Jan. 9, 2028: #6 ranked Boston College Eagles (13-1, 3-0) vs Florida State Seminoles (10-5, 0-4) at Donald L. Tucker Civic Center in Tallahassee, FL
SG James Lilly
I’m so happy to be playing for Boston College. To be honest, the main reason I chose BC was that the previous head coach PROMISED me that I would start as a freshman. The other colleges I was looking into wouldn’t give me that guarantee. I expected I could come here and turn the program around. That didn’t happen under the old coach in my freshman year. But when Coach Fed got here, things really began changing. Getting to the finals of the CIT tournament as a sophomore and then winning the ACC tournament and getting to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament as a junior made my decision to play for the Eagles a good one. And thus far this season, the team has been GREAT!
You gotta wonder what’s up with Florida State. They finished pre-conference play with a 10-1 record and were ranked as high as 11th in the polls. But they have lost their first 4 ACC games…and all 4 have been losses by double-digits. We’re intent on making their recent misfortunes continue. Unlike the most recent teams we’ve played, Florida State is more like us in that they don’t have one or two star players but a bunch of solid players, any one of whom can lead the team in a given game. So we’ll save our double teaming for anyone that gets hot.
Due to poor shooting we trailed most of the first half, but late in the half we went on a 9-0 run that gave us a small lead. With 6 seconds left, Coach Fed called a time out to set up an isolation play that allowed me to get up jumper from the left of the key that settled through the hoop to give us a 31-28 halftime advantage. We only hit 35% of our shots, but Florida State did no better in the half. Our top scorer in the first half was C Courtland Reese with 10 points. I had 5 points and 6 boards.
Early in the 2nd half we scored 10 unanswered points that gave us a 44-33 lead. With 16 minutes to play. We had to struggle to hold onto the lead but the Seminoles were able to whittle away at it mainly because of uncharacteristic poor foul shooting by us. But Florida State was fouling a lot, many were simply stupid fouls. So even though both teams weren’t shooting well from the field, we got to the foul line repetitively and that, along with a 47-34 rebounding advantage, turned out to be the difference. The extra 14 points we scored on free throws gave us a 67-54 win. Not pretty, but a win is a win.
Leading our scoring was C Courtland Reese with 20 points and he also had 8 rebounds. I had a nice little double-double with 10 points and 13 rebounds.