Lack of speed a killer
Eagles exposed in ugly upset
Twenty-seven names appear on the depth chart for the Boston College football’s team’s offense. Just one, true freshman receiver Zay Flowers, has a listed weight of less than 200 pounds. Nine are 300 pounds or heavier. Just four of the 27 names on BC’s defensive depth chart have listed weights of less than 200 pounds.
The Eagles look as good as anybody walking through airports, but on the football field, sometimes speed plays bigger than size. No matter how big you are, you cannot tackle what you cannot catch.
The Eagles couldn’t catch a couple of jets who ran Kansas, the most downtrodden Power Five football program for most of the decade, to a 48-24 upset victory Friday night at Alumni Stadium.
Boston College, which surrendered the lead for the final time with five seconds left in the first half, was favored by 21½ points vs. a Kansas team that the previous week lost a home game to Coastal Carolina.
“We obviously didn’t play well enough, and that’s my responsibility,’’ BC coach Steve Addazio said. “We couldn’t get off the field (on defense). It started early and it didn’t stop. Their backs were dynamic, and I said it during the week . ... We didn’t stop the run. You have to stop the run before you stop the pass, and we didn’t stop anything.’’
Superior size was one factor in the lopsided betting line.
Kansas has 22 players on their offensive and defensive depth charts combined who weigh under 200 pounds, compared to five for BC.
The depth chart doesn’t list the speed of the players or the two running backs who won the game for Kansas would have had the boldest numbers.
Senior Khalil Herbert, who played his senior season of high school football at American Heritage in South Florida for former NFL defensive back Mike Rumph two years after Patriots running back Sony Michel did, flashed more speed running on the outside than BC could handle. A 5-foot-9, 205pound senior, Herbert rushed for 187 yards and a touchdown on 11 carries, an average of 17 yards and broke runs of 82, 36, 28 and 25 yards. As a sophomore, Herbert rushed for 291 yards in a loss to West Virginia.
Pooka Williams, a speedy 5-foot-10, 170-pound sophomore out of the New Orleans area, carried a heavier load than Herbert. He darted his way to 121 yards and a touchdown on 22 carries.
Williams rushed for 252 yards in a loss at Oklahoma late last season, but was suspended from all of spring football and the seasonopener vs. Indiana State after entering a diversion agreement stemming from a misdemeanor domestic violence charge last December. He returned to action last week in a 12-7 loss to Coastal Carolina.
This wasn’t the greatest upset of Williams’ sports career. The fact that he’s playing sports at all had longer odds than defeating a 21½-point favorite. At the age of 9, Williams lost all the toes on his right foot when his cousin, rushing to beat an impending rain storm, accidentally ran over Pooka’s right foot with a lawn mower. That didn’t prevent him from placing third in the high jump and second in the 100-yard dash at the state track and field meet and didn’t keep him from setting rushing records galore during his high school football career.
Former LSU coach Les Miles, in his first year at Kansas, had nothing to do with bringing Williams into the Big 12, but did keep the assistant coach, Tony Hull, who recruited him.
As does Boston College, Kansas must recruit outside its geographical area to compete against schools closer to football hotbeds. College football is loaded with strange recruiting roads and with Miles at the helm and Hull working New Orleans, the Louisiana-to-Kansas pipeline figures to flow faster than ever.
It doesn’t matter where Boston College finds more speed on the recruiting trail, but it has to come from somewhere. Kansas, which hasn’t had a season of more than three victories all decade and which had not won a road game against a Power Five school since defeating Iowa State in 2008, exposed the Eagles’ lack of speed in a big way Friday the 13th.
Afterward, Miles, who clearly used last week’s loss to Coastal Carolina to put his players in the right frame of mind to be on the other end of an upset, wondered aloud how he was going to break it to his players that he couldn’t keep a pregame promise he made to his players.
“I told the team that after we won we would park the plane someplace here in Boston and go out on the town,” said Miles, who said he learned that would be against NCAA rules, even if
it were possible to park a plane somewhere in Boston. “So I might not be able to come through with that. So I don’t quite know where that sits.”
Herbert was surprised to hear those plans had been scotched.
“Really?” he said. “And I just told my family that we were going to be partying in Boston.”
Herbert, who said he works out with Michel at American Heritage in the offseason, already led a Kansas party at the expense of Boston College. Just as well he didn’t get the promised night on the town. The money Herbert saved will come in handy when he takes his offensive line out to dinner.
“I hope they don’t run the bill up on me too much,” he said.