ECU football is bowl eligible for the first time in 7 years. Will it impact recruiting?

After roaming Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium and mingling with coach Mike Houston over a plate of Sup Dogs tater tots doused in Buffalo sauce and ranch last June, C.J. Mims got a good feeling about ECU football.

“I felt like they were on the come-up,” the West Craven defensive line recruit said.

Now, the Pirates have the results to prove it.

ECU’s 30-29 overtime win at Memphis last Saturday clinched a long-awaited return to bowl eligibility, as the Pirates moved to 6-4 on the backs of another comprehensive performance from quarterback and Greenville folk hero Holton Ahlers and a pass breakup on a game-winning two-point conversion attempt.

The victory, ECU’s fourth in the American Athletic Conference and sixth in its last eight games, sealed the program’s first postseason trip since 2014, when coach Ruffin McNeill’s penultimate squad rose as high as No. 18 in the AP Top 25 and finished 8-5 with a loss to Florida in the 2015 Birmingham Bowl.

In his third season at ECU, Houston can also clinch the program’s first winning record and highest win total since 2014 when the Pirates visit Navy for a Saturday conference tilt (3:30 p.m., CBSSN).

In other words, these are exciting times on 1 Ficklen Drive for a team that went 7-14 in Houston’s first two seasons and previously endured a three-year 9-26 stretch under former coach Scottie Montgomery.

And Mims, a three-star 2022 recruit who verbally committed to East Carolina during his official visit, is more than confident in his future team’s continued growth on the field and the recruiting trail.

“We’re just ready to open people’s eyes more,” he said. “To show them that ECU is here to stay.”

‘Not the finished product’

Mims, 17, grew up 30 minutes south of Greenville in Vanceboro and had a family member who worked at ECU. As such, he was a regular at home games during the high-flying McNeill era, a six-year period that saw ECU qualify for three consecutive bowl games, score some memorable Power Five upsets (UNC, N.C. State, Virginia Tech) and mostly weather its Conference USA to American Athletic transition.

“I remember those games being really loud and really packed,” Mims said.

ECU fired McNeill after his 2015 team went 5-7 – still a controversial decision – and promptly hit a nadir under former Duke offensive coordinator Montgomery. In their worst three-year stretch since 2003-05, the Pirates went 9-26 and 4-20 in conference from 2016-18, with 17 of those 26 losses by 20-plus points.

Tasked with rebuilding that faltering program was Houston: a championship-winning coach at FCS James Madison who arrived in Greenville (rather than Charlotte) with a western North Carolina mountain drawl, deep ties to the state and, as he put it Tuesday, an understanding that “you knew what you were getting into, to a degree.”

“It’s been a tough two years,” Houston said, what with a rash of single-score losses, coronavirus pandemic game cancellations and a 4-12 conference record during the 2019 and 2020 seasons.

That made the win over Memphis all the more special for players such as Ahlers, the hometown kid from D.H. Conley who described bowl eligibility as “the best feeling I’ve ever had in my life,” and Bruce Bivens, the fifth-year senior linebacker who’d never seen an airport return crowd like he did Saturday.

“You start this with a plan and a vision, and you kind of map out how you want to do things,” Houston said. “To see it culminating in becoming a program that’s a legitimate contender, that’s what we wanted to build here. (But) we’re not done yet. We’re not finished yet. This is not the finished product.”

‘All about relationships’

That’s a nod toward the tall task ahead of the Pirates: Saturday’s game against a 2-7 Navy team that ECU is yet to beat in AAC play and next week’s home game against undefeated CFP No. 5 Cincinnati will go a long way in determining how much momentum the 6-4 Pirates will carry into their looming bowl season.

But it’s also a wink toward the future, where ECU’s current 15-man recruiting class of 2022 ranks fourth in the AAC and 64th in the country, per 247Sports composite rankings. If those numbers hold, they’d give Houston ECU’s top recruiting class of the internet era (since 2002) in his third full cycle as coach.

Louisiana running back Marlon Gunn Jr., Georgia wide receiver Kaleb Webb and Maryland offensive tackle Jacob Sacra headline a group with an average recruit rating of 82.15 – fourth-best in team history behind 2021, 2019 and 2020 – while Mims is one of three three-star in-staters headed to ECU next fall.

Houston’s staff also isn’t afraid to shoot for top talent. Freshman quarterback Mason Garcia, the presumed heir apparent to Ahlers, became the top commit in program history when he chose ECU over numerous Power Five offers as a three-star quarterback out of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the 2020 cycle.

The Pirates also made a strong push for four-star 2022 J.H. Rose running back Michael Allen, who ultimately chose N.C. State, and last month they landed on the initial top 10 list of K.J. Sampson, a four-star New Bern defensive lineman who ranks among the country’s top 200 recruits in the class of 2023.

Keith Sampson, K.J.’s father and a longtime area coach and trainer, said ECU was “really the first school to start taking interest in K.J.” early in his prep career. Now a junior, Sampson, 17, has visited campus three times and built strong relationships with Houston and assistants Blake Harrell and Donnie Kirkpatrick.

“They’ve been very on point with checking in with him daily if not weekly,” Keith Sampson said of his son, who’s also being courted by Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, UNC and N.C. State. “K.J. doesn’t discredit anyone or just allow the big names influence the process – it’s all about relationships and what’s going to be the best place for him academically, so ECU is one of the schools that we like.”

Mims, who’s known Sampson dating back to their Craven County elementary school youth football days, said his Pirate recruiting pitch to his longtime friend – and anyone else across the state – is simple: “If you want to be a part of a school that feels like family and is right down the road, then ECU’s the place.”

Asked for an example, Mims pointed to last week. His West Craven team had qualified for the NCHSAA 2A playoffs and won its first game over North Lenoir. But the Eagles lost their second-round game to Wallace-Rose Hill last Friday by 35 points, ending Mims’ four-year varsity career on a tough note.

Amid ECU’s win over Memphis that weekend, Mims said Houston was still one of the first people outside of West Craven’s team to shoot him a text (loaded up, as per usual, with pirate flag emojis).

Recalled Mims: “Coach Houston’s really caring … he texted me and he said: ‘Hey, I heard about the loss. Sorry about that, but I heard you had a great game, too – and we’re excited for your next chapter.’”

Now, thanks to ECU football’s current trajectory, it’s one Mims is even more anxious to write.

Chapel Fowler is a recruiting reporter for The Fayetteville Observer and the USA TODAY Network. Reach him by email at cfowler@gannett.com or on Twitter at @chapelfowler.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: ECU football, Mike Houston rising with bowl eligibility, recruiting