Soaring Rhetoric: The Soaring to Glory 2012-13 Season Finale

Danny Wild-USA TODAY Sports

Kyle: Worst moments at Boston College…well, there was vo…oh, BC athletics.

First one for me is the West Point/Bryant combo special. The combination of us losing to these two titans of college football and basketball, respectively, was heartbreaking. Like, seriously, how in Flutie’s name does an ACC team lose to those programs? Come on. By the end of the Army game I was laughing at how we kept giving up the lead to that nominal running QB. I didn’t personally see the Bryant game, but I could imagine that I would’ve had a similar reaction. How much can an ACC program simply [expletive] the bed against lowly competition!? I can’t think about it any more without generating too much negative waves.

The other awful memory of BC Athletics from this season is baseball. How could a team be worse? When you are battling for double digits or a single ACC win before the end of the season, you know you are having a year to forget and bury at the Brighton stadium construction grounds.

We are going to be talking/thinking a lot about the future of the baseball team and its current coach, Mike Gambino. It doesn’t look like Gambino will be fired as he hasn’t been given the pink slip yet, but wholesale changes will be needed to bring the program to some sort of respectability that the ACC program has lacked for its entire history. I really don’t know how embarrassing it must have been for the Eagle players to go out there every afternoon and know that they are most likely going to lose and the only victories that they would get would be “moral.”

Joe: Trust me, the Bryant game was terrible, and I was at the Army game. Having grown up in nearby Poughkeepsie, I went to Michie Stadium every year and rooted for the Black Knights when I was a kid — I’m not sure, but the game in October may have been the first I’ve been to that Army won. It figures.

As for Mike Gambino, my rule of thumb about coaches is that by the third year, you know what you have. Sometimes it’s sooner (with Spaz I was pretty sure he was going to be a dud by the end of year two) and sometimes you have to wait longer into the process, but usually, by three years in, it’s clear. Gambino is 51-107 as BC’s coach in three seasons and they’ve gotten worse every year. Before he took over, BC actually was somewhat respectable, but as for how Bates could ultimately retain a coach whose results keep getting worse is puzzling. He might still go, but we’ll see.

There are a thousand things to fix about BC baseball, but firing the coach is the easiest one on the list. If they don’t, I’d actually be worried that Bates doesn’t care and then you start talking about other things, like the program’s long-term future.

Kyle: I think Bates really does care and honestly, unlike the last athletic director, I trust him not to trudge his feet with the baseball coach. Sure, Gambino hasn’t been fired yet, but we don’t know whether or not recruiting was left in shambles after the last coach (Mik Aoki) left or what. Maybe Bates gave Gambino one more year to prove that his recruits can win at the ACC level. Maybe, who knows, they’ll hire another assistant coach to meet the minimum requirement for Division I baseball teams. Wouldn’t that be something?

The conversation concludes on the next page