UNC Basketball: Boston College Eagles vs Tar Heels Series History
By Matt Allred
As you may or may not know, the heels square up against the Eagles of Boston College tonight at 9 pm eastern time on ESPNU. Frankly, the Boston College game (for me, at least) is often overlooked by the Tar Heel faithful. Ever since the Eagles came into the league in the 2005-2006 season (in all sports EXCEPT lacrosse in case you were dying to know), the Eagles have really been among the least of our worries in basketball. We even beat them in football their first year in the league, and I’m at least 27% sure they had Matt Ryan then (those are pretty good odds, right??).
Jan 12, 2013; Tallahassee, FL, USA; North Carolina Tar Heels head coach Roy Williams talks to his players during the first half of the game against the Florida State Seminoles at Donald L. Tucker Center. Mandatory Credit: Melina Vastola-USA TODAY Sports
So, lets cut the crap and get down to brass tax here. The Heels are 8-5 against the Eagles all-time, and just as I did in my eloquent article last week, I will break down this series one game at a time until either a) I die of boredom or b)you stop reading due to death by boredom. So, here it goes.
The numbers:
UNC leads the all time series 8-5 (by the way, there aren’t many series that we don’t lead in in case you wondering. We are down to Army 0-3 all-time but we haven’t even been on the same court as them since 1935 so does that even matter. Also, for randomness we lead Trinity College (Duke University) 131-101 but I’ll be writing about that in a couple of weeks.) Wow guys sorry for that tangent I just went on.
Anyways, 8-5 against Boston College. Right. Here are the scores of all of them since their inception into the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2005. All the other scores are practically irrelevant. Go.
In their first conference game against the Heels on 1/25/06 the Eagles beat us 81-74 (L)
3/11/06 – 85-82 (L) In the first round of ACC play
2/17/07 – 77-72 – (W)
3/10/2007 – 71-56 – (W)
1/31/08 – 91-69 – (W)
3/1/08 – 90-80 – (W)
National title year: 1/4/09 – 78-85 – (L)
Awful year: 2/20/10 – 67-71 (L)
2/1/11 – 106- 74 – (W)
2/19/11 – 48-46 – (W) (no typo)
1/7/12 – 83-60 – (W)
There you have it. In that list, there are two games that I remember. Firstly, the game that Tyrese Rice went ABSOLUTELY HAM and dropped 46 points on us in a game that we still won by 10, I repeat, we still won by 10. He had 46 on 14/25 shooting (including 8/12 from deep) and he still lost because Tyler Hansbrough had 25, Wayne Ellington had 20, and Danny Green had 18 so there. Here are all 8 threes that he made. Once again, this was in a losing effort.
And the only other game that I unfortunately remember is on that dismal evening of my freshman year that I had front row riser seats and I was on TV. The unfortunate thing is, that we beat BC 48-46 that day in it was, arguably, the most boring game of basketball that I have ever witnessed (and I have been to middle school girls’ games where the score has been 8-6 at halftime). Yeah, it was bad. So bad in fact, that I won’t even waste time to research the box score or even put up a video. Just know, if you didn’t already, that this was an excessively painful game to watch.
At the end of the day, we haven’t really played them all that much for me to make any outlandish claims about the game tonight (if this was a home Clemson game, I would). Instead, I just ask that you watch this game with great vengeance and be sure to look out for whichever suit Leslie McDonald is wearing.
Go Heels.