Nearly two months have passed since Georgia Tech saw Boston College, and oh so much has changed.
The Yellow Jackets (13-13, 7-8 ACC) have had to reinvent themselves since hosting the Eagles on Jan. 4. Injuries to all sorts of key players at times have shortened coach Damon Stoudamire’s rotation to six players. Tech also went through a four-game losing streak after beating Boston College, but it has righted the ship and won five of seven to vault up the ACC standings.
Boston College, meanwhile, was 9-6 and 1-3 after losing at McCamish Pavilion. The past several weeks have been a nightmare for the Eagles, who have lost nine of their past 11 and fallen into a tie for 16th place in the 17-team ACC standings.
Losing streaks of five and then four games have Boston College on the verge of missing the ACC tournament next month. But there is some deception in the Eagles’ overall mark.
Coach Earl Grant’s team beat Virginia Tech 54-36 at home Tuesday. It also beat Florida State to start February, thanks to an epic comeback, and three of Boston College’s conference losses have been in overtime to North Carolina, double overtime to Notre Dame and triple overtime to Syracuse.
“They’re playing hard,” Stoudamire said Monday on his weekly radio show. “It’s a dangerous game, and it’s a game where when you’re coming off wins the way we’ve come off wins, and now we got a week off, and then we’re going to play a team that they’re fighting for everything right now? We gotta be ready and on point.”
Tech hasn’t played a game since defeating California 90-88 in overtime at McCamish Pavilion on Saturday. The week of rest should give the Jackets time to reset and refresh ahead of the final five games of the regular season, and all five of those games will become vitally important if Tech is to finish inside the top nine in the standings and earn a bye into the second round of the league tourney.
The team’s seven conference wins matches its total from the 2023-24 season, Stoudamire’s first. One of those victories was the 85-64 win over Boston College on Jan. 4, when Tech shot 58.5%, had 19 assists and led by as many as 27 points.
“We not only made shots, we played great defense,” Stoudamire said. “BC is a dangerous team. They got guys that can get downhill. But we did a great job, a great, great job, of staying between our man and the basket after the first four minutes.”
Tech will be going for only its second road win of the season (1-7). Of the five games left on the schedule, three are on the road as the Jackets head to Pittsburgh (16-10, 7-8 ACC) on Tuesday and Wake Forest (19-7, 11-4 ACC) on March 8. Maybe a trip back to Massachusetts, though, will bring good vibes for Stoudamire, an assistant for the Boston Celtics from 2021-23.
Tech hasn’t played at Boston College since Stoudamire took over the Tech program in 2023.
“It’ll be good to get back to Boston. Man, I really enjoyed my time up there,” Stoudamire said. “It was such a first-class organization. I learned a lot in such a short period of time. Aside from the team being really good, it was just a lot of information, a lot of, ‘how can we get better?’ And nobody had agendas or egos within the building. I think that made us who we were.”
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