Let’s Play: Where in the World Is Brad Bates?

If you are younger than 21 years old at present, you may not get the reference, so I apologize in advance that this article does not cater to your needs. Bear with me.

Boston College athletic director Brad Bates, by all accounts, has been burning up the phones trying to find the next football coach for this team. If our intuition is also to be believed, he’s been on his way flying to meet some new candidates. This begs one question, which should by rights be sung by Rockapella: Where in the world is Brad Bates?

There’s really only one way to interpret that: he flew back from meeting someone, most likely for an interview. Let’s not be unnecessarily contrary about this, either. There could be special functions for him to attend out of town, but there’s a good chance he’s flying around to meet some candidates for the job. Not all of them are going to come to campus, and never knowing which bloggers may be staking out Yawkey (not me, by the way), that may be the way BC wants it for now.

If you are so inclined, like those gumshoes on the PBS game show, you can try to figure out which flights landed yesterday afternoon and where Bates may have been. It’s a fun game to play if you’ve got nothing better to do, I’ll give you that. Someone could just ask Bates for his plane ticket, but where’s the thrill of the chase in that? For example, some enterprising message board folk came up with a private flight from South Bend to Hanscom Airport in Bedford, which is BC’s airport of choice. For those who completely missed it, Bob Diaco is in South Bend. I highly doubt that’s a common route they run, but we’ll never know if Bates was on the plane unless he says it, so speculation is just that — speculation.

Bates is operating quietly, though he has pledged to drop a few hints to the fans who are now hanging off of every word he utters. I personally don’t mind the stealth search, so long as it results in a good coach. Besides, it’s sometimes fun to play the speculation game.

Where will Bates be today, and to whom will he speak? They are deep into the contact phase and almost certainly well into the interview stage by now. Maybe he’ll give us some clues and get some more BC fans digging for answers. Exciting, isn’t it?