Take a stroll through Terrier Nation, and one adage will ring through your ears: “BC sucks.”
Many true-blue Section 8-ers may have a point here. The Boston University hockey team has dominated the Boston College Eagles when it comes to the city’s most important tournament – the Beanpot (see: 25 titles for the scarlet and white compared to BC’s 13).
But take a quick look through the scorecards of all the BU-BC matchups this year in all Terrier sports, and you might hear a different tune. BC does not, in fact, suck. Well, at least this year.
As a collective athletic program, the Eagles have all but dominated the Terriers in all sports this academic year, from the fall semester up until now. Basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, swimming, tennis, track, field hockey, softball and yes, even hockey – they have all fallen at one time or another (sometimes even in embarrassing fashion) to their rival at the other end of Commonwealth Avenue.
The latest victim in the trend was the BU lacrosse team, which fell 7-5 to BC on Wednesday at Alumni Stadium.
Don’t believe it? BC does suck? Take a peek at some of the numbers those men and women from Chestnut Hill have put up against the Babcock Street band.
In head-to-head matchups since the end of last August (starting with the BU women’s soccer team’s 3-1 loss to the Eagles on Aug. 31), BC holds a 13-3 advantage over the Terriers. The men’s teams have posted a 2-8 record, while the women have gone 1-5 against the maroon and gold. In sports where the two teams haven’t gone head-to-head but have met in the same race or tournament, the Eagles are up 6-2 on BU.
Overall, the Terriers have been outscored 470 to 307 by BC. The men’s basketball team’s 67-44 drubbing at Conte Forum and the swim teams’ combined losses (361-238) certainly don’t help that statistic much.
But the crown jewel in the Eagle crown is its hockey team’s 2-1 overtime win back on Feb. 9 against an overmatched Icedog squad in the Beanpot championship, thus avenging its loss to BU from the year before.
While Terrier fans up and down the B Line hang their heads in disappointment, at least they can take solace in the fact that in some of the most important games (yes, it’s more than just the Beanpot), BU has come up big. While the Eagles did take five out of seven meetings with the Terriers on the ice this past season, the ‘Dogs did take the most important two in the first round of the Hockey East playoffs, sending top-seeded BC home to wait for the NCAA Tournament.
“Just to win it at Conte Forum, two out of three games, it’s just so great,” junior defenseman Ryan Whitney said of his team’s upset over its long-time rival. “We expected to win and we knew we could win, but we knew it would be tough. It was just really fulfilling and it felt great.
“It just made the year,” he added.
The Terrier cross country and indoor track teams have also fared well against BC. In the indoor New England Championships, the women and men’s teams each finished second and third, respectively, while the Eagles placed sixth and 17th. While the men placed three spots behind BC in the cross-country equivalent, the women ran to a seventh place finish, eight spots up on its Comm. Ave. counterpart.
Even last weekend, the BU softball team split a doubleheader with the Eagles, exacting revenge on a team that snapped its 12-game win streak the year before. And according to senior outfielder Abbey Pauley, when it comes to BC, there’s something a little extra in the air (and no, that’s not a “Sucks to BU” chant made famous by the “Superfans”).
“You don’t even have to see them. Just knowing that you are going to play BC that day, everyone gets fired up for it,” Pauley said. “One of my teammates always says, ‘We are going to take away their pride, dignity and self-respect.’ You wanna do that much more against BC just because it’s such a big rivalry between the schools.”
Sadly, it hasn’t been all well and good for the Terriers when it comes to BC. Erik Evjen, a defender on the men’s soccer team, has never been on the winning sideline against the Eagles, and that didn’t change this past season with a 2-0 loss in front of 2,345 fans at Nickerson Field. In all head-to-head games, BC has not lost when making the trek down to Babcock.
“We hate to lose to them. Out of conference, it’s our biggest game the whole year. If we played a team that was No. 1 in the country, it would be even better to play BC. It’s the game you look forward to,” the junior captain said. “I heard a lot about BU-BC before I came but it’s another thing feeling it.
“It’s hate.”
That same sting runs through all the Terrier teams. Just ask Sally Starr, the head coach of the BU field hockey team, which has lost to the Eagles every year since 1998. In 2003, the Terriers, who were ranked No. 17 at the time, lost 1-0 in double overtime to BC, which was No. 20 before the victory.
“It’s a big game for many reasons,” Starr said. “It’s a Boston game, it’s a regional game, it’s a national game, and right now, I think they have had our number for the last couple of years so I’ll be really happy when we get that monkey off our back and we start beating them again.”
But even while BU and the Eagles are engaging in battles on the field, BU women’s soccer coach Nancy Feldman said she squares off with BC in a different way every year.
“It hurts just because we recruit against them a lot, so you wanna get that win under your belt so you can say to a kid that’s looking at BU and BC, ‘Look, we’re the better team this year,'” Feldman said. “And you don’t have to live with it for a whole cycle for 12 months, so it raises … the importance of it a little bit more.”
But that’s nothing compared to the intense play the Terriers endure when the maroon and gold graces the other sideline.
“There’s so much more trash talking, there’s elbow flying like when the referees don’t see it, there’s people stepping on your toes. There’s yellow cards, there’s fights – much more than would ever happen in another game,” Evjen said of his annual showdown with the Eagles. “My sophomore year, actually, some kid spat in my hair and we ended up in a fight, but it got broken up. Just crazy stuff that would never happen in a normal game.”
Normal games they are not when BC is concerned. And normal it hasn’t been in 2003 and 2004. For a rivalry that is considered one of the greatest in college sports – especially on the ice – this type of dominance just leaves many of scarlet and white squads looking forward to next year.
Ah, next year. That’s all BU has to hold onto.
Except, of course, for the women’s and men’s tennis teams. April 17 and 21 are circled on the schedule.