Boston College at Maryland: Opening Line & The Basics

Randy Edsall will finally get to live out what has (apparently) been his dream for a while: coaching a game against Boston College.

The only difference is that he’s running the Maryland Terrapins now, not the Connecticut Huskies.  His dream of the BC/UConn hatefest and/or “good for New England game” won’t happen, but being in the Eagles’ division, he’ll personally get to face them every year.  Still, there isn’t really a whole lot distinguishing his old team from his current one this year: UConn is 3-4 with only one decent win, and Maryland is 2-5 and have underachieved after winning nine games last season.

In spite of the issues the Terps have, they are 7.5-point favorites at the moment for Saturday’s game against the 1-6 Boston College Eagles. This past Saturday, for the first time all year, the Eagles beat the point spread, but it was hardly a statement performance: the spread was Hokies -21, and Virginia Tech won by 16.

What we did see, however, was this team playing hard. The kids on this BC team haven’t quit, and I don’t think they’re going to quit. They’re probably way more tired of losing than we are of watching them lose, and they want to win in spite of their coaches who have put together lousy gameplans, managed the clock poorly, gotten too conservative and are lacking in killer instinct. We are never, ever going anywhere with Spaz as coach, but as far as winning this game, it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Maryland looked in preseason like they’d be a team that would get back to a bowl game, and sophomore quarterback Danny O’Brien looked like he was poised to take another leap forward and become one of the ACC’s best quarterbacks in 2011. Neither one of those things has happened; the Terps would need a very strong finish just to become bowl-eligible, while O’Brien has taken a step backwards and got benched for CJ Brown, who evidently isn’t much better and, by the way, he got hurt against Florida State on Saturday and could have come back into the game, but didn’t. Now we have no idea who the starting quarterback will be this weekend, and I don’t know if Edsall does, either.

This is one of the two remaining games where I had forecasted a realistic chance of an Eagles victory, so it’s almost now or never for BC in terms of finally getting an FBS win.