A narrow loss to a ranked team conjures a vision of what East Carolina football once was

This is still a town that comes to a stop on Saturdays when there’s a football game over by the railroad tracks, still a place where someone has to clean the empty bottles and cans off the grounds of the elementary school on Sunday morning before the kindergartners come back.

East Carolina has always been an outlier, making its bones as an independent, knocking the nearby ACC and SEC teams down a peg at every opportunity, fighting for its place in the wider football world outside Greenville. At a moment when the world of college athletics, and football in particular, is in complete upheaval, it’s increasingly hard to figure out where the Pirates fit.

Some of its old rivals from Conference USA, like Cincinnati and Central Florida, have moved on to bigger and better things while East Carolina has always had to fight for its place in the football world. The season the Pirates are having doesn’t help.

Tulane, 21st in the AP poll and 24th in the CFP rankings, came to town Saturday, very much the chaos agent in the football world the Pirates used to be, and the Pirates jumped out to a 10-0 lead and fought for every yard, and it was hard to figure how a team that could play Tulane to the finest of margins couldn’t find a way to beat Charlotte or Appalachian State or Rice.

For this one afternoon-turned-evening, the days when East Carolina pillaged richer, bigger programs like its mascot namesake, beating Miami at Carter-Finley Stadium in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd, or handing out heartburn and heartache to the same ACC teams that overlooked so much of ECU’s roster, didn’t seem so long ago.

But 1-8 is 1-8, as the Pirates now stand after the narrow 13-10 loss. The fans who stayed to the end were engaged but not enough to fill a stadium expanded, in a burst of optimism, to hold so many more – a vivid and visible reminder that East Carolina football is still struggling to get back to what it once was, yet to truly recover from the outrageous 2015 dismissal of Ruffin McNeill, a purple-blood sacrifice to mollify a few loud-mouthed boosters that had years of repercussions.

The progress of the past two seasons, when Mike Houston appeared to have the program back on solid footing, has proven a mirage as the Pirates have bottomed out this fall. With his predecessor’s recruits and hometown kid Holton Ahlers at quarterback, Houston won seven games in 2021 and eight games in 2022, but after Saturday slipped away, everything feels increasingly desperate in his fifth season after that promising start.

“I know there’s somebody sitting in a recliner somewhere that has pure hate in their heart and they’re going to say all this stuff and they continue to say all this stuff,” Houston said. “I know what our record is. But we have a good program. Those kids are good kids. We have not made plays enough to win those ballgames, but we have a good bunch of tough-ass, hard-nosed kids in that locker room, and they’re going to fight.”

Houston has had success everywhere he’s been – The Citadel, James Madison, the previous two seasons at East Carolina – but the Pirates’ best chance of a second win this season might be a Connor Stalions-induced Michigan forfeit of the Wolverines’ 30-3 win in the opener.

Based on this season’s evidence, unless the Pitt County schools are going to deliver an NFL-prospect quarterback like Ahlers every three years, East Carolina’s future prospects appear bleak. The Pirates used to have a chance at every decent player east of I-95, the only non-ACC option at the bowl-subdivision level. Scottie Montgomery, McNeill’s ill-fated replacement, actually recruited reasonably well, for all the struggles on the field. His players left as winners.

But the landscape has changed, even since then. Now the Pirates have competition at their level from Old Dominion and Charlotte and App State and Liberty and JMU, all of which have caught up or pulled ahead, and East Carolina has so far been unable to press what should be a considerable NIL advantage.

Which is crazy, because being the only horse in a one-horse town should have put East Carolina in prime position to outraise and outspend AAC peers overshadowed in bigger pro markets (like Tulane). There’s no shortage of famous local names slapped on every building in ECU’s athletic district. But the apathy that now greets the program is pervasive, and it’s hard to sell recruits on a half-full stadium when that was once how decades of ECU coaches closed the deal.

Then again, football is hardly alone when it comes to suffering from outbreaks of leadership in Greenville. Jeff Compher, who pulled the trigger on the McNeill firing, was himself fired. An interim chancellor approved the short-sighted 2020 decision to cut swimming and tennis, only for the school to reverse course and reinstate women’s swimming and tennis after being threatened with a no-crap Title IX lawsuit the school had no chance of winning, but not before spending more than $75,000 on legal fees, according to invoices obtained by the News & Observer through a public-records request.

Only in the movie-studio accounting of college sports are partial-scholarship sports like those huge money-losers; at worst, they’re a marginal financial drag that still delivers the kind of intrinsic benefits coaches and athletic directors love to tout – helping young people achieve their dreams, fulfilling the holistic educational mission of the blah blah blah etc. etc. – when they’re begging for money to pay another football strength coach.

Because in the end, this is all increasingly ancillary to football, at a place with East Carolina’s history and tradition more than some others. But devotion can be fleeting, even here, in this what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world. The Pirates are less than a year removed from a bowl appearance, but optimism appears in short supply at the moment, even as Houston pointed at Tulane as an example.

“Everybody left them for dead a few years ago and they’ve come out of it pretty good,” Houston said. “That’s why I say we’re not that far off.”

It’s a pretty big gap, though. Tulane, with Air Force’s loss Saturday, controls its own destiny to play in the Cotton, Peach or Fiesta bowl. East Carolina has three chances to pick up a second win.

As fans filed out of the stadium after watching Tulane run out the clock on a far narrower loss than they ever could have been expected when they arrived, one loudly sang the fight song as a mournful, off-key dirge. No one else joined in.

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