Boston College Basketball: Projecting the Remainder of the 2013-14 Season
By Joe Micik
Greg M. Cooper-USA TODAY Sports
Things are not well with Boston College basketball. Instead of sizing up the resume for a Tournament appearance, we’re mentally composing short-lists of coaching candidates.
Our prediction about this season was very, very wrong. It was consistent with the expectations set for this year, but it was wrong.
In order to figure out how the rest of the season will go, we can actually turn to facts as opposed to completely blind guesses. Sure, any game predictions are guesses, but Boston College is over half-way through this disastrous season. We know what they are and what they’re going to be. We know this team has struggled greatly and that they’re going to have major issues with a number of teams yet to come.
Some websites that use advanced statistics and whatnot offer up projections based on those figures. KenPom is one of them, but one must pay to see them. Regardless, you can safely assume that Mr. Pomeroy does not have the Eagles slotted in for too many more wins. It does not cost a thing to see what RealTimeRPI has cooked up:
| at North Carolina (1/18)……………. | Loss, 83-63 |
| vs. Georgia Tech (1/21) | Win, 72-70 |
| vs. Virginia Tech (1/29) | Win, 74-69 |
| at Notre Dame (2/1) | Loss, 86-65 |
| at Virginia (2/5) | Loss, 73-51 |
| vs. Duke (2/8) | Loss, 85-75 |
| at Georgia Tech (2/12) | Loss, 78-64 |
| vs. Notre Dame (2/16) | Loss, 78-74 |
| at Syracuse (2/19) | Loss, 80-58 |
| at Miami (2/22) | Loss, 74-60 |
| vs. Pittsburgh (2/26) | Loss, 75-67 |
| at Wake Forest (3/1) | Loss, 81-65 |
| vs. Florida State (3/4) | Loss, 74-70 |
| at NC State (3/9) | Loss, 82-69 |
RealTimeRPI Pre-ACCT Record: 7-24 (3-15)
Now, there are a few nitpicks that I have with some of the individual game results — for example, North Carolina has the talent to win Saturday’s game by 20, but they have beaten the big-name opponents this year while struggling with the underwhelming teams. That game could be ten points closer than their projection insists. Maybe a few other scores are inflated, but aside from that, this looks scarily realistic.
Against Syracuse, the Eagles showed that they can still shoot hotly at times, and I believe that will give them one more win than they would have otherwise gotten. Florida State looks like a good candidate, but even if you throw that in the win column for Boston College, that’s still a very bad season. In fact, if everything else followed this estimate, the Eagles would enter the ACC Tournament having lost ten of their last 11 games. That doesn’t exactly add up to momentum for a shocking run in Greensboro. The Eagles might be able to win a Wednesday game, seeing as they’d be playing another lower-end team, but anything beyond that is fantasy.
It therefore seems prudent to expect at this point a Boston College final, pre-ACCT record of 8-23 (4-14). Best-case scenario is that they leave Greensboro 9-24, and worst-case is 8-24. If the latter bears out, a .250 win percentage would make for the worst Eagles basketball season since 1998-99, Al Skinner’s second year, and 24 would be the most losses in program history. The 2011-12 team, Donahue’s second year, holds that record at present (22).
It’s one thing to be a coach and have an historically-bad season in year two, but to have an even worse season in year four? Let’s hope for the team’s sake that it doesn’t get as bad as it looks like it might.