In case you passed by Agganis Arena early Monday morning and were thrown off by people waiting outside of the building (some in sleeping bags, no less), don’t be overly concerned. No, these people weren’t Bernie Madoff’s former investment partners, but rather they were BU students waiting in-line for tickets for what is arguably the biggest event of the year on the Terrier sports calendar: the first game of the BU-BC hockey series.
If the Dog Pound’s passionate chants and a newly-released DVD titled ‘The Battle of Comm Ave’ haven’t been enough of an indication, let me be the first to tell you: there’s not a whole lot of love lost between BU and BC out there on the ice.
Rivalry is nothing new when it comes to college sports; in fact, the intense hatred that exists between certain schools in various sports has almost come to define college athletics, in a way. We see it in football with Michigan-Ohio State, Oklahoma-Texas and Auburn-Alabama; in basketball with Louisville-Kentucky and Duke-North Carolina; and when it comes to hockey, BU-BC is widely thought to be as good as it gets, and for very good reason.
The rivalry dates all the way back to 1918 (a few years after Jack Parker was born, I think) and the teams have met well over 200 times since.
In addition to eerily similar names, the schools are only separated by a mere four mile stretch of Commonwealth Avenue.
The schools themselves stand in sharp contrast to one another, with BC being the Jesuit school, complete with a picturesque campus in the suburbs and a student body that looks fresh out of a J. Crew catalogue, while BU is the urban school with a campus that’s . . . well, not exactly picturesque.
Former Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin went so far as to call BU-BC hockey the best rivalry in all of sports, and it’s a sentiment that has been echoed by none other than Parker, a man who went as far to say that, ‘The best thing that ever happened to BU hockey was BC.’
While it’s pretty much a lost cause to argue against BU and BC being a premier hockey rivalry, in my time at this school I’ve noticed something that I find strange: BU students and fans try to extend this rivalry beyond hockey, allowing their hatred of BC in hockey to morph into a hatred of all things BC.
It’s something that I observe all of the time here, whether its doing ‘The Song’ at games where we’re not even playing BC or people rooting against the Eagles football and basketball teams, just from the illogical standpoint that, ‘We go to BU, so we cheer against BC in everything.’
As I read it, this is really nothing more than a desperate attempt to try to create a rivalry where there is no rivalry to be had.
Do I think that BU and BC share an intense and captivating rivalry? Absolutely, but it’s one that should hardly get any traction away from the rink.
Differences between schools are essential for a rivalry to exist in the first place, but once you get below the surface and beyond hockey for both schools, the differences that stand are too much to be compensated for.
To begin with, we’re on completely different levels in the grand scheme of collegiate athletics. BC is a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference for a majority of its programs, while BU is in the America East for most of its teams, meaning that the schools have vastly different athletic budgets, play different sets of teams and play at drastically different levels of competition.
BC and BU obviously don’t play one another in football since BU hasn’t had a team since 1997, and the two haven’t met in basketball since 2004. For certain minor sports like soccer, a rivalry certainly exists between the two schools (as anyone who went to the BU-BC men’s soccer game this year could tell you), but with all due respect to the minor sports teams, nobody really cares enough about those teams for it to be deemed much of anything, let alone a rivalry.
And speaking in all honesty here, I really don’t hate much about BC beyond hockey.
Matt Ryan’s one of my favorite players in the NFL and watching the highlight of Doug Flutie’s iconic Hail Mary in 1984 against Miami never gets old. For a while, I soured on BC football after the stunt that was pulled with former coach Jeff Jagodzinski, who was fired for interviewing for the Jets’ head coaching position, but after Jagodzinski got fired as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ offensive coordinator just a few weeks before the start of this season, I came to the realization that his firing was probably more due to his character than the school acting out of line.
In basketball, I’ve always liked and respected the job that Al Skinner has done with BC program, making the Eagles a formidable presence in the NCAA Tournament year after year in his tenure, even when he doesn’t always have the most talented team on his side.
Before I sound like I’m gushing over a hated rival, I’ll end my column with this: we don’t have to hate someone or something just because it is force-fed to us over time.
Believe me, I’ll be cheering against BC as hard as anyone this upcoming Saturday at Agganis, but I’ll be doing it with a level head, knowing that’s about as far as the rivalry goes.
I’m not calling for all BU fans to follow my lead, but the fact remains that as long as we allow ourselves to get caught up in the notion of us being engaged in a heated rivalry with BC in all sports, we may continue to come off as delusional fans who carry an inferiority complex in trying to uphold a rivalry where the hate doesn’t even come from both sides.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
