Boston College Eagles
intercollegiate sports teams of Boston College
The Boston College Eagles are the athletic teams that represent Boston College, located in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. They compete as a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I level (Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) sub-level for football), primarily competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).
Nickname and mascot history
The Eagle nickname and mascot for Boston College's teams were given by Rev. Edward McLaughlin. Fr. McLaughlin, incensed at a Boston newspaper cartoon depicting the champion BC track team as a cat licking clean a plate of its rivals, penned a passionate letter to the student newspaper, The Heights, in the newspaper's first year in 1920. "It is important that we adopt a mascot to preside at our pow-wows and triumphant feats," wrote Fr. McLaughlin. "And why not the Eagle, symbolic of majesty, power, and freedom?"
The Boston College mascot is Baldwin the Eagle, an American bald eagle whose name is a pun derived from the bald head of the eagle and the word "win."
The school colors are maroon and gold. The fight song, "For Boston", was composed by T.J. Hurley, Class of 1885, and is America's oldest college fight song.
The public source identifies “Boston College Eagles” as intercollegiate sports teams of Boston College. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Boston, College and Eagles.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3046352. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920 and 1885.
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This entry incorporates text from “Boston College Eagles” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.