PREVIEW: Boston College vs Louisville

By Quinn Kelly

A week removed from their first ACC victory in the last two seasons, Boston College returns to the Heights to try to pick up its second against visiting Louisville.  The task in front of them is pretty daunting, though.  Louisville enters play at 7-1, touting the Heisman favorite Lamar Jackson, and as 25 point favorites.  All odds point to a big loss for the Eagles, but riding high off a huge win, do they have a chance at making a game of this?

Simply put, no.  It’s highly unlikely that the Eagles are going to be able to stay competitive against one of the most prolific offenses in the nation.  This is an offense that has just once been held to fewer than 30 points.  It’s an offense that averages over 600 yards a game.  It’s an offense that has more speed top to bottom than any other the Eagles have seen this season.  But what makes this team the most dangerous and likely unstoppable for the Eagles is where they’re at in their season.

Louisville, at 7-1 having lost a few weeks ago to Clemson, is ranked 7^th in the first College Football Playoff poll, and despite continuing to win, is watching their playoff hopes fade with each day.  Louisville can’t make the ACC championship at this point.  Given their loss to Clemson, Louisville would need the Tigers to lose two of their next three games against Cuse, Pitt, and Wake; something perhaps more unlikely than the Eagles winning Saturday.   Further, with a very narrow escape this past week against Virginia, most analysts are writing the Cardinals off.  Even if a number of teams ahead of them were to lose, Louisville would need four emphatic and convincing wins to close out their season to make any noise on the Playoff stage.  Being this the case, expect a laser-focused and merciless Cardinals team to take the field on Saturday.

Generally, this is just a bad matchup for the Eagles.  This is a team that really struggles with the spread offense, and will be trying to stop one of the best spreads in the country.  Louisville is built more like a Pac-12 team than an ACC team, sporting a high-octane offense and a serviceable defense rather than a balance on both sides, but this style doesn’t favor the Eagles at all.  This style of team is going to find a way to put up points on any defense, no matter how good.  The Eagles are going to give up points and most likely a lot of yards.  A weak defense doesn’t do much for the Eagles offense, as they’ve proved inept at times against even the weakest of Ds.  Syracuse, a team regarded as having the worst defense in the ACC, only surrendered 20 points to the Eagles.  In their huge win against NC State, BC scored 21 points.  That’s not going to get it done against Louisville this week.  I could easily see BC scoring around 20 points, but it won’t be enough against Lamar Jackson and the Cardinals.

But enough doom and gloom, let’s get to how the Eagles would have to play if they want to beat Louisville, because there is, of course, still a pipeline shot it could happen.  In their post-game press conferences after the NC State win, both Harold Landry and Kam Moore talked about the key to the defense’s success being that they picked one player (Matt Dayes) to take out of the game and forced NC State to go to its other options.  Eliminating Louisville’s first option this week will be far more difficult, given that he’s guaranteed to touch the ball every single play.  Lamar Jackson is not only the lead passer for the Cardinals, but the lead rusher as well.  You’re not going to completely shut him down, as he’s shown in every game that if he’s limited in one aspect, he’s excelling in the other.  So, BC has to look at who did the best job of limiting Jackson this season.  That team would be Duke.

In Duke’s game against Louisville, Jackson was for the first and only time this season held to under 200 yards passing.  He did make up for this by rushing for 144 yards, but there was a considerable drop in the offensive production for the Cardinals.  Duke held Louisville to just 24 points on the back of their “stifling” Jackson, the only time they’ve scored less than 30.  BC needs to examine exactly how Duke did this and mimic it, only better.

So, if you’re reading this Coach Addazio, here’s how Duke did it:

Duke kept the ball away from Jackson in the only way they could, by taking their sweet-ass time on offense.  Duke would run the play clock all the way down nearly every time before they would snap the ball, averaging 37 seconds between each snap.  This helped to give them a 15 MINUTE advantage in time of possession.  It seems as though the only way to limit Jackson is to just keep him off the field.  For the Eagles, they can hang their hat on the fact that they have a better defense than Duke, and given the right amount of pressure to score in limited time on Louisville, maybe they can fair even better.

The major flaw in this strategy is the reliance on the Eagles offense to sustain drives.  Even though they found success offensively this past weekend, BC relied upon a couple big plays to score some of their points.  If Jeff Smith breaks another 60 yard run on the second play of a drive to score a touchdown, it’s not going to help the Eagles in the same way on Saturday.  As demoralizing as it is for a defense to give up a play like that, it’s unlikely to affect this particular offense, and really just allows them more time to score.

End of the day, this one’s going to be a really tough one for the Eagles.  Louisville’s going to come in looking to run it up and should take this one on the back of one of the best offenses in the country.  The Eagles are going to have to come up with a strong game plan if they want to have any hope at winning this ballgame.  But hey, they were 15 point underdogs this past weekend…

Now onto the picks:

You can listen to WZBC Sports’ call of the game Saturday at 12:00 on WZBC Newton 90.3 FM or at wzbc.org.