REPORT: BC Men’s Basketball To Retain Head Coach Jim Christian

Reports on Twitter are beginning to break that Boston College Men’s Basketball will be retaining head coach Jim Christian for at least another season. Stadium Network’s Jeff Goodman was the first to report the news on Twitter.

There has been a pretty big push among fans in the Twitterverse (and certainly in our comments) for Boston College to move on from the head coach, but that doesn’t appear to be happening at this time.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a major factor in the decision to keep Jim Christian as coach. There are many parts of the puzzle here from the Coronavirus effect on his being retained, but the main one is obviously the financial factor — it’s one thing to have to buy out the coach, but there is a lot of uncertainty in the world of college athletics even for next season. The possibility of there being no football season next year would be a huge financial blow to the university. The financial effects of the virus on the money in college athletics are staggering.

But besides that, not having a basketball season at all but paying your fired coach anyway wouldn’t be the best. And it’s also uncertain what kind of coach the Eagles would be able to hire in this climate, both due to the financial limitations there could be as well as just the overall unpredictability of the next several months.

But despite the justifications for retaining the coach, there’s no doubt that this is going to be a really tough pill to swallow for a fan base who has now endured a decade of mediocrity (in the best of times) for a program that used to be an NCAA tournament mainstay. This will now be Jim Christian’s 7th year at the helm, and the program has only had an overall record over .500 once — and zero times in the ACC — since Christian has taken over. The team’s also been on a two year downswing and appears to be losing rising junior Jairus Hamilton to transfer.

Still, the team has a halfway decent core returning and a solid recruiting class. There’s certainly not going to be much enthusiasm going into next year, but we’ll see what Jim Christian will be able to do with another season.