An Open Letter to BC Coach Steve Donahue

Dear Coach Donahue,

We Boston College fans are pleased to have you here. Your hiring has struck some optimism into our fanbase and we can't wait until November to see what you can do. The Eagles men's basketball program is better today for having you in charge.

Many of us admire the job you did at Cornell. You took a program from absolutely nothing into one that finished up #17 in the nation. I'm sure you're very proud of your accomplishments with the Big Red, and we're hopeful that you can have even greater success here.

You will face some tough challenges in your time on the heights. Our program is not nearly in as bad of a state as the one in which you found Cornell in 2000, but this team desperately needs rejuvenation. The last several years have been marked by consistent inconsistency, fundamental mistakes, and some unexplainable losses. Our players have not gotten the job done and our venue's seats are empty. It will be your job to breathe life into this program and take it to respectability, then to the so-called next level.

This basketball program suffers from widespread chronic apathy: the students barely attend the games, and many of the old whalepants wearers living in Boston don't feel like braving the traffic to get to the Conte Forum. If BC isn't playing North Carolina or Duke, people don't show. Your hiring has inspired a few people to take an interest in BC basketball, as a change at the head coaching position was largely welcomed, but there is far more work to be done. This fanbase wants something about which to be excited. Good play will bring people out to the games, but this goes far deeper than that. You have a chance to do something that your predecessor never did: engage the fanbase as a means of generating interest in the program. Be visible. Encourage your team to be visible. Enthusiastically sell your team to your school and the nation.  We had none of those three things in the previous regime, and the time for that to change is right now.

Many BC fans are tired of the "we are what we are" mantra which implies that this school's basketball program cannot and will not ever be anything more than a low-end major-conference program that is consistently decent but never great. I hope you are taking this job with the mentality that you will do everything in your power to challenge the status quo and build a consistent winner. We don't have to be mediocre, and we don't have to settle for less. We don't have to be "that" program anymore that does some nice things but never goes anywhere.

This can be a great new era for Boston College basketball. We want you to succeed, and we wish you well. Take us to the promised land, sir.