CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- Manny Asprilla doesn’t want to hear it.

“I think we’re playing the best we’ve played on the back end,” his coach, Steve Addazio, said on Monday. “I think Manny played arguably one of his very best football games here at Boston College.”

With a team-high 10 tackles, one for a loss, and a pass breakup in the Eagles’ 33-31 win over Virginia Tech, Asprilla earned ACC defensive back of the week honors -- the senior’s first career ACC accolade.

Asked about the plaudit and his coach’s praise, Asprilla said it’s nice to hear but doesn’t mean much beyond that. Just as he has trained himself to do in games, Asprilla puts whatever happens -- positive or negative -- behind him and moves on to the next thing.

“I can’t stop right there,” he said after practice Wednesday. “I don’t want to have that be the height of whatever I’ve done in my life. I want to keep going from there.

“I don’t want to label that as the best game I’ve ever had because I expect to play better in the future.”

The Everett, Massachusetts, product calls football “the escape.”

“It’s like being away from the world when I’m on the field,” Asprilla said. “There’s a lot of problems in the world -- there’s world problems, social problems, school problems, personal problems. But when you’re on the field, none of that matters.

“All that matters is what’s going on right there at the moment. Everything that’s ever happened in the past, or what’s going to happen in the future just doesn’t matter. Nobody’s thinking about it. All you’re thinking about is what I’m going to do next on the field.”

So far in his senior season, the 5-foot-11, 183-pound corner is fifth on the Eagles with 41 tackles (31 solo). He leads all BC defensive backs with four tackles for a loss and nine passes broken up.

The Eagles have improved from the nation’s No. 113 pass defense (allowing 268.3 yards a game) in 2013 to stand at No. 59 (allowing 223.6 yards a game) ahead of Saturday’s game against Louisville (7:15 p.m. ET on ESPN2).

Asprilla is a three-year starter despite being told most of his life he’s too small, he’s not good enough and he’ll never make it at the Division I level.

To hear Asprilla tell it, that’s a common story among those in the BC defensive backfield.

“We want to prove to the world that we’re great players,” he said. “People looked down on us basically. Nobody wanted us. That’s why we’re here. We just want to show that we should have been picked up by someone else. A lot of us came here with different stories -- unhappy, this wasn’t their No. 1 choice.

“I wanted to go to many places, but they told me I was small or they told me, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll think about it,’ but they didn’t take action. When BC took action, I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to go with the first school that feels like I can play, that believes in me.’ That’s what I did.”

Spurned by top choices UConn and Maryland, Asprilla landed close to home at BC. And though there have been plenty of tough times since his freshman year in 2011 -- as Asprilla and the Eagles went just 4-8 in 2011 and 2-10 in 2012 -- he may be hitting his stride in 2014.

He certainly hasn’t lost the chip he carries on his shoulder, the one he developed at Everett High when other, more talented kids failed to land Division I offers and passed the negativity they developed on to him.

“They would say I can’t do it because they couldn’t do it,” he said. “And that always stuck in the back of my mind. And so when I got here, they still said again I can’t do it because of my size or because of anything.

“Anything that [critics] see as a flaw, I don’t see it as a flaw -- I see everything as a way to make myself better. It creates a whole new opportunity for me. A flaw just means that’s something you need to work on.”

And though he’s constantly motivated by his past, on the field he’s never looking back -- he keeps his eyes on what’s in front of him.

Jack McCluskey is an editor for ESPN.com and a frequent contributor to ESPNBoston.com. Follow him on Twitter @jack_mccluskey.