Spring Game Recap – Part II

Less than a week away from NIU, and we’re talking about fedoras. Unreal. Let’s get back to football. You all asked for it, so here it is – Spring Game Recap Part II. See Part I here.

RB

Which Jon Hilliman do we get this year? If he wants to see the field, based on the reviews that true freshman AJ Dillon is getting, it better be the 2014 version. Davon Jones was solid last year, and has big play potential. Richard Wilson continues to get touches for reasons that I cannot begin to comprehend, as his career Yards After Contact is 0. Meanwhile, Travis Levy, any true freshman, is getting zero hype, and he might be the best of the whole group.

That’s a couple of grown man cuts right there. Based on my very, very limited review of his film, Levy has Leveon’s Bell’s patient field vision combined with Barry Sanders' elusiveness. This group is only as good as the OL and play-calling, but a ton of potential here.

WR

Newsflash: our WRs stink. The fact that we’re still trotting out the Elijah Robinson and Troy Flutie experiment shows you everything you need to know about the lack of playmakers behind Jeff Smith. Tell you what though, that’s okay. If there is one position BC has struggled to recruit historically, it’s ACC-quality receivers that can separate from ACC-level DBs.

That's why the emergence of Sweeney is huge. When the BC offense was clicking during the TOB/Jags era, TEs (shout out to Ryan Purvis and Lars Anderson) were getting 5-10 targets a game. Chris Pantale, who is playing on Sundays now, was criminally underutilized in the Spaz era. It sounds like Daz/Loeffler are starting to understand our offensive identity needs to match our personnel, so my guess is we’ll see an uptick in jumbo TE/FB sets (love Colton Cardinal to break out this year, see above) as well as passes out of the backfield to Jones and Levy. Sweeney may break the single season TD record.

Defense

There is a foregone conclusion coming into this season that BC will have one of the top defenses in the ACC, if not the country. After all, they were 8^th in the nation in yards allowed per game last year. But were they actually that good when you take out UMass, Wagner, Buffalo and UConn? BC allowed 34.3 points per game in conference last year. And while you can blame the 31.3% third-down conversion percentage to some degree for keeping the defense on the field all game, you can’t tell me that we had any more offensive ineptitude than in 2015. That year, under Don Brown, we only allowed 18.4 points in conference play, with an average margin of loss of less than 9 points (versus 22 in 2016). None of this is groundbreaking sabermetrics. But with the losses of Milano, Kavalec, and Johnson, compounded with a real OOC schedule, I don’t expect to be anywhere near the top this year. I do like the potential of the front seven, and I think the DBs are as good as they’ve ever been, but I think the offense is going to have to do its part for the first time since the Tyler Murphy era.