It took more than six hours for Boston College football to fly to California to take on Stanford on Saturday night. And by the time the Eagles took the field, it was 10:30 p.m. EST. While the Eagles ended up losing 30–20, head coach Bill O’Brien said the extensive travel and time-zone change were not to blame.

“I don’t think that’s any excuse whatsoever for what we saw on the field tonight,” O’Brien said. 

While it’s difficult to point a finger at one defining factor in a team winning or losing, a series of crucial mistakes by the Eagles (1–2, 0–1 Atlantic Coast) late in the first half of Saturday’s game are some of the most glaring culprits. 

“I just told the team, ‘We’re all in it together. There’s no finger pointing,’” O’Brien said. “The coaches—we were terrible tonight. We’ve got to coach better. Starts with us, starts with me. That will lead to better play.” 

Crucial mistakes, including an interception from reigning ACC Quarterback of the Week Dylan Lonergan and a bad snap that resulted in a fumble, were the most obvious factors that cost the Eagles the game. 

“I’ll tell you exactly what I told the team,” O’Brien said. “Everybody’s got a choice. You want to be here. You don’t want to be here. Make your choice. You know, we’re only in the third game of the second year of our program. And so far, it’s basically been a little bit up and down, .500 football. And so, you know, we’re going to work hard to get it better and see where it goes.” 

The Cardinal (1–2, 1–0) capitalized on BC’s turnovers and scored two touchdowns to close the first half, taking the game from an 11-point BC lead to a 20–20 tie. Before the game was over, Stanford scored 21 total points off BC giveaways. 

Turnovers did not decide the game on their own, though. 

BC has struggled to establish a ground game all season. The Eagles picked up just 84 rushing yards on Saturday, while Stanford ran the ball for 231 yards. The Cardinal’s Micah Ford ran for a career-high 157 yards—73 more than BC’s whole team did. 

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“We’ve got to figure a lot of things out,” O’Brien said. “We’ve got to figure out how to stop the run. We’ve got to figure out how to run the ball.”  

Lonergan threw for 333 yards, 141 of which belonged to Reed Harris. The redshirt sophomore receiver was making leaping grabs throughout the first half, elevating high and tracking down the ball while airborne.

Someone from the running back room did score a touchdown, but even that was the result of a pass. Lonergan connected with Turbo Richard, BC’s leading rusher, and the 5-foot-8 running back made it known why the nickname “Turbo” stuck. 

After catching Lonergan’s swing pass over to the right sideline, Richard dodged his defender and found himself in open field, sprinting up the field and outrunning everyone as defenders dove for his ankles. The go-ahead 49-yard touchdown was the first time either team got in the end zone. After a start that had the Eagles down 6–0, BC scored 10 straight points and was up 10–6. 

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Luca Lombardo put the Eagles on the board first as he drilled a 51-yarder a little over a minute into the second quarter. The picture-perfect kick was the beginning of a 17–0 run for the Eagles. 

Lonergan hit Harris twice on BC’s next drive following Richard’s touchdown—once for 24 yards and then again for a 46-yard gain. That set the Eagles up for a two-yard rushing touchdown from running back Jordan McDonald, who gave BC a 17–6 lead. 

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BC’s defense turned up on Stanford’s next drive. Favor Bate broke up a pass, and KP Price stifled the run behind the line of scrimmage to force a Cardinal punt.

The drive started with an 8-yard rush from Richard and a 13-yard completion from Lonergan to Jeremiah Franklin. Then, Lonergan swung it to Richard again for a 23-yard gain and a first down. 

Then the trouble started. An ill-placed snap caused a Lonergan fumble. Stanford defenders dove on it, and Clay Patterson recovered it at the Cardinal’s 24-yard line. A turnover is never a good thing, but Stanford still had to find a way up essentially the entire field. 

Instead of stopping the damage the fumble had set into motion, BC’s defense allowed a 69-yard pass from Ben Gulbranson to Sam Roush, who scored to make it a 17–11 game. 

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“We have a chance to go up in the game, we fumble the ball,” O’Brien said. Even if we get stopped there, it’s still a 99-yard drive that they have to perform, right? So we got them backed up, but we don’t [stop them], it’s a touchback.”  

Lonergan threw an incompletion on the first play of BC’s next drive. On the second play, he threw a pick-six to Collin Wright. In 19 seconds, BC had allowed two touchdowns. 

Lombardo made a 31-yarder at the end of the half to tie the game 20–20 as the teams headed into the locker room.  

“We fumble a snap where—it was a bad snap—then we throw an interception,” O’Brien said. “Some false starts, batted balls, can’t stop the run, don’t fit the gaps correctly—just really some bad football.”

The Eagles had five drives in the second half: punt, punt, fumble, punt, punt. The fumble belonged to Richard, who was trying to dive into the endzone when the ball popped out, and Stanford recovered it. 

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In the fourth quarter, BC gave up an 80-yard touchdown drive in just two plays to give Stanford the lead. The Cardinal kicked a score-cementing field goal with 11:26 left on the clock, and the Eagles never answered as they suffered a 30–20 defeat on the road. 

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“I don’t think we’ve ever really been blown out,” O’Brien said. “We have to coach it better. We gotta eliminate bad football so we can win close games, because we’re going to be in a lot of close games.”