Eagles No ‘Fun’ for Nashville

'08 Football General42

Another year…another bowl with an Atlantic Coast Conference tie left reeling after a visit from Boston College.

This comes to us from the Nashville Business Journal:

Vanderbilt University may have been the big winner in the 2008 Music City Bowl, but Nashville came up short.

The New Year’s Eve game between Boston College and Vanderbilt generated $9.97 million for the local economy, Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl representatives announced Friday.

That’s the lowest amount since 2005 when the game brought $7.8 million to the area, and a fraction of what the Music City Bowl had been bringing in the past two years. The 2007 bowl had an estimated economic impact of $27.1 million, and the 2006 bowl had an economic impact of $20.1 million.

The game brought 54,250 people to the 2008 hometown game at LP Field. That’s down from last years 68,661 attendees. The drop in number of out-of-town visitors for the game was even more drastic, with only 17,498, coming in from out of town for the game in 2008, compared with 53,556 in 2007.

We will never forget the following quote from Boston College’s Athletics Director, Gene DeFilippo after Coach O’Brien was replaced by Jeff Jagodzinski.

“We’re having fun now,” he said. “We’ve won before, but we had no fun. This is still a game, it’s not life and death. The fun is back in Boston College football. Tom did a wonderful job here, but nobody was having fun. The fun is back at Boston College.”

Obviously Jags wasn’t feeling the fun as he started looking for an NFL job before his first season was finished. Two years after bringing the fun back to BC, Jags is now the offensive coordinator of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

You may remember last year that despite gaving away FREE tickets to the Champs Sports Bowl Boston College still disappointed in Orlando.

After embarrassing the conference while failing to deliver support for two consecutive ACC Championships and now for every bowl they have attended, it is no wonder a Chick-fil-A Bowl committee member was quoted as saying the following last year:

Our committee is leery of the Eagles and we’re not convinced their fans will support this team on a bowl trip to Atlanta. The Chick-fil-A Bowl has a long tradition of sold-out stadiums and an atmosphere that is as loud as any stadium in the country and we’re not sure a pro sports town like Boston can support their team at that level.

Of course, none of this is surprising and serves to underscore exactly why Tom O’Brien also wanted out of Chestnut Hill.

Did you know that NC State’s SPRING GAME drew more fans than one of Boston College’s home football games this year? (2006-2007) No shit. 14,682 fans showed up for BC’s game with Buffalo this year. BC entered the game ranked with a 6-1 record and ranked in the Top 25. (Not that it really matters…but, it was a mild 55 degrees and raining)

Could you imagine the attendance in Carter-Finley if NC State was ranked in the Top 25 and had a guaranteed win coming to town that was going to advance our record to 7-1 and position us for a potential run at a top-flight bowl?

Don’t any of these people just know how to have fun like Gene?

About StateFans

'StateFansNation' is the shared profile used by any/all of the dozen or so authors that contribute to the blog. You may not always agree with us, but you will have little doubt about where we stand on most issues. Please follow us on Twitter and FaceBook

'08 Football General

42 Responses to Eagles No ‘Fun’ for Nashville

  1. Alpha Wolf 02/24/2009 at 9:16 AM #

    BC fans cannot bring themselves to mingle with the Hoi Polloi, so they stay home from their football games. All of them.

    Seriously, BC is a school with such major Notre Dame envy that they make the inferiority complex that UNC has towards Duke look like mere envy. BC alums and students will be the first to tell you how superior they are, always a sign of insecurity.

    Quick little story that should illustrate my point. Once in Boone, I was playing golf with my father-in-law at Boone CC. We were hooked up with a Notre Dame guy. He had on an ND jacket, an ND golf shirt, carried an ND bag and had ND covers on his clubs. He talked about ND all the way around the course and of course put me down because I went to a “public school” – NCSU.

    Anyhow, my father-in-law hadn’t said a word. Finally, somewhere around the 15th tee, the dude decided he had had enough fun with me and turned to hector Felix. He saunters over to my father-in-law and asks him in a condescending tone where he went to college.

    Without missing a beat, Felix replied that he had gotten his undergrad at Yale and his MBA from Harvard. (It was true, BTW)

    Dude didn’t say a word the rest of the round.

    Even though that was a ND alum/fan, he has the same disease that BC and a lot of UNC (not all) alums have: a superiority complex they use to hide their own insecurities.

  2. wufpup76 02/24/2009 at 9:25 AM #

    Well I must say that all of this comes as a huge surprise …

    “BC Athletics: Fun! Fun! Fun! Come out and see ego-maniac Gene DeFilipo lead his Eagles’ athletics teams to VICTORY! Remember, Gene says “If you don’t come to our events, YOU ****ING SUCK. How can you not support ME? We’re having fun here and I’m showing you how to do it. Those pro teams have NOTHING on me and Eagles athletics.”

  3. LRM 02/24/2009 at 9:29 AM #

    Not to take away from the yankee-elitist savagery Boston College has reaped upon the ACC in five short years, but it can never be a good thing for the local economy when the fans of one of the teams playing in the bowl game can sleep in their own beds the night before and the night after the game.

    I won’t rehash my evaluation of expansion from last year, but the irony doesn’t escape me: the only one of the expansion teams that has even proved a benefit to the ACC wasn’t even in the original plan.

  4. Ed89 02/24/2009 at 9:42 AM #

    I think we should drop Miami and BC, and get back to 10 teams. Play everyone in football once, and play everyone in hoops twice (Home & Away). Just about every school is within driving distance of NC. All would be well.

  5. LKNpackfan 02/24/2009 at 9:45 AM #

    Refresh my memory, wasn’t MAFox the last hold out, preventing a majority, against BC’s inclusion? She left a year later, and “our” vote flipped to yay (hence the 1 yr delay).

  6. wufpup76 02/24/2009 at 9:55 AM #

    ^^Ed, it’d be nice to get the round robin back in basketball – but dropping under 12 conference teams means you can’t have a conference football championship game (Not that it’s been a great thing so far).

    IIRC, MAF voted against original expansion along with Duke and the Hole and the original expansion included Syracuse and not VT (or BC – I think) … After that, I kinda get lost as to how everything shook down.

  7. CarnifeX 02/24/2009 at 9:55 AM #

    I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t be throwing stones about another school’s AD while we sit in a huge glass house.

    From what I understand ours is on another miracle diet, a “national coaching search.”

    Let’s hope this one doesn’t bring as much egg to our face.

    SFN: Are you kidding? What does the fact that our AD is one of the worst in the country have to do with the overall topic of their fanbase and support and AD.

  8. Alpha Wolf 02/24/2009 at 9:58 AM #

    “I kinda get lost as to how everything [with expansion] shook down.”

    You can search the archives to this site and see pretty much the timeline of everything. SFN has a solid historical record of a lot of things — Amato, Sendek’s departure and the coaching search’s winding road, expansion, etc.

    If you want to take a trip through recent NC State history, this is a good place to do it. The comments are especially illuminating.

  9. Noah 02/24/2009 at 10:03 AM #

    Boston is probably the single-greatest college town on the planet. But college sports are always going to be a very, very low priority for its residents. The Celtics, Red Sox, Bruins, and Pats are what they care about. The PawSox are a bigger draw than anything BC puts out. Boston University’s hockey team is a bigger draw than BC football most of the time.

    It’s just a cultural thing. There are places in the midwest where basketball is a religion. Go one state over and that’s how they feel about lacrosse. Go one state over from that and it’s hockey.

    In the south, it’s basketball and football.

  10. wpackman33 02/24/2009 at 10:06 AM #

    LRM, you’re right on the money. i live in Nashville and was a little surprised that Vandy was selected to this bowl. Honestly, Vandy doesn’t have a huge fan base to begin with but they do rally around their team fairly well. And of course, we know how well BC travels so right from the start we knew this wasn’t going to bring a lot of revenue in. Especially with the type of economy we were/are in.
    Its basically a home game for Vandy which means a huge drop in hotels and resturants/entertainment, etc. I remember the previous year it was Kentucky and FSU and my wife and i were walking around the mall that weekend and you wouldn’t believe the herd of people from florida and kentucky. it was absolutely ridiculous (on a side note, i got the distinct pleasure of running into CTC. so i got a picture with him and told him we were huge state fans. His face was priceless).

    Anyway, this was a no win situation from the start. a home game for vandy and the visiting team is a BC team that never travels well. Oh well, i’m not surprised.

  11. waxhaw 02/24/2009 at 10:07 AM #

    Forcing our upper tier bowls to take a chance on getting Wake, BC, Virginia every few years has to cost all ACC teams when the contracts are negotiated.

    I realize that it would be embarrassing to have an upper echelon team playing in a crappy bowl or not bowl at all but there has to be a better solution.

    It will benefit the entire ACC when BC football returns to irrelevance and is not in contention for bowl games.

  12. ktoh 02/24/2009 at 10:10 AM #

    ^ Very true I agree Noah and was about to point out Boston,NY and Philly are for the most part por towns. BC also has a very small enrollment,and frankly nashville is nashville.

  13. Greywolf 02/24/2009 at 10:15 AM #

    Noah
    February 24th, 2009 at 10:03 am
    “…In the south, it’s basketball and football.”

    You might want to add baseball.

  14. BJD95 02/24/2009 at 10:25 AM #

    It’s just more of an illustration of how screwy the bowl system is. They are civic money-making ventures, not well-designed to serve as post-season “reward.” Trying to meld those concepts gives you the worst of both worlds, and ultimately hurts everybody.

  15. BJD95 02/24/2009 at 10:34 AM #

    One more thing – I will never, ever get tired of making fun of Crazy Gene and the Boston College fanbase. I hate the fact that I respect and like Al Skinner so much.

  16. 4in12 02/24/2009 at 10:43 AM #

    All I’ll say is that I’m really looking forward to watching the ACC Baseball Tournament in Fenway Park next year!!!

  17. tcthdi-tgsf-twhwtnc 02/24/2009 at 10:44 AM #

    Any reports on how the other non-BCS bowls did this year with the down economy. Did they all show gains and only the Boston College game drop in attendance and revenue?

  18. Wolf Dog 02/24/2009 at 10:52 AM #

    Baseball was king where I grew up in NC. In most tobacco areas baseball was king. Coundn’t get many farm boys to work in the tobacco field all day then go to football practice that evening. But they played the heck out of some baseball.

  19. bradleyb123 02/24/2009 at 11:06 AM #

    “I think we should drop Miami and BC, and get back to 10 teams. Play everyone in football once, and play everyone in hoops twice (Home & Away). Just about every school is within driving distance of NC. All would be well.”

    Ed89, the only problem with that is we could not have an ACC Championship game in football. The NCAA requires conferences to have at least 12 teams before they can have a championship game. If we went back to ten teams, we’d have to go back to the days when the team with the best regular season record is crowned as champion.

    Other than that, I’d agree with you. Although, my only problem is with BC. I don’t mind Miami being in the ACC.

    If we did away with the stupid BCS and replaced it with a playoff, then we wouldn’t have to worry about something as dumb as BCS bowl contracts.

  20. Daily Update 02/24/2009 at 11:29 AM #

    Boston College reports $61 million in revenue from athletics last year:
    http://www.boston.com/sports/colleges/articles/2009/02/23/private_schools_pay_up/

    High-profile sports programs help many schools enhance their brands, boosting marketing and ticket revenue, television and radio income, admission applications, alumni giving, and other fund-raising. BC, which has raised its national profile thanks largely to the success of its sports teams, last year reported that its athletic programs generated $61 million in revenue.

  21. Daily Update 02/24/2009 at 11:30 AM #

    I love the trip to Boston ever two years for football. Very happy they were added over Syracuse.

  22. tcthdi-tgsf-twhwtnc 02/24/2009 at 11:33 AM #

    bradley, how could we live without the ACC Championship game in football? I don’t think there could be anything less interesting than the ACC Championship game. I would much rather see every team play all the schools in football and and twice in basketball.

  23. Cosmo96 02/24/2009 at 11:33 AM #

    Speaking of BC, it looks like BJ Raji is the top DT in this year’s NFL draft class, and will be taken with one of the first three or four picks. Who recruited that two-star guy, again?

  24. Tar Heel Fan 02/24/2009 at 11:46 AM #

    I spent four years there and considered it to be the freaking desert where college sports were concerned. No one cares about BC or any other college team. It is all Red Sox and then the Patriots started winning so that was all people cared about. College sports were never discussed on sports talk like it is here. Of all the schools the ACC could have pursued why they chose one so far away with zero fan support is beyond me. BC deserves to be in the Big East with all of those other schools who have to share their fans with the local pro sports teams.

  25. Elrod 02/24/2009 at 12:41 PM #

    Will Gene ever get tired of whistling through the graveyard?

1 2

Leave a Reply