Minnesota 85 Boston College 80 (OT): Five Takeaways

A look at Tuesday's loss to Minnesota.

Boston College lost their fourth game of the season on Tuesday night, dropping their ACC/B1G matchup with Minnesota 85-80 in OT. Here are some of the takeaways from the loss. 

The offense needs to go through Wynston Tabbs. As the season continues to progress it becomes more and more clear that Tabbs is not only back, but the cog for this offense. The sophomore finished with 24 points, and showed great versatility hitting shots both from outside and driving to the hoop. Jay Heath is definitely a good scorer, but would probably better be the Robin to Tabbs's Batman. 

No lead is safe with this team. Boston College built up a 15 point lead early in the second half, but it only took five minutes of game clock for that to completely evaporate. As we have mentioned before, Boston College is incredibly streaky, a "Jekyll & Hyde" offense that can look like a tournament team for five minutes, and then completely come unglued for the next five. They get in rhythms, but just as easily lose it. There is no reason not to believe this will happen game in and game out, as this has been the MO for the past seven years. 

Unforced turnovers continue to kill this team. Turnovers are going to happen, that is part of basketball, but the unforced type are preventable. Boston College continues to be haunted by those mistakes seemingly every game. You have bad passes, players stepping out of bounds on a drive. Then you have mental mistakes like the end of the first half, when Tabbs had the ball with 31 seconds on the clock, and couldn't get any sort of play off, getting called for a 30 second violation. BC isn't good enough to just give away possessions, but they do it frequently, and it leads to losses like this one. 

 CJ Felder continues to grow. One of the quietest stories of the season has been the continued development of center CJ Felder. He went into this season as a young sophomore who didn't do a whole lot his freshman year even though he was the starting center. He is clearly fitting his role this year, improving his shot and being a much stronger rebounder. Finished tonight's game with nine points and 11 rebounds. 

Minnesota's poor perimeter shooting kept BC in this game. Neither team shot particularly well from three, but Minnesota really struggled shooting 24%. The Golden Gophers interior game was much stronger than BC's, and they could have pounded the Eagles even more in this area. But they wanted those threes that never fell, and that allowed BC to stay in this game.

Boston College returns to action on Saturday when the Eagles open ACC play against Syracuse at 1pm.