Women's hockey saving the year for Boston College athletics
By most any measure, the 2015-16 athletic year has been a miserable one for Boston College's two most prominent sports.
In football, the Eagles went 3-9 — including an 0-8 mark in ACC play — despite boasting the top total defense and No. 4 scoring "D" in the entire FBS. During the season, BC lost five games by three points or fewer, which at least suggests that the team could have been competitive, but it's hard to give benefit of the doubt to a team that lost two games without allowing a touchdown.
In men's basketball, meanwhile, Boston College went 7-24 during the regular season, including an 0-18 mark in ACC competition. And by and large, the games weren't close — just three defeats came in by less than 10 points.
The other 15 losses came by an average of 19.7 points, and on Tuesday, the Eagles — who finished 339th of 346 Division I teams in scoring offense, dead last in both free-throw attempts and made free throws, 325th in free-throw percentage, 323rd in rebounding margin and 304th in field goal percentage — whimpered out of the ACC tournament with an 88-66 first-round loss to Florida State.
If that all sounds historically bad, that's because it is. A school hasn't gone winless in conference play in both football and men's basketball since TCU's teams went 0-8 and 0-16, respectively, in the now-defunct Southwest Conference in 1976-77.
And save for Sewanee, which didn't win a single conference football game and only won three conference basketball games in eight years of SEC affiliation in the 1930s, only one other program — Northwestern in the Big Ten in 1925 — has managed to duplicate the in-conference ineptitude Boston College displayed this year with a full complement of games.
(In 1943, Georgia, the defending national champions in football, went 0-3 in SEC play — seven SEC teams did not field a team due to World War II — while the basketball team went 0-2 in conference, with both losses coming to then-SEC foe Georgia Tech. The team also lost to Kentucky in the first round of the SEC tournament.)
But as bad as Boston College's so-called moneymakers have been, there's one team that's nearly made up for it in the form of an unbeaten season.
On Sunday, the Boston College women's hockey team moved to 38-0 on the year with its 5-0 win over Boston University in the finals of the Hockey East conference tournament. The victory gave the Eagles an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, where they will be the No. 1 overall seed.
The BC women will host Northeastern — a team it has already beaten four times this season — on Saturday, with the winner moving on to the national semifinals on March 18. A win there would put the Eagles in the March 20 national championship game, where they could potentially meet up with last year's champion Minnesota, winners of three of the last four national titles.
Though should Boston College wrap up a perfect campaign, it wouldn't be the first in women's college hockey: Minnesota went 41-0 en route to its 2013 championship. But after watching the men's basketball and football teams combine for exactly zero conference wins in arguably the most embarrassing sports year of all time, it's doubtful anyone around Chestnut Hill would care.
You can follow Sam Gardner on Twitter or email him at samgardnerfox@gmail.com.
