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When Virginia Tech and Boston College entered the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2004 and 2005, respectively, the goal was to bolster the football side of the league.
Fast-forward to 2010, and each school has taken a different approach to football superiority.
While Tech has enjoyed the stability of head coach Frank Beamer and his staff, Boston College has employed three head coaches in the last four years. One year after joining the ACC, then-Eagles head coach Tom O’Brien decided to take the vacant head coaching position at North Carolina State. He was later replaced by former Green Bay Packers offensive coordinator Jeff Jagodzinski.
Jagodzinski led the Eagles to an 11-3 record in 2007 with future NFL first round picks Matt Ryan and Gosder Cherilus. However following the 2008 season, Jagodzinski interviewed for the vacant New York Jets head coaching job and was promptly fired by athletic director Gene DeFilippo.
That brings us to the 2010 version of the Eagles under second-year head coach and longtime defensive coordinator Frank Spaziani. Spaziani brings to Chestnut Hill an old-school mentality of running the football and playing strong defense.
“They’re big, strong and tough,” Beamer said. “Well coached.”
The BC defense is led by its linebackers. Mark Herzlich, a 2008 All-American, is back for his senior year after battling cancer during the 2009 campaign. Tech running back Darren Evans, who also missed last season, remembers the connection the two had before the Tech-BC game last year.
“I guess it was like a little moment, just because we had something to talk about,” Evans said. “I just wished him luck, and I had actually just seen something on ESPN about him, so I was just wishing him good luck and stuff like that.”
Besides Herzlich, the Eagles have freshman four-star recruit Kevin Pierre-Louis penciled in the starting lineup at weak-side linebacker after he flashed his skills in preseason camp. However, the true star of the group is sophomore All-American Luke Kuechly.
At 6-feet-3-inches and 235 pounds, Kuechly started 12 games as a true freshman out of Cincinnati, Ohio.
“He really has great instincts,” Spaziani said. “I don’t know if we can put our finger on what makes him so good ... we’d make a lot of other guys that good. He just has good instincts and he understands football, and we just try not to mess him up believe it or not.”
Spaziani said Kuechly can improve on his freshman campaign, in which he recorded 158 total tackles.
“He’s got a lot of areas that he needs to improve on,” Spaziani said. “We moved him to a new position, and he hasn’t skipped a beat over there. He can be as good as he wants to be.”
A version of this article appeared in the Sep 24 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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