Game day has finally arrived! The BC men’s basketball team takes on the FAU Owls down in Boca Raton tonight to tip-off the 2025-26 regular season. Let’s take a look at what to expect.
Who: Boston College
Eagles (0-0) vs Florida Atlantic Owls (0-0)
Where: Eleanor R. Baldwin Arena, Boca Raton, FL
When: Monday November 3rd at 7PM ET
How to Watch: The game will be broadcast on ESPNU and streamed here.
FAU is coming off of an 18-16 season, 10-8 in the AAC, without a postseason appearance. You may remember this program from their improbable Final Four run in 2023 under head coach Dusty May. May has since left to become the head coach at Michigan, and now this will be the second season for head coach John Jakus at Florida Atlantic.
It’s been an offseason of turnover in Boca Raton. All five of FAU’s top-5 scorers from last season have departed the program in the transfer portal to Michigan State, Xavier, Cincinnati, Texas, and Wyoming. Their top returning scorer is Niccolo Moretti, a 6’1” guard from Italy who scored 6.4 points and 3.4 assists in 22 minutes per game last season. Fortunately, they’ve been able to replace some of that production with transfers of their own.
One of FAU’s new transfers is junior guard Kanaan Carlyle, who started his college career at Stanford and then transferred to Indiana for one season, and now comes to FAU to be an Owl. Carle averaged 11.5 points and 2.7 assists per game at Stanford, but couldn’t find much playing time at Indiana. He’s not particularly effective from behind the arc, but has shown a good ability to drive and get to the free throw line.
FAU also brought in sophomore guard Isaiah Elohim, a transfer from Southern California. Elohim only saw about 6 minutes of action per game last season, but as a high school recruit he was 4-star that was touted for his ability to score from the midrange and around the rim. Another key transfer for FAU came from a different southern California school, UCLA’s Devin Williams. Williams is a 6’10” sophomore forward who was a 4-star recruit in his own right, but he hardly saw the floor in Los Angeles.
This team and game are very unpredictable. Many of these players have the recruiting pedigree to be difference-makers, and John Jakus’s first season at FAU went pretty well for a first year head coach. The Owls are favored by 1.5 points tonight, but really that just seems like a shot in the dark. We know so little about how these teams built upon transfers are going to look in game #1 of the season.
Prediction: Boston College 74 Florida Atlantic 73
