Haf-way Fan Pulse: How Do We Feel Now?

Ha, get it, HAF-way? It’s funny because our coach’s name is Jeff Hafley, you see, and we’re half-way through the schedule. We are very witty and fresh here at BC Interruption dot com.

We’ve gone another quarter of the way through the season since we last did an expectations reset and predicted how many wins Boston College Football would earn before the end of the year. The result of that How Many Wins poll, by the way, was one hell of a bell curve:

Mmm, yes, that appeals to the math major in me very much.

Things were looking pretty grim at the time, and that somehow wasn’t even the rock-bottom point of the season. I think if we took this poll after getting mollywhopped by Florida State, we as fans might even consider taking the Maine win off the board by predicting zero wins on the season. Certainly it caused one of us lose our heads completely by lobbing a Molotov cocktail of an article into the Eagleverse. Yikes, who would write that?

But a few weeks later, with a half dozen games down and a half dozen to go, things are looking little bit less dire. The Louisville victory takes the huge “winless in the ACC?” monkey off the back, of course, but the Clemson game — despite the final score — was pretty encouraging. The Eagles seemed to be controlling the game in the first half and were a couple short field touchdown conversions away from actually having a decent lead. The defense in particular really came ready to play and showed us that they’ve got some fight in them yet.

Still, after going 1-2 to start the season and 1-2 in the next three, the Eagles are going to have to find another couple upsets if there’s going to be even a prayer of making it to bowl season. As Joe pointed out in his Weekly Kickoff yesterday, ESPN’s FPI predicts just another 1.5 wins for Jeff Hafley’s men — essentially, a W in the UConn game (although with UConn looking like less of a Complete Laughingstock than normal, even we must concede that this isn’t totally a gimme anymore) and then a 50/50 shot of pulling out another win from the Wake/Duke/NCSU/ND/Cuse gauntlet. That’s a pretty tough stretch, and 1.5 wins does seem like the reasonable hope unless BC can really find a sizeable upset somewhere.

Where might the wins come? Well, Duke, for starters, is obviously BC’s next most likely victory, and they’ll need that one to even give themselves hope to have a good second half. Beyond that, it gets all kinds of tough. Wake (14th), NCSU (15th), and Cuse (18th) are all ranked in the teens, and Notre Dame is, well, Notre Dame. The Eagles have played much better at home than on the road this year, so you’d have to think that Syracuse is probably the next likeliest place to find a win between the BC team continuing to develop and Syracuse, by the end of the season, hopefully coming to the realization that they are, in fact, Syracuse. Anything past those games, though, and you’re talking a pretty major upset.

So let’s check in once again here at the halfway point as we head into the bye week. How do you see the rest of the season playing out?