Change of environment

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Tom O'Brien was perched high in Section 110 of the RBC Center, watching the Boston College men's basketball team thrash North Carolina State, 74-58, in an Atlantic Coast Conference romp Saturday afternoon. Frustrated by BC's whopping 23-point lead with 15:10 remaining in the game, N.C. State fans suddenly launched into chants of "Tom O'Brien! Tom O'Brien!," a not-so-subtle reminder of how BC's former football coach was now, in fact, the leader of the Wolfpack.

"I guess they can't wait for football season," O'Brien said the next day.

Sitting in his fourth-floor corner office in the Wendell P. Murphy Center -- with its vaulted ceiling, wall-mounted plasma TV, and panoramic view of Carter-Finley Stadium -- O'Brien spoke at length Sunday afternoon, choking back the emotions at one juncture, about the reasons he decided to leave BC after 10 seasons and a 75-45 record, best in school history, to succeed Chuck Amato as N.C. State's coach.

"If you saw this place 10 years ago, and you saw it as we walked into it this year, it's night and day," O'Brien said of his new surroundings. "The commitment to this program has been incredible. There's a great passion here for football and these fans are the best in the state of North Carolina."

O'Brien, 58, seems prepared to make the transition from Boston's pro-oriented sports landscape to this rabid college environment in the heart of the ACC.

"I knew what I was getting myself into, I saw it for 15 years at Virginia, the spring caravans and all that," said O'Brien. "So I know exactly what I'm getting myself into and I'm happy to be a part of it. There's a passion here. It's on a much larger scale, and that's good for me, because I want to be a part of something like that."

Fully aware of the demands that will be placed on him as the face of a program whose Wolfpack Club numbers 19,000 strong and ranks as one of the largest in the conference, if not the country, O'Brien said he doesn't plan a personality makeover. He intends to remain the way he was at Navy, at Virginia, and at BC: steady and solid.

"I can't be anybody else; I can only do the best job I can do," O'Brien said. "I only know one way to do it and I've been trained one way to do it, and to try to do an out-of-body experience and be somebody I'm not, that's how, in my opinion, most coaches fail; they try to be somebody else and they don't try to be themselves."

At BC, O'Brien projected an image as a taciturn coach with little emotion. Until, that is, it came time for him to leave, a decision that resulted in a tearful farewell meeting with his players and staff, two days after word leaked about his imminent departure.

"Oh, that was hard," O'Brien said, tears welling and voice quivering. "I always prided myself in doing things the right way, and that certainly didn't come out the right way."

While he will bring six members of his BC staff with him to Raleigh -- Jerry Petercuskie, Dana Bible, Don Horton, Jim Bridge, Jason Swepson, and Keith Willis, in addition to grad assistant Jay Civetti and strength coach Todd Rice -- O'Brien became emotional at the thought of those people he left behind at BC, people he felt were just as responsible for the program's success over the last 10 seasons.

"It certainly wasn't just me, it was a lot of people, people who are still there," O'Brien said. "Certainly there's Spaz [defensive coordinator Frank Spaziani] and Billy [McGovern, linebackers coach]. Steve Bushee and the training staff. Jill Hegarty [assistant director of football operations].

"You think about them and what an amazing group of people we had. That was the hardest thing. As I said to them [at a going-away Christmas party Dec. 23], 'It's all your fault I was as emotional as I was,' because they were great friends."

O'Brien was asked about his working relationship with BC athletic director Gene DeFilippo, one some thought was on the rocks.

"It was professional," O'Brien replied. "But I wouldn't say we were drinking buddies or anything like that. It was professional."

So why is BC's winningest coach now at N.C. State? After a USA Today report last fall placed O'Brien's $733,626 total salary among the bottom third of the league's 12 coaches (a figure DeFilippo disputed and put at $1 million), did O'Brien feel compelled to seek greener pastures?

"The timing was right," said O'Brien, who got a seven-year deal at N.C. State that will pay him a minimum of $1.1 million per year and up to $1.8 million with incentives.

"It was time, time to move on, and if I was going to do it, it was going to have to be sooner rather than later," he said. "As I said before, 10 years is a long time to be a head coach [at one school].

"You look back, when I took the job [at BC], there were 21 positions open that year and now there's only two guys still at their schools: Pat Hill is still at Fresno State and Joe Tiller is still employed at Purdue; everybody else is out of a job.

"So there's not ever one reason why you do anything, I don't think, especially in this profession. A bunch of things came together and it was just too good of an opportunity for us not to take."

The opportunity to return to the South also was irresistible. O'Brien spent the formative part of his coaching career in Charlottesville, Va., where he toiled for head coach George Welsh.

After 10 years at BC, O'Brien figured he and his wife, Jenny, now empty-nesters after their three children graduated from BC, didn't have many more moves to make and had begun planning for retirement by purchasing a home in Charleston, S.C., some four hours from Raleigh, N.C.

"I don't have any left; this was it," O'Brien said. "I mean, the next move as far as I'm concerned is to South Carolina [to retire]. So I think that all played into it, too."

In his 10 seasons at The Heights, O'Brien restored discipline to a program that had been sullied by a gambling scandal in 1996. He pushed for his players to excel not only on the field but in the classroom, evidenced by BC's exemplary graduation rate. And he guided the Eagles to eight consecutive bowl berths and the first six of seven consecutive bowl wins.

Though he dedicated it to O'Brien, interim coach Spaziani was credited with BC's 25-24 victory over Navy in this season's Meineke Car Care Bowl, which kept intact the nation's longest active bowl winning streak. O'Brien, who watched the game from his home in Charleston, was awarded the game ball. It now sits as the only memento on the mantel in his office.

And yet, for all his accomplishments, O'Brien continued to be haunted by those things he had not accomplished -- specifically, taking the Eagles to the "next level" by landing a Bowl Championship Series berth.

"I remember after losing at Temple, my first game, I had to speak to the Touchdown Club that week," O'Brien recalled. "I made them the promise that every day I'd work as hard as I could to make Boston College's football program the best program in the country. And so that's what I always did. That wasn't going to change.

"Sometimes you can't change people's perception of you, but I think I did my job to the best of my ability and I accomplished the things I needed to accomplish at Boston College."

Michael Vega can be reached at vega@globe.com.