernest Lawrence Thayer, born in Lawrence.
As Thayer wrote: “Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;”
In college football, that somewhere isn’t Loss-achusetts.
Christopher L. Gasper is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at christopher.gasper@globe.com. Follow him @cgasper and on Instagram @cgaspersports.
