Inside Bill O'Brien's big plans at Boston College
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Pete Thamel, ESPN
RYE, N.Y. — On a sunny evening in early June, Boston College coach Bill O’Brien pulls out his iPhone and starts filming.
He catches a panoramic view of the Shenorock Shore Club, a private club for swimming, tennis and pickleball in Westchester County, a few out-routes from Manhattan. He captures a scene like something out of East Egg — water lapping on the shore, Adirondack chairs at the ready and an American flag rustling gently in the breeze.
He sends it to his wife, Colleen, and chuckles as he reads her response: “I thought you were working!”
This is all part of the work of the modern coach, a window into the new-age challenge for an old-school mind. O’Brien’s appearance at the Shore Club includes more than an hour of glad-handing, introducing himself to graduates and students of all ages. It comes amid a jam-packed multistop trip through Westchester and Manhattan that includes meetings everywhere from Winged Foot to the Downtown Athletic Club — old haunts for a new era.
The role of coaches as fundraisers isn’t new, as they have been passing the leather helmet long before NIL, NCAA lawsuits and conference television networks. But as O’Brien sips on a Miller Lite and presses the flesh, the scene marks a compelling intersection of coach and moment.
O’Brien arrives at Boston College as the most qualified coach in the school’s nine decades of football. He led the Houston Texans to four playoff bids — and two wins — in seven seasons and went 15-9 in two seasons as Penn State’s coach.
He’s worked under the two modern GOATS — Bill Belichick in the NFL and Nick Saban in college football. He’s called plays in the Super Bowl and for both a Heisman winner (Bryce Young) and an NFL MVP (Tom Brady).
He’s also been around long enough to have been fired from the Texans and hailed as the savior of Penn State in the wake of searing scandal, and he even parachuted into both Notre Dame (under George O’Leary for a few days) and Ohio State (under Ryan Day for less than a month) for stints that never saw a down of football.
The totality of the experience has power, and O’Brien appreciates the collective knowledge accumulated from the wins and losses, the climb and fall, and he feels those lessons have him ready for the journey.
“I feel very prepared,” O’Brien said in his office a few days before the start of summer camp. “At the core, I am who I am. I’m passionate about football. I’m passionate about the guys I coach. I’m passionate about the guys I work with. But I’ve learned a lot. And I think I am calmer. I’m more thoughtful in certain situations. I have a lot of great people around me.
“I realize how important delegating [is]. I think when I was at Penn State, I tried to do everything. I tried to do everything. And I learned. And even in Houston, I tried to do everything at times. And there were some successes, but over time, you have to delegate.”
The challenge at BC is significant. The athletic department in the lower tier financially of the power leagues, the school is located outside traditional recruiting hotbeds and is a program that hasn’t won eight games since Frank Spaziani’s first season in 2009. BC’s last coach, Jeff Hafley, abruptly left for an NFL coordinator job in part because of all the changes swirling in the sport.
O’Brien is confident BC will have a place in the revenue-share world and have access to NIL, and he’s comfortable knowing it will look different from Georgia and Ohio State.
BC officials have been thrilled with O’Brien, with athletic director Blake James offering a pithy summary of why they are so optimistic. “He’s done it,” James said. “So he knows. There’s not a lot of learning.”
O’Brien is here for both the opportunity and the tug of home. He’s from nearby Andover, Massachusetts. His wife, Colleen, is a BC grad, and he has family scattered around the area. But him taking the job is also a bet that BC can win, as he’s ready to take an old-school philosophy and merge it with a new era.
“I really think that this is a place where you can win consistently — I really have a strong belief in that,” O’Brien said. “If you have a bunch of guys that really take pride in representing BC, you’ve got good football players, you’ve got a really good quarterback, you got a couple special players on the roster, and then a bunch of guys that are just tough hard-nosed guys. You can win. You can win.”
In an era of college sports where the star players have private plane deals, it’s telling that O’Brien is driving his Jeep Cherokee through Westchester. He picked up his old friend and new BC chief of staff, longtime Patriots consigliere Berj Najarian, early in the morning and they grinded down I-95 on the fundraising trip.
As Najarian helps with navigation, they both talk about the overall 10-year plan for BC football. They want a foundation that will create sustained success where recently there’s only been mediocrity.
For O’Brien, 54, his career through college and NFL coaching has required 16 moves, by Colleen O’Brien’s estimate. The latest came this spring, and the family now lives just about a mile down the street from the BC campus.
“I should walk to work,” O’Brien chuckles with a flash of his Boston sarcasm. “I don’t. But I should.”
It’s been a long journey to get here for O’Brien, who points out that he doesn’t envision move No. 17.
“We’re not moving,” he said. “We love it here. Colleen went to school here. You’ve heard me say this a lot — I love the job. People say, ‘Well, BC is a tough job.’ Every job I’ve had is tough. All jobs, all football jobs are tough, but they pay well and they’re fun jobs. And it’s like Bill Belichick used to say — ‘It beats working.'”
Certainly, every new coach promises long tenures and enduring fidelity to his new employer. But a peek at O’Brien’s path and family dynamics give this job a sense of permanence that transcends coaching clichés.
The O’Brien family’s choices have long been guided by their oldest son, Jack, who was born with a rare genetic brain malformation known as lissencephaly. Jack O’Brien has limited mobility and has severely limited motor planning, meaning the brain is slow to tell the body what to do.
The O’Briens’ move back to the Boston area when Bill returned to the Patriots in 2023 meant reconnecting Jack, who is now 22, with a lot of the doctors and specialists who worked with him earlier in life.
O’Brien said Colleen has been Jack’s primary caregiver, and there’s a lot of guilt working the hours that he does and not being there for support. He’s grateful for the help Colleen’s parents, Don and Clare, have provided with Jack.
Bill O’Brien said it’s fair to say that Jack has outlived his life expectancy, and they are grateful for the medical experts along the way who have cared for him.
“But every day, you feel like this could be the last day,” he said. “And that’s just the way it is. The doctors in Houston were incredible. That was a big reason why we took the Houston job. They prolonged Jack’s life. There’s no doubt about it. And the doctors in Boston have been awesome.”
The move back to this area also brought the O’Briens closer to their younger son, Michael, who is a rising sophomore pitcher on the Tufts baseball team. Colleen calls having all the family nearby an “embarrassment of riches.” Living nearby for Michael means Sundays at home with football on TV and both food and laundry provided. “I tease him that we followed him to college,” Colleen said.
The power of being close to home appealed to the family, and it resonated in an unexpected way soon after Bill took the job in February. His father, John, died in early April, and Bill was able to be close in the final days.
Colleen said it meant a lot for John O’Brien to attend Bill’s opening news conference at BC. “Being able to be close by for his last few days, it was really important and special for all of us,” she said. “It’s something we’re grateful for, something we couldn’t have planned.”
Colleen said when the Boston College job has opened in the past the “timing was just never right.” Now that they have replanted the family roots here, the O’Briens are looking at a long run.
“I can’t tell you how many people have commented to me how at peace he seems, how happy he seems,” Colleen said. “He can’t wait to go to work every day. I think he really believes in Boston College. … It’s important for him to try and make an impact on the lives of the players he coaches. I think this is a great place for him.”
At 7:20 a.m. during his first season at Alabama, O’Brien would call Tide offensive line coach and close friend Doug Marrone into his office. They’d look at the window to the front of the facility and watch Nick Saban pull up at exactly 7:22 a.m. every day. Not 7:23. Not 7:21.
Saban would get out, a staffer would hand him coffee and papers, and he’d head up to a 7:30 staff meeting. The consistency and intentionality of the Alabama building never wavered. And that prepared O’Brien for the grind and complications of modern recruiting.
“He recruited every day,” O’Brien said. “There wasn’t one day he didn’t. Christmas Day? Nope. Thanksgiving? Nope. Every day he did something in recruiting. He either spoke to a recruit, Zoomed with a recruit, watched a recruit, spoke to a high school coach, multiple coaches every single day. And that’s what we do here. So we carry that.”
O’Brien flashed his recruiting chops during his time at Penn State. He hauled in a class in 2013 that featured elite tight end Adam Breneman and quarterback Christian Hackenberg, both in the top five at their positions.
His 2014 class had commitments from future top 10 NFL draft picks in offensive linemen Quenton Nelson and Mike McGlinchey and first-round wide receiver Will Fuller. Those three ended up at Notre Dame.
“There were some really good players,” O’Brien said. “We had a lot of guys that ended up playing pro football, but when the NCAA sanctions came out, they [went elsewhere].”
O’Brien’s first recruiting job at BC came with keeping the current roster, as no players who had provided significant production left after Hafley’s sudden departure.
“He came out of it hitting a home run,” James told ESPN. “I mean, to not lose really anyone, it’s a credit to the institution and the environment and the buy-in that the guys in our program have. But it’s a bigger credit to Coach O’Brien, because every coach is going to be different.”
For senior lineman Ozzy Trapilo, entering what’s expected to be his final season, the professional approach appealed to him. He noted that BC’s practices have been much more efficient, as he said “we’re never really stopped,” with more work crammed into the same length of time.
O’Brien is one of three former NFL head coaches on the staff, as he brought in Marrone (Bills and Jaguars) and retained Rob Chudzinski (Browns). That professional approach is accentuated with a returning offensive line coach, Matt Applebaum, who has also worked in the NFL.
“They’ve sort of seen it all with the amount of years combined that they all have,” Trapilo said. “It’s crazy. They’re able to tell you basically exactly what you need to do, what you need to work on, where you are now. And that overall is really helpful for a guy like me who’s going into a really big year.”
Trapilo and defensive end Donovan Ezeiruaku are two of the program’s top NFL prospects. Both had opportunities to leave. But they stuck around in part because O’Brien has laid out clear directions on where they need to improve, as they used the words “blunt” and “direct” to describe O’Brien.
Ezeiruaku recalls O’Brien coaching him through a drill that focused on bending by describing how close Von Miller could bend to the ground in a pre-draft workout.
“‘You’re not 6-foot-5, 275 (pounds) playing defensive end,'” Ezeiruaku recalled. “‘You’re 6-foot-2, 245. You need to be able to bend and be that low to the ground while you’re bending.’ Now I could bend, but he was just putting a strong emphasis on the fact that that’s what it’s going to take.”
Part of why Ezeiruaku stuck around was that he wanted to get his degree. O’Brien says that BC’s role in revenue share and NIL will be significant, but it will not be in the same sphere as Alabama, Georgia and Ohio State, which means that he’s going to have to recruit players who have dual motivation of football and a diploma.
“I think the big thing is it’s going to come down to our ability to recruit the right type of guy for Boston College football,” O’Brien said. “When Boston College football has won in the past, and it has won … they had a group of guys that really understood what BC was all about, what BC could do for their lives, and they bought into BC.”
So what can Boston College end up looking like under Bill O’Brien?
Can it reach the heights — pun intended — it did when Matt Ryan and Doug Flutie helped the Eagles surge to national relevance?
The early read on the investment in the program has been positive. O’Brien’s biggest hire, arguably, was bringing in his longtime strength coach wingman, Craig Fitzgerald, from Florida. That’s a financial battle BC isn’t accustomed to winning. O’Brien also brought Najarian from the Patriots, a steady hand who was at Belichick’s side for one of the greatest runs in NFL history.
There’s a trust that O’Brien’s experience and vision will translate into execution.
“I think we can be a successful program,” James said in his office recently. “Now what does that mean? Can I envision us making the playoff? Yeah. Do I think we’re going to look like Georgia or Alabama or some of those schools? No, but I think we can be successful. We’ve been successful in the past as a program. It’s getting the right person and providing them with the support structure that they need.”
O’Brien’s debut comes on Labor Day night at No. 10 Florida State (0-1). It’s part of a difficult opening month that includes a trip to No. 11 Missouri and hosting Michigan State.
It should be a good measuring stick for how far BC has to go. O’Brien is confident he has a strong team. Quarterback Thomas Castellanos tied for the national lead with 13 rushing touchdowns by a QB. There’s a veteran offensive line filled with NFL prospects and a few defensive stalwarts, including tackle Cam Horsley.
And as he prepares to start the on-field execution of his 10-year plan, O’Brien feels right at home.
“I love the job, I believe in the place,” he said. “I really enjoy the people I work with. I love being a head coach. I’m Irish Catholic. I embrace what Boston College is all about.”
