Shakim Phillips and Clyde Lee off BC football

This morning, Eagles football fans found out what they had been suspecting since yesterday afternoon: that sophomore WR Shakim Phillips and junior WR Clyde Lee, who did not appear on the updated 2011 roster, are no longer on the team.

The word came down from the Boston Globe this morning, and was confirmed by Boston College Athletics and to me personally by @EAHoffses on Twitter, that Lee is sitting out the season because of an academic issue and that Phillips has elected to transfer. In 2010, Lee caught 17 passes for 185 yards and one touchdown while Phillips, who had his redshirt burned mid-season and then got injured, caught one pass for nine yards and had four kickoff returns for 63 yards.

With the article in Part III of the 2011 Boston College football breakdown series last week, you saw a team with lots of wide receivers. The Eagles have eight of them now, which seems like a lot, but as we’ve seen with two of our most major teams, attrition happens. There is no definitive word at this time as to where Phillips will go.

Losing Lee means losing a receiver who, in two seasons, amassed 225 receiving yards for the Eagles. His departure from the team is a slight harm to depth at wide receiver, though with Larmond, Amidon, Swigert, and Momah all figuring to see more playing time and catch more passes than he would, he is not irreplaceable.

Taking Phillips out of the equation hurts both the depth at wide receiver now and down the road. There was considerable excitement from Boston College fans when he was recruited as a four-star player out of New Jersey. He didn’t have the best speed on the team (not that we got a chance to see much last year) but he could go up and get balls and had proven himself as one of the better receivers coming out of high school. Injuries were his problem, however, and as we saw last year, it apparently doesn’t take much. Still, Phillips figured to be a key component of the receiving corps in future years, even in spite of his wasted redshirt-then-non-redshirt freshman year. It’s a great shame that that’s all we’ll see of him in a Boston College uniform, though this season, with the aforementioned glut of receivers and those four guys in particular who are likely to see a lot of action, Phillips was probably not going to be seeing as much time as players like Larmond, Swigert, and the like. I don’t purport to know the reasons for his transfer, however.

I guess that’s something we also have to evaluate with regards to BC recruiting, which has gotten us some four-star guys recently: we’ve got them, but can we keep them?