Florida State at Boston College: Condensed For Your Convenience

Short week, short preview.

The 2-6 Boston College Eagles are coming back home for their first Thursday night home game since they hosted Virginia Tech on October 12, 2006. That, of course, was the game where Steve Aponavicius made his debut and kicked two field goals in BC’s 22-3 win over the Hokies.

Things have changed a little bit in the last five years. By that, I mean a lot.

That Eagles team went to 5-1 with the win over Virginia Tech and had few questions surrounding the quality of play on the team. This one, however, would have to win out against difficult opposition just to salvage a .500 season and has had stretches where they’ve played brutally-bad football.

They didn’t last week, though. In a contest between two wildly-underachieving football teams, the Eagles stuck with the run and let Rolandan Finch power his team to a 28-17 win, BC’s first win over an FBS team this year. True, they were helped by Randy Edsall coaching a horrendous game, and it was not a perfect effort on BC’s end, with a bunch of turnovers in very tough weather conditions and some more of the same with regards to conservative coaching decisions, though a few less than normal, but the players have done admirably despite all of the things working against them. Our players at BC deserve a lot better than what this season has turned out to be.

Their opponent this week is Florida State, a 5-3 division rival who just beat the stuffing out of Tom O’Brien’s NC State Wolfpack. There is no question at all that the Seminoles were massively overrated by the media during the preseason (I wanted to see them win a couple games first before I put them in the Top 10, but of course, once they got there, they didn’t stay very long). The national title hopes that they had dreamed about were over by roughly Week 4 of the season, but they’re still a good team.

Florida State, though not the team some people thought they would be, is still a big step up in competition from Maryland, which will make this a difficult game for the Eagles. Whereas the Terps were a very inconsistent offensive team that had shown just a few flashes of being decent, the Seminoles are a legitimately strong offense. Quarterback EJ Manuel has led his team to the 12th-best passing attack in the nation and a top-25 scoring offense. In fact, Florida State has only been held below 30 points once this season, and that was against then-#1 Oklahoma.

The Eagles managed to put up some points for a change on Saturday thanks in part to Finch and an atrocious Maryland defense, finally breaking through the 20-point mark against FBS competition, but they have not gone above 30 in over two years (now 23-straight games). With the Seminoles offense being what it is, 30 might be a necessity, but aside from Boston College’s general offensive futility, there is one good reason why that may not happen: Florida State’s scoring defense is 12th in the nation with only 16.88 points allowed per game.

More on the FSU defense, which is arguably the best in the ACC: it is roughly comparable to the sort of defense the Eagles saw from Virginia Tech. They are second in the conference in scoring defense, first in the conference in total defense by over 20 yards, first in the conference in rushing defense (only allow 77 yards per game), and 4th in the conference in pass defense. This is not going to be Maryland, that’s for sure. Of particular concern here is FSU’s rush defense being the best in the conference and 4th-best in the nation: considering how the run was BC’s bread and butter last week, and the Seminoles are very good at stopping it, BC is going to have to find ways to do more (scoring) with less (rush yardage).

The Eagles are not going to get away with a game where they only throw the ball 12 times for 32 yards this week; Chase Rettig is going to have to be throwing the ball a lot more because there is absolutely no way the Eagles will even come close to 372 rushing yards with 62 rushes again this week. If they get a third of that, which is potentially a reasonable amount, they should be pleased.

Across the board, this game looks like an advantage for Florida State. Correct, the Seminoles are not an 8-0 powerhouse barreling into Alumni Stadium, but they play better offense and defense than BC does, which would explain why they’re a two-touchdown favorite even though the Eagles just won a game. Simply put, whereas the Eagles had a realistic chance of beating Maryland (and don’t tell me I didn’t say that because I did, repeatedly), and they did, Boston College does not match up well with Florida State.

Last year’s game, which honestly shouldn’t be used as proof that anything is going to happen because it was a different season, was weird. The Seminoles made a lot of mistakes and the Eagles’ defense was a lot more stout than it has been for the most part this season. In fact, BC’s defense finished ahead of Florida State’s last season in a number of categories. This year, not so. The Seminoles are better at stopping the run now and in terms of a pass rush, which BC still doesn’t particularly have, they have four of the conference’s top 20 sack men in Bjoern Werner, Cornellius Carradine, Brandon Jenkins, and Telvin Smith. To further highlight the extreme difference between Boston College and Florida State in getting to the quarterback, try this out: FSU is #3 in the nation with 29 sacks; Boston College is dead last, 120th in FBS, with six.

This looks like a Florida State win with a score in the neighborhood of the Virginia Tech game, and that’s how I see it going, but one thing that could give BC an outside shot is the nature of the game itself. It’s the Eagles’ first Thursday night game at home in five years, the eyes of the nation will be on Boston College, and they have the momentum resulting from having won their most recent game, as did Florida State. The crowd will be energized and it should be a good atmosphere, which may be enough to carry the team for a little while. I don’t think this will be a blowout because of that factor; in fact, it may, for a while, be close.

When taking the whole body of work BC has put together, you can see that even against a good but unranked Florida State team, the Eagles are going to have to do things a lot better than they’ve been doing. Beating UMass is nice and kicking Maryland around is one thing, but one is an FCS team and the other won’t come close to a winning record. The Seminoles figure to win about nine games or so if everything breaks their way. The gameplan BC used against Maryland isn’t going to work this week, and Florida State frankly does a bunch of things better. This is going to be a challenge — not a completely undoable one given that this is a special game — but BC will have to keep up their recent intensity and try to force a lot of mistakes; otherwise, last week’s win may end up as a distant memory.