Bill O'Brien is an odd move for Boston College, but it could be the right one
I'm still surprised this happened in the first place, but if he plays his cards right, O'Brien could be the spark BC's been searching for.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
There’s a kind of accidental artistry to the picture above, which I stumbled across on Boston College’s athletics site and quickly chose to accompany this week’s article. It’s just a little too perfect: new head coach Bill O’Brien standing awkwardly on one side of the frame, his expression reading more as consternation and disbelief than excitement to take over the Eagles’ program, in front of a rather drab office hall and a glaring exit sign overhead. I’m reminded of the new royal portrait for King Charles III, bizarrely apt for something that you’d expect to paint its subject in the best possible light.
This image feels fitting, not necessarily because O’Brien is a bad hire, but simply because he’s such a strange one. The look in his face there is pretty much the same one I had upon hearing who Boston College had decided to bring in, like…wait, are we sure? That’s the guy? The move really just feels odd and unexpected, more than anything; it’s easier to joke about than try to actually, properly analyze and understand as a hire.
O’Brien has been a solid coach, it’s true. He was a key part of the New England Patriots’ offensive success in the late 2010s, experience which propelled him into his first HC job at Penn State. After one year, he’d pulled off an impressive 8-4 campaign amid sanctions and earned the Big Ten Coach of the Year award; after two years, he’d taken off to coach the Houston Texans. For six seasons, it went well—four AFC South titles, a couple playoff wins in those postseason trips—and then he was named the team’s general manager, traded away one of his best players for peanuts, and singlehandedly sent the franchise into a three-year period as one of the NFL’s very worst.
In recovering from that disastrous turn of events, O’Brien has rebuilt his career with stints as the OC and QB coach at Alabama (2021-22), back with the Patriots (2023), and most recently at Ohio State (2024). This last hire didn’t even stick for a month, as Jeff Hafley’s departure to the Packers’ staff opened up the Boston College job, which O’Brien quickly jumped to. And now he’s here, after a decade full of drama, back in a college head coaching job for the first time since he departed PSU a decade ago.
On paper, it’s not a bad move. O’Brien has been a very capable coach when he focuses on the on-field performance and doesn’t try to do too much. Weighing the pros and cons of bringing him in is odd, because he’s almost the opposite of many other coordinators seeking HC jobs that would seem to be in a similar position. Far from an unknown, what he can do in practical terms on gameday is in fact his greatest strength; it’s everything else, from recruiting to roster management to the transfer portal, that raises questions.
And…yeah, there are a lot of questions there, which is why I’m admittedly not quite as gung-ho about this hire as many have been. There’s certainly appeal to landing a coach with great regional ties and a sparkling pedigree of on-field success, but it’s hard to be sure everything else will fall into place to make that practical coaching skillset truly rewarding. No matter how encouraging the other aspects of his résumé, there are certain responses…
If the first question out of a guy’s mouth is “How much are you going to pay me?” that guy might not be the best fit for Boston College.
Bill O’Brien, introductory press conference at Boston College
…that, in the modern era of college football, are inevitably going to raise some eyebrows.
What O’Brien intends to do at BC can certainly work. Crucially, he is a very good in-game coach, and the combination of major NFL experience and strong Boston roots should make him a serious factor in high-school recruiting, if nothing else. But we’ve seen before that if his roster isn’t provided competitive talent—a problem he’s been part of in the past, and might be again here—things can go downhill quickly. In the ACC, a league open for the taking precisely because its preeminent power stuck to Winning The Right Way™ in a changing landscape, I’m skeptical that openly eschewing NIL like this is a shrewd move.
Still, this is by no means an outright poor hire. For a program without much recent success beyond endless six- and seven-win seasons, not to mention one that had to go hunting for a coach late in a particularly busy cycle, pulling O’Brien is a serious coup, and one that brings a lot of energy to Boston College. This is a big swing for BC, which has been hesitant to take risks like this for a long time, and there’s value both to being able to square up for that swing and to actually follow through with it. If anyone can thread the needle and build a successful old-fashioned winner amid the prohibitively expensive atmosphere of modern college football, it’s Bill O’Brien.
The Last Five Years
I’m hesitant to take a victory lap on behalf of Steve Addazio, who was fired in 2019 after going 7-6, 7-6, 3-9, 7-6, 7-6, 7-5, and 6-6 at Boston College. His coaching tenure at Colorado State was a mess—marred first by a bizarre ejection against Nevada in late November 2021, then just days later, a far more serious investigation which backed up accusations that he had demeaned, threatened, and discriminated against a custodian in his first months on the job. I felt that firing Addazio on performance wasn’t the right move for BC, but if this sort of thing was going on behind the scenes, I can understand it. Still, hiring Jeff Hafley, whose expectations fell in line with what Boston College had been for years under Addazio, felt a bit pointless to me at the time, and I’ll certainly chalk that one up as a win. A 3-1 start to 2020 highlighted by a narrow loss against #12 North Carolina got people talking…only for that season to end at 6-5, followed by 6-6, 3-9, and 7-6 campaigns before Hafley saw the writing on the wall and bailed.
Surprisingly, Boston College held onto a lot of its roster after the coaching swap. In the initial SP+ returning production rankings, published on February 5 between Hafley’s departure and O’Brien’s arrival, the Eagles landed 40th with 67% of their roster expected back, including a whopping 80% on offense. Stunningly, in the recent May 13 update to those rankings, that number went up to 68% and BC soared to 26th overall, bringing in more from the portal than they lost to it in a Year Zero. That’s a massive reason to believe in O’Brien as a serious recruiting force here, even if he’s working with an NIL handicap in the portal. We’ll see if it lasts.
The Next Five Years
I’m not gonna sit here and tell you this hire isn’t, on the face of it, at least a little bit funny. I think there’s an inclination with guys like O’Brien, who’ve been around long enough and worked on such strong staffs (how many coaches have votes of confidence from both Belichick and Saban?), to treat them as very serious and unimpeachable hires. Nobody wants to criticize someone who’s been around the game a long time, and will probably be around for years to come.
But, yeah, O’Brien’s catastrophic tenure as GM in Houston—along with his not-inconsiderable failings at Alabama and New England since his firing—can’t be ignored. Among coaches without direct ties to scandal or other fatal off-field flaws, he’s been one of the most consistently disdained coaches of the 2020s, drawing the ire of every fanbase which has watched him work. Boston College is the first place he hasn’t been under heavy scrutiny from the start since he took over the Texans, and if you’re not bought into the idea that O’Brien can’t fail because he’s had two largely solid HC tenures, it can be easy to read this fanbase’s optimism as naivety.
The balance, I think, is somewhere in the middle. As a head coach, O’Brien has earned the respect and trust he’s getting from his believers. It’s in other roles that he’s also earned the skepticism and derision he’s getting from his doubters—which, to be honest, it’s always fun to be one of. Given how unique the role of college football head coach is, and just how much it’s changed since the last time O’Brien held it, I don’t think we can say for sure how well he’ll be able to lean into his strengths and cover his weaknesses. There’s reason for hope and disbelief alike, but that fact in and of itself is enough reason for BC to feel good about the hire. This big swing is what they needed, more than anything; now, the question is whether it’ll clear the fences and prove to be the home run hire that could propel Boston College into college football’s upper echelon.