2009-2010 Worst Moments of the Year

Last time, I gave you my five best BC moments of the year. That was a far happier article than this one will be, where I will run down the five worst. Honestly, I feel like I had more obvious candidates for this list than the previous one.

All five come from the biggest-money sports: men’s basketball and football. Some (dis)honorable mentions that didn't make the cut include: Baseball’s mercy-rule loss to Florida State in the ACC Baseball Tournament, Basketball choking at Virginia Tech, Women’s basketball declining their WNIT invite, Football imploding on Senior Day, and Football losing to Notre Dame. Again, you may feel free to disagree.

5. Basketball loses to Virginia in the ACC Tournament

Boston College's last game of the 2009-2010 season was a microcosm of the whole thing -- a few solid moments, but otherwise embarrassing. With a little help from Sammy Zeglinski on the Wahoos, the Eagles were shot down by lackluster Virginia in the very first game of the 2010 ACC Tournament. Boston College had just beaten them a few weeks earlier with Sylven Landesberg, but this time in Greensboro, the Eagles were smoked by the same team WITHOUT their best player.

This game was the last of Al Skinner's tenure on the Heights, and may well have been the last straw that cost him his job. His successor, Steve Donahue, may turn out to be a positive for the Eagles, but it is too soon to tell.

4. Basketball loses to Harvard…again

BC's 2009 flop against the Crimson at home was so nice, they did it twice. The Eagles lost to Harvard in basketball twice in the calendar year 2009, with the second loss in the 2009-2010 season. The first one was embarrassing, but the second was infuriating. Once again, in what was virtually a replay of the first disaster, the Eagles had no answer for coaching wizard (/sarc) Tommy Amaker and his good (for an Ivy League) player Jeremy Lin. You just knew BC was in for a bad year when this happened.

3. Football loses at Clemson

In perhaps the worst offensive football performance I have ever seen, Boston College went to Death Valley on a stormy Saturday and, well, rolled over and died. Despite a reasonably admirable performance from the defense, the offense managed just 54 yards of total offense in the entire game. I went back as far as I could into the BC football box scores, but I could not find a performance even close to being as terrible as that all the way back to 1995. I would be willing to bet it has been decades since BC has had a game that bad offensively.

2. Football loses at Virginia Tech

Some said the coaching staff was looking ahead to the NC State game the following week. Perhaps they were. The Eagles football team took their worst loss of the season at Lane Stadium in October, a site where, in their previous road game two years earlier, they had gained one of their most memorable wins in the history of the program. Boston College's defeat was thorough: the offense was bad, the defense was bad, the special teams was bad, and the coaching was bad. The halftime score was 34-0 in favor of the Hokies, en route to a 48-14 ass-whooping.

1. Basketball loses to Maine

This wasn’t just the worst BC sports moment of the year; it was one of the worst of the last decade.  This may go down as the most embarrassing loss of the Skinner era, right up there with the first Harvard loss in 2009.  Boston College basketball went totally flat at home against the University of Maine, losing to the Black Bears on the hardwood for the first time since 1925. In this game, the Eagles scored one point in the closing six minutes.  It was an eminently winnable game but Boston College, as lethargic and stubborn as ever, made no adjustments and managed only 51 points in the whole affair.

This should tell you how bad the season truly was for BC: they lost to not one but two of the low-level schedule-fillers from New England.  This is a team that not even a crappy BC squad should lose to. 

This defeat made the Harvard loss look alright in comparison; at least Harvard was somewhat decent this year.  It was their most stunning, complete failure of the season, and one of the worst moments in recent BC sports memory.