Bill O'Brien defines success at Boston College

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Boston College made some waves this offseason when it hired former NFL head coach and New England Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien to be its new head coach, replacing the departed Jeff Hafley.

Hafley left to go to the Green Bay Packers after putting together a 22-26 overall record at Boston College.

Now that he has taken over and is beginning to get re-established in the college ranks, O’Brien is wasting little time making sure everyone around him knows exactly what the expectations are.

“Yeah look, I think we have to go out there and do our very best to win every single game,” O’Brien told ESPN’s Pete Thamel on the College GameDay Podcast. “Losing will never be accepted here. But to think we’re going to go out there and be in the Final Four every year, that’s probably not realistic. But you do a great job recruiting, you get the right guys, you get a great quarterback and you catch lightning in a bottle, anything happen.”

It’s been a while since Boston College has won anything of consequence. The program’s last division title came in 2008, when the team won the ACC Atlantic. The last conference title came back in 2004, when Boston College was still in the Big East.

With the ACC expanding, too, the competition figures to be as fierce as ever for a conference crown.

“In the meantime we have to do a good job of embracing who we are,” O’Brien said. “We’re a team that’s going to be tough, we’re a team that’s going to go to class and we’re a team that’s going to be involved in the community. I think if we do that and we keep recruiting to that type of standard, I think we’ll win a lot of football games.”

Coming off a 7-6 campaign, the Eagles actually do have a little bit of momentum to build on going into the O’Brien era. He’ll have to supply the rest of the momentum for the full rebuild into what he wants the program to be.

O’Brien’s last experience at the college level came at Alabama, where he was the quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator from 2021-22. Prior to that, O’Brien was the head coach of the Houston Texans from 2014-20 and the head coach at Penn State from 2012-13.

He’s certainly not lacking in experience, so it’ll be interesting to see how quickly O’Brien can start to realize his vision at Boston College.