We’ve spent a lot of space this year on manufactured rivalry weeks and theme-night gimmicks: jersey patches designed by committee, “historic” trophies invented the same offseason they’re first awarded. Tonight’s game between Boston College and Rutgers at Alumni Stadium is not one of those. It’s the 13th annual Red Bandanna Game, and Boston College built the tradition around a single alumnus nineteen years before anyone could have known 2026 would be the year the calendar, the medal, and the matchup all landed on the same night.
Kickoff is 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN2, and the date does the framing no marketing department could improve on. This is the actual 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, not a proximate weekend picked for scheduling convenience. Three days ago, President Trump posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Welles Crowther at a Steel Across America event near the Ellipse, with Crowther’s mother and sister accepting on his behalf. The Red Bandanna Game predates that ceremony by well over a decade.
Crowther graduated from Boston College in 1999, where he played lacrosse and volunteered as a firefighter back home, the instinct that would define what came next. By every account of the man in the red bandana, he wore the same cloth under his lacrosse helmet that his father had given him as a boy. He was working as an equities trader in the World Trade Center’s South Tower on September 11. In the chaos after the first plane hit, he is credited with guiding as many as 18 people to stairwells and safety before the tower collapsed. He was 24. Survivors who made it out identified him only afterward, from the fabric over his face, as the man in the red bandanna.
Every Boston College player wears “FOR WELLES” across the back of his jersey tonight instead of a name, the numbers styled to echo the bandanna’s pattern. A Coast Guard flyover precedes kickoff, a drone show is scheduled for halftime, and the first 10,000 fans through the gate get their own red bandannas. Crowther’s family is expected in attendance, along with relatives of other Boston College alumni killed that day.
Rutgers is not a passive host here. The program lost 37 alumni on September 11, and tonight the Scarlet Knights wear “Never Forget” on the pants and the number 37 on the helmets. (Worth sitting with: two programs sharing a Friday night, both carrying real losses instead of borrowed symbolism.) Coach Greg Schiano put it plainly this week: “This is very real to us. Just outside this door, we were standing on the practice field and you could see the smoke on the horizon 25 years ago.” Some of his staff and players, he said, “didn’t know where their wives or their mothers or their fathers were.”
Bill O’Brien spends the week of this game working Crowther’s story into practice, and he talks about the assignment like it outranks the scoreboard: “This game is what BC’s all about. Welles Crowther embodies what Boston College is all about. It’s about being a man for others and so it’s going to be a special night.” He tries, he’s said, “every single day the week of the game” to educate his team on who they’re representing. (A strange thing to have to say out loud about a football game, and also the entire point of it.)
None of that erases the fact that both teams arrive at 0-1. Boston College lost its opener to Cincinnati. Rutgers was upset by UMass, 37-21, as a 29.5-point favorite, after paying UMass $1.55 million to play the game (a transaction that will outlive the final score in every Scarlet Knights fan’s memory). Rutgers will also be without scheduled starter Dylan Lonergan, himself a Boston College transfer, sidelined by injury; junior AJ Surace is expected to start in his place, which adds a small, strange irony to a night that already has enough of them. The records themselves are worth a footnote and nothing more: neither program is walking into Alumni Stadium tonight thinking about style points, and by Saturday morning almost nobody outside both buildings will remember the seeding implications either way.
Sports sections run plenty of the other type of tribute night: sponsor-timed, algorithm-friendly, forgotten by the following season. I believe this is the rare one that earns the weight put on it, mostly because Boston College never treated it as content in the first place. The tradition started as a one-off in 2011 and turned permanent in 2014, the year BC upset a ranked USC team while wearing the bandanna theme for the first “annual” edition. That result could easily have gone the other way, and it’s hard to imagine it would have changed whether they kept doing this.
Boston College’s own account marked the night the way it usually does, without much decoration:
https://twitter.com/BCFootball/status/2098400911320088859
No hashtag stunt attached to that post, no countdown graphic. Just a kickoff time and a stadium, which tracks for a program that’s had thirteen years to learn this game doesn’t need embellishing.
What happens on the field tonight will matter to the standings and not much else; both teams need the win more for confidence than resume. What won’t change, win or lose, is that Boston College and Rutgers will play this fixture again next September, and the year after, long after 2026’s alignment of dates stops being notable. That’s the actual test of whether a tribute is real: whether the program still shows up for it once the year everyone happened to be watching has passed. Watch what BC and Rutgers do with this rivalry in a September that isn’t a round-number anniversary — that’s when you find out if the reverence was ever conditional.
