“It’s energizing,’’ says Boston College football coach Frank Spaziani. “It really is. I don’t know about the enjoyment factor.’’

No coach or manager will ever say he “enjoys’’ life during a season. Issues abound on a 24-7-365 basis. Finish one game and you start preparing for another. Sleep? Hah. Relax? You nuts? These jobs are daily torture.

And every time there is a vacancy, the line of desperate candidates stretches from San Diego to Skowhegan.

Frank Spaziani patiently waited for his. He got out of Penn State, where he was a tough defensive end, in 1969. He went the grad assistant/alma mater assistant coach route for three years. He went the high school coaching route for two years. He jumped back onto the college coaching carousel in 1975. The Naval Academy for seven seasons and the University of Virginia for eight.

Canada beckoned, and he said, “Why not?’’ Five years up there, two with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and three with the Calgary Stampeders. His old friend Tom O’Brien came calling, and he was back in the US of A, at Boston College, in 1997. The first two years he spent coaching the running backs and the next 10 as the defensive coordinator.

That’s a heap o’ coaching, but it was all spent as an assistant. When the 2008 college season ended, Frank Spaziani was 61, and never mind that he looks a minimum of 10 years younger and looks as if he could bench press Rhode Island. He was 61, and he’d already been passed over once for the head job at BC, and the guy with the head job was only 45 and was doing a good job. But if Coach Spaz was feeling sorry for himself, he wasn’t telling anybody.

And then Jeff Jagodzinski just lost it, challenging BC director of athletics Gene DeFilippo by going after the Jets job and triggering a series of events that resulted in Jagodzinski gaining and losing an offensive coordinator job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Meanwhile, the BC AD decided against the vaunted “nationwide search’’ and instead turned to Frank Spaziani, making him a rookie head coach for a BCS program at age 61.

Well, Coach Spaz is 62 now (April Fools Day), and, after all those years of being a lieutenant, he’s a general. His team, which was picked by the pundits to finish last in the ACC, instead is tied with Clemson for first place in the ACC Atlantic Division with a 3-2 record. The Eagles are 6-3 overall, which makes them bowl-eligible for the 11th straight season.

It is bye week. There are three games remaining in the regular season, all winnable and, frankly, all losable, as well. So don’t ask Coach Spaz about any Big Picture questions, about squirming back into the ACC championship game for the third consecutive year, or where they might go bowling, or any of that stuff.

Right now, all he’s thinking about is a trip to Charlottesville, Va., a week from Saturday, and not because he’s looking forward to renewing any old acquaintances. It’s about getting a W over Al Groh’s Cavaliers.

“We don’t have the luxury of thinking too far ahead,’’ he reasons. “We know what’s at stake. You always want the games at the end of the season to have some meaning to them, and we have that. But, obviously, for us, it’s one game at a time. We have a very thin margin of error.’’

BC also has an 0-fer on the road, and two of its three remaining games are away from home, a Nov. 28 contest at Maryland being the other.

Two of the road losses have been certifiably ug-leee, the first a 25-7 loss at Clemson in which BC had 54 yards of total offense and the second a 48-14 whipping at Virginia Tech, a game in which the Eagles had two first downs and 28 yards of total offense after three quarters.

The third road L was a shoulda/woulda/coulda 20-16 affair at Notre Dame in which BC turned it over five times. At least you could say that BC played well enough in general to win that one.

But 6-3 overall and 3-2 in the league is certainly more than anyone expected from a team that started the season with no experience whatsoever at quarterback and then lost the services of a guaranteed first-round draft pick linebacker when Mark Herzlich was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer.

Thus did Coach Spaz find out the difference between being a lieutenant and being the general very quickly.

In addition to being a renowned X-and-O type, Coach Spaz is a 100 percent people guy who coaches from the heart. Whatever he’s selling, they’re buying.

Not that he’s taking any of the credit.

“These kids have taken ownership of the team,’’ he maintains. “They believe in what we’re trying to do, but this is their team. Especially with Mark gone, we’ve had kids step up. Take a kid like [junior linebacker] Mike Morrissey, who’s one of the leaders and who came here as a walk-on.’’

So when backup quarterback Jesse Tuggle and running back Josh Haden just up and bolted the program two weeks ago, Coach Spaz didn’t have to worry about his team’s reaction.

“It was almost like they said, ‘Well, somebody’s injured. They’re not here. Let’s move on,’ ’’ Spaziani says.

That quarterback situation? Dave Shinskie, a 25-year-old freshman who spent seven years playing minor league baseball in the Minnesota and Toronto organizations, has taken firm control of the position.

“He’s light-years ahead of where he came in, and he’s still got light-years to go,’’ Spaziani says. “But he’s got the physical tools.’’

Coach Spaz has even found a pretty good replacement for Herzlich in freshman linebacker Luke Kuechly.

“A gem,’’ he declares. “If I were an alumnus, he’d be everything I want for someone at my school.’’

Can’t speak for all the alums, but I think Coach Spaz has been pretty good for the school himself.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist and host of Globe 10.0 on Boston.com. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.