Boston College has spent years leaning on bruising tailbacks, not quarterbacks, to drive its ground game. That script has changed fast, and Mason McKenzie is the reason why.
In Saturday’s win over Georgia Tech, Boston College built the offense around McKenzie as a true centerpiece, layering designed runs with the kind of integrated playmaking that gives the Eagles two different looks at once. It was a sharp turn for a program that long treated quarterback rushing as an afterthought, even as the rest of college football moved toward more space, more option, and more stress on defenses.
“I think the coaches did a great job of planning this [scheme] during the week,” said head coach Bill O'Brien, “and the players really executed well in practice. We were able to do some things and adjust some things at halftime, and I give the players and the coaching staff on both sides of the ball a lot of credit.”
McKenzie backed that up with a 170-yard rushing day, but the damage wasn’t just in raw carries. Boston College mixed in runs by Bo MacCormack III and Mekhi Dodd, then used McKenzie’s arm to keep Georgia Tech off balance.
His 21-yard completion to Javarius Green opened a third-quarter drive from BC’s 25-yard line, and three plays later he broke off a 27-yard run to the Georgia Tech red zone. Two snaps after that, he finished the series with a 15-yard touchdown run after MacCormack had picked up four yards up the middle.
The first half brought a similar sequence. After MacCormack ripped off three runs for a combined 48 yards, McKenzie found Nedrick Boldin, Jr. for a 25-yard touchdown pass. That play came after a shorter throw to Dodd and an over-the-middle attempt helped pull coverage inward, leaving Boldin in a one-on-one battle along the right sideline against Jaylen Mbakwe.
“It goes back to those five guys up front,” said McKenzie. “They were just moving guys all day, especially in that second half, and we just kept calling the same couple of plays, over and over in different formations. They say that if it's not broken, don't fix it, so those guys did a great job of opening up our entire offensive playbook.”
That kind of quarterback-driven rushing attack has never really been Boston College’s identity. For years, the Eagles were defined by powerful running backs behind rugged offensive lines, with the quarterback asked mainly to hand off or work off play-action and rollouts. Mike Cloud, William Green, Derrick Knight, Montel Harris, Andre Williams and AJ Dillon all piled up the program’s most memorable yardage totals while the quarterback stayed in the background.
The shift began more clearly when Tyler Murphy transferred from Florida and brought in a fully optional offense without a primary passing attack. Thomas Castellanos later joined him as one of the only BC quarterbacks to clear 1,000 rushing yards in a season, but McKenzie is now pushing the concept into a different lane altogether.
Saturday also showed just how much the attack can morph from drive to drive. Boston College has leaned on McKenzie in different ways over the last two weeks, and he has responded by handling varied schemes against highly touted defenses.
He has run for 614 yards through seven games, with two 100-yard outings, and he has not thrown an interception in three of his last four games. Against Virginia Tech, the offense leaned run-heavy.
Against Pittsburgh, he got closer to 300 yards passing. Against Georgia Tech, the ground game became the engine.
The numbers tell the story, too. McKenzie’s five rushing touchdowns are four fewer than the career totals of Phil Jurkovec and Chris Crane, yet his season rushing yardage is already fifth-most among BC quarterbacks and about 120 yards shy of Doug Flutie for fourth place. Of the quarterbacks ahead of him on that list, only Flutie had a 2,500-yard passing season at Boston College.
There’s a broader backdrop here as well. In 2019, BC repeated a gap-run look on a 13-play third-quarter march against Rutgers in a 30-16 win, but that team was built around AJ Dillon.
Anthony Brown didn’t need to do much beyond 13 completions on 25 attempts for 159 yards, 40 rushing yards and a score. Dillon handled the load with 150 yards on 32 carries, and David Bailey added 82 yards on 12 carries as the Eagles bludgeoned Rutgers on the ground.
Dillon’s workload that season was massive, finishing with 318 carries, third-most in BC history. He remains the only BC running back with more than 800 carries, piling up 845 over three years.
Before him, Montel Harris, Derrick Knight and Andre Williams were the only backs to reach 700 carries, while Andre Callender finished with 637 during the mid-2000s. Jon Hilliman’s 612 carries over four seasons couldn’t crack that same tier.
McKenzie is operating in a different category entirely, and Boston College is finally using a quarterback who can make that kind of offense work. He’s already in rare company among the program’s rushing passers, and Saturday’s performance only reinforced how much more dangerous the Eagles become when the quarterback is part of the run game, not just adjacent to it.
“It’s a special thing when you can run the ball like that,” said McKenzie. “It really just opens everything up, but we’re running the ball so well that we didn’t even have to get into the passing game.
We had a good plan in the pass game, but there's no reason to take shots down the field when you can sustain drives like that. It's a very good feeling to see that we can get rolling a little bit and give those guys up front a little bit more confidence.”
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