Everything Boston College Head Coach Bill O'Brien Said at 2026 ACC Football Kickoff

2026 ACC Football Kickoff is officially underway at Hilton Charlotte Uptown in Charlotte, N.C., and Boston College took the podium on Thursday afternoon to discuss the upcoming season.

The program was represented by head coach Bill O’Brien, quarterback Mason McKenzie, linebacker Anthony Palano, and defensive back KP Price.

During his time at the podium, O’Brien spoke on the new players and coaching staff, gave updates on a couple of returning players, and shared the keys to having an improved season.

Below is a transcript of everything O’Brien said.

BILL O'BRIEN: Good afternoon, everybody. Really appreciate all of you being here today. I'm joined today by three great young men. Quarterback Mason McKenzie, linebacker Anthony Palano, and safety KP Price. A great representation of our program, student-athletes all the way, leaders, really good football players and really have done a great job of leading this football team this offseason.

We have a brand-new team. We have a brand-new team. We have basically about 50 new players. We have about 25 guys out of the portal, 25 guys in high school recruiting. We have six new coaches, including defensive coordinator Ted Roof. We also have a new general manager in Kenyatta Watson. It's a brand-new organization, a brand-new team from last year, and we're excited about that.

Last year is in the past. We moved on. When the team returned to start workouts in January, they've done a really good job. Had a really good winter conditioning, really excellent spring practice, and really have had a good summer.

We're excited about training camp. We're excited about the upcoming season. Really enjoy coaching these guys each and every day. It's really just fun to come to work because these guys work, and they're really smart football players. They work hard. They give us everything they've got, and we're fired up about this team.

I think that one of the things that I look forward to during this time of year is always training camp. I think training camp is a good time to really lay the foundation of your football team from a bonding standpoint, from a toughness standpoint, from a conditioning standpoint. All of us are excited about training camp, and that will get going here at the beginning of August. Got a couple more weeks of summer conditioning.

These three guys actually, believe it or not, worked out at 3:00 a.m. this morning to get their workout in because we left at 5:00 a.m. We flew up here from Boston this morning. Just tells you something about these guys right here.

With that, I'll open it up to questions.

Q. Syair Torrence has been something for you on that defensive side. Got injured last year. What can you say about his comeback, where he is at right now and your expectations with Syair moving forward this season?

BILL O'BRIEN: Yeah, Syair is a guy that, unfortunately, did get injured last year in kind of a fluke play in practice, but he's done an excellent job with our training staff of coming back and rehabbing, and he's out there. He's out there this summer. He's had a really, really productive summer. He's still a little bit noncontact. I believe he'll be contact when training camp starts, but he's a guy, a young player, with a great upside.

I appreciate you asking me about him because we're really excited about him being back ready to go, healthy for us when training camp starts.

Q. You talk about the new coaches on the staff, including Ted Roof. What is it like having an experienced coach with head coaching experience on your staff coming in and going forward from 2026 on?

BILL O'BRIEN: Right, Ted and I have been together a long time, right? We started in the mid-'90s at Georgia Tech where he was a great player. He and I were position coaches there. We worked for George O'Leary at Georgia Tech. Learned a lot of football there. We were both coordinators there. This is our fourth stop together, so that tells you how long we've been doing it. 35 years for me; 40 years for him.

We were together at Duke. We were together at Penn State, and now we're together at Boston College. I think he's brought a great energy to these guys.

I'm sure KP and Anthony can speak to it also. He shows up every day. He loves the players. He really connects with the players. He knows how to communicate. He's demanding. He's fair, but he makes it fun. He coaches an attacking-style defense, a very difficult defense to go against for us in the wintertime and in the spring and now in the summer. It's really helped us offensively. I think Mason would attest to that, too, because we see a lot of different things every day.

So excited about having Ted, and got some other guys on the staff that we're excited about, too. It's great to have Ted back.

Q. You talked about, hey, we have essentially a brand-new team. You brought in three new offensive linemen transfers. How have you liked them? How are they meshing into this program for you?

BILL O'BRIEN: Yeah, we're excited about those guys. We have got a new offensive line coach, Kurt Anderson, that's done a really good job of teaching the schemes and the things that we want to do from a run game standpoint, a protection standpoint. These guys have really done a good job of improving. You can see, like, the improvement from winter to spring to where we are now in the summer.

Yeah, we've got three guys that transfer, but we've also got some guys that are coming back from last year. Rob Smith will be probably our left guard, one of the best guards in the ACC, an excellent player. We've got Michael Crounse, our center back from last year. We got Pape Sy. Pape Sy is one of the most improved players on our team. He's taken on more of a leadership role and things like that and plays left tackle.

Then we have Juju and Kristian Phillips and Tre Humphrey that are transfers that have come in and done a really good job. We've got some young players, like Judah Pruitt, an offensive guard for us that we feel is going to be really a good player.

We're excited about the O-line and the improvement that they've made, and looking forward to training camp with those guys.

Q. I just wanted to know a little bit about how you build your roster as far as the transfer portal versus the freshmen. Is it a fairly equal balance, or are you looking to have more experienced players come in, or how do you build your team?

BILL O'BRIEN: I think moving forward I think at Boston College we always want to be primarily a high school recruiting program, right? If you put percentages on it, we would say about 75% of our roster to come through high school recruiting and 25% to come through the portal.

This year was a different story because we lost guys to either they transferred or graduation or whatever it might be, so we had to, in my opinion, replace experience with experience. So we were able to go out. We have two of them up here this afternoon with Anthony and Mason and some other guys that have just really done a good job of coming in and understanding the culture of Boston College.

So it is about 50/50 right now, but I think moving forward it will always tend to be more of a high school recruiting philosophy. I think one thing that BC did is BC made a much bigger commitment to football in January when they allowed us to expand our staff. We were able to expand our personnel staff, hire Kenyatta Watson, our GM. We have Julian Rowe-Cohen our assistant GM. We have a number of people that can help us. Now you can divide up, hey, these guys are in charge of high school recruiting, these guys are in charge of portal recruiting and evaluating the tape and finding the right fits for BC.

It's been a good process and something that we'll continue to build on, but we think we're on the right track.

Q. You disclosed to ESPN that Kaelan Chudzinski tore his Achilles. Can you talk about that injury, the impact it's going to have on your offense, and does that change anything you want to do schematically this season?

BILL O'BRIEN: No, I don't think it changes much. It is a loss. Chud had a really good freshman year. I feel terrible for him. But if you asked him where he's at in his rehab right now, he'd tell you he's going to play this year. You know, the percentages tell us that he's probably going to miss the season and be back in January.

We did move a man named Bryce Lewis who was a defensive end for us who had played tight end in high school. We moved him back over to tight end this summer, and he's had a really good summer, and we're excited about him.

We have guys like Zeke Moore and Brady Clough and Danny Edgehille. So we feel good about that position, but obviously Chud was a very productive player, so you don't really replace that right away.

We feel good about the position, where it's at right now, and we just continue to move forward.

Q. You spoke about hiring Kenyatta Watson as your new general manager. Just what does that mean in the world of college football now? You've been in the NFL. You know team GMs. What does that look like for BC and this new role of GM over the last few years?

BILL O'BRIEN: I think the way that college football is now, just my opinion, the more that you can set it up organizationally using the model of the NFL organization where you have a head coach and a GM and then you have your coaching staff and your personnel staff. I think in college you have your portal recruiters, your portal evaluators. You have your high school recruiters, your high school evaluators. The similarity there in professional football would be your college scouts, right, your pro scouts. That's kind of how we have it set up.

So Kenyatta is in charge of the personnel side of things. Football-wise I oversee the whole thing, but he's got the personnel side of things.

I think it's gone well so far. We're in the first six months of it. It just really became that way in January, and I think we've definitely improved the football team, but we're always looking to tweak and figure out ways that we can do it in a better way, whether it comes to the budget of what we're allowed to spend or just the recruiting itself.

I think we're on the right track, and it's really helped me a lot. It's helped to take some things off of my plate, which has allowed me to coach more football, which is pretty cool for me. I'm happy about it.

THE MODERATOR: I'm curious, it's a great definition of culture that culture is the accumulation of a million choices made by each colleague, but when the colleagues change every year, how do you maintain culture through those millions of decisions?

BILL O'BRIEN: I do. I think that's a cool definition. I do believe that culture is defined by the people within your culture.

I believe that we've done a really good job of bringing in the right guys that understand the value of playing great football in a great conference in the ACC and the value of an unbelievable education, but also the philosophy of Boston College where, you know, we're going to develop the whole person at BC.

These guys are going to -- they're busy seven days a week. You know, they're giving back to the community, doing a lot in the community, going to class, playing good football. That will always be the philosophy of BC. So the more we can find guys that fit that culture that take pride in putting that uniform on and playing for Boston College, representing all the great players that came before them, that's how we're going to win.

I believe we're on the right track with these three young men that are up here today, plus all the other guys that are back at BC working out today. We feel good about where our culture is at. I think that would be a good question for these guys. They'll talk more to that because they're in that locker room every day. I believe we're headed in the right direction with our culture.

Q. If BC exceeds expectations in the ACC this year, what do you believe will be the key factor to making that happen?

BILL O'BRIEN: Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, one of the key factors in any football season is health. I think these three, start with these three, they've got to stay healthy. We need guys to stay healthy. I think that's a big deal.

Then we have to play better on defense. I think we've got to take better care of the ball on offense, play better situational football overall as a team. But I think that we've shown that we can do that. We're a much more competitive football team in practice. A lot of times in my experience that tends to lend itself to improvement on the field during games, but those are some areas where we have to improve if we're going to improve on the record.

Q. What went into targeting Mason, and what traits on and off the field give you the impression that he can be the leader at BC you want him to be?

BILL O'BRIEN: Yeah, the first thing we felt like when we got done with the season and we evaluated that position, you know, we had guys leave, so we knew we had to replace. We couldn't just do it with rookies. We had to go get somebody out of the portal, at least one guy out of the portal.

We had somebody that was not only an efficient accurate passer and could understand our passing game, our protections, our reads and things, but also a guy that was mobile, that could make plays with his feet. We weren't going to be a team that's going to drop back 55 times in a game and have a guy just standing there like a statue. That's not going to be who we are.

We started to track that, and we started to really scour the portal, which a lot of our guys had already been doing that during the season. So this was -- Mason was a guy that came up right away as soon as I saw his film. And I knew the level of competition in that conference because I had looked at Trinidad Chambliss the year before, and knowing Pete Golding, coaching with him at Alabama and what Trinidad had meant to that program.

This was a guy that I knew from the level from that conference that had played good football and was very productive. Had almost 6,000 total yards. You're talking about passing and running and very productive and a winner, and was the Player of the Year in that conference this past year.

So we went out. We contacted him, and he came and visited, came with his dad. Right away we liked him. You know, very sharp guy, learns well, can communicate, puts his mind to it, really prepares every single day, comes into the meetings. Fun guy to coach. Same guy every day. Very consistent guy.

So really looking forward to continuing to work with him in training camp and then into the season.

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