Prior to Tuesday night, Boston College men’s basketball’s previous two games told a tale of two teams.
After BC knocked off potential NCAA Tournament team Boise State to take home the Cayman Islands Classic Championship, the Eagles looked like a team capable of hanging with just about anyone. After suffering its first Quadrant 4 loss of the season to Dartmouth three days later, BC looked like a team destined to miss the ACC Tournament.
The Eagles’ Tuesday night ACC/SEC Challenge matchup against South Carolina promised to provide some answers amid the uncertainty. BC’s 73–51 (6–3) blowout loss to the Gamecocks (5–3) did exactly that, though perhaps not for the Eagles’ head coach Earl Grant.
“I’m not sure,” Grant said when asked about the discrepancies shown in BC’s last three games. “I know we got a good team. I put a lot on these guys with the schedule. … I got to take some of that. It’s been a lot of games here the last seven or eight days.”
From the opening tip, BC suffered from poor shot selection and stifling South Carolina pressure. As a team, the Eagles finished the game shooting 33.3 percent from the field and 12.5 percent from deep, with the latter marking a season-low.
“For us to have a bad shooting night, obviously the defense has to do something with that,” Grant said. “I think it’s a combination. We haven’t had a team be that disruptive, so they got us in the late clock a lot. I thought our players—we ended up going 1-on-1 a lot, instead of working the ball to the weak side.”
BC’s limited shot selection, however, paid off in the early going. Six-foot-9, 270-pound Chad Venning hammered South Carolina’s interior defense, picking up the Eagles’ first eight points—enough for BC to keep things close in the opening minutes.
Venning remained the only Eagle on the board until about nine minutes into the first half. But once he took a seat on the bench, BC’s already stagnant offense crumbled. Unwilling to take threes and unable to make them, the Eagles consistently settled for contested isolation looks.
“I got to give them credit,” Grant said. “They did what they needed to do in terms of the way they defended us. They took some stuff away.”
BC’s offense added just 11 points the rest of the half, two of which again came from Venning. BC couldn’t secure a single field goal in the half’s final 7:18.
With Venning the only Eagle to have notched multiple field goals, BC entered the locker room at halftime trailing 36–19, utterly outclassed by a Gamecocks team that sat at the bottom of the SEC prior to Tuesday night’s matchup.
Venning snapped BC’s field-goal drought at the second half’s 18:54 mark, but Grant still couldn’t find a working formula. So with South Carolina refusing to give up its steady advantage, he went with a younger lineup that included freshman forward Kany Tchanda, who recorded his first career points with just over a minute remaining in regulation.
“I had four freshmen out there for like seven minutes,” Grant said. “At that point, you’re down 18 to 19, what you want to do is try and continue to chip into the lead and then try to help guys grow up and get some experience.”
Venning, who finished the game as one of two Eagles in double figures with a team-high 12 points, fouled out with 37 seconds left to go. That ejection sparked raucous chants from the remaining Gamecocks fans, filling the void left by BC fans who had long since left Conte Forum.
“We’ve had ups and downs already this year—really good ups and really bad downs,” Grant said. “So it’s a journey, it’s a season—we got a very capable group.
With BC’s first ACC game four days away, Grant and his team will need their next “up” to come sooner rather than later.
“There are some things that we got to correct to be better, and I think that these guys have enough character and enough willingness to do it, but it’s gonna take some time,” Grant said.
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