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SURVEYING THE LANDSCAPE
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Pirate Notebook No. 269
Friday, May 19, 2006
By Denny O'Brien |
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Supply and demand at heart
of ECU enigma
©2006 Bonesville.net
The most discouraging detail for East
Carolina about its upcoming football season has nothing to do with the depth
chart. Save for a couple of question marks, personnel should be the least of
Skip Holtz's concerns.
Ditto for the offensive and defensive
playbooks, neither of which can be measured as one of the program's flaws.
If nothing else, the philosophy that was installed last season provided the
platform for steady improvement.
And there certainly is no lack of star
power to feature in the East Carolina script. Though they are likely to be
under-publicized by most major media outlets, you will be hard pressed to
find a more productive battery than quarterback James Pinkney and receiver
Aundrae Allison.
But if history is any indication, there
should be no shortage of ticket availability for ECU home games. That is my
pessimistic prediction despite what easily is one of the best home slates in
school history, and the fact that East Carolina is on pace to exceed the
record 16,173 season tickets that were sold in 2000.
You'll find just the opposite for a pair of
highly-visible road contests against regional opponents. According to a
recent report from East Carolina, only 3,000 tickets are available to ECU
for its season opener at Navy, and a mere 3,500 for the finale at N.C.
State.
Neither is nearly enough to meet the demand
from the Pirates contingent, which is half the explanation of why the East
Carolina fan base can be described as an enigma. The other half is
exemplified by the number of empty seats in Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium on most
fall Saturdays.
Last season was no exception, with East
Carolina drawing over 35,000 fans only twice last year — and that was barely
— during a season in which the Pirates were resuscitated by an enthusiastic
coach who embraced the school's gridiron tradition and clearly displayed a
strong vision for the program's future advancement.
Now, the typical reaction to such a
statement has been to pinpoint reasons for underwhelming attendance for
individual games. Inconvenient game times, unattractive opponents, proximity
to national holidays, and inclement weather are the most common rationale,
though each excuse holds as much water as the Mojave during a drought.
There are 118 other Division I-A programs
fighting the same battles, and those that leverage football as their
athletics foundation rarely see attendance dip to 80 percent of stadium
capacity. East Carolina experiences it regularly when the opponent is not
one of historical or regional significance.
In my 15-year observance of the program,
this has been the most difficult reality to grasp, and the only explanation
I can offer is this:
East Carolina has a strong core of
passionate diehards whose loyalty and deep pockets are the heartbeat of
Pirates athletics. This group of purple bloods long ago embraced the ideals
of Leo Jenkins, proclaimed East Carolina the state's official Football U.,
and to this day caravans each weekend to any port where the Pirate ship
docks.
They've been waterlogged, sunburned, and
frostbitten — and creatively justify absences from weddings, funerals, and
family reunions when they are in conflict with an ECU game. But at some
point over the past decade, this tightly-knit fraternity of purple
brotherhood began to plateau in numbers at a time when ECU needed it to
explode.
If the East Carolina fan base ever felt a
sense of urgency about the future, it should be now. Given the current
climate of college athletics and the probability of Big East expansion, ECU
is in the most critical period of its football history.
With the home schedules AD Terry Holland
has
secured for the future, any empty seat
could reflect poorly on the Pirates' résumé. ECU's reputation for sending
large contingents to road games and postseason bowls is no doubt a feather
in its cap, but home attendance will play a role in the next round of
conference shuffling and therefore can not be overlooked.
"Without a doubt," Holtz said recently, "I
think especially as a program that has so many big things on the horizon,
with the level that we want to compete, with the new schedules that we've
put together, with the... with what the football program is trying to do
right now.
"It takes a lot of, not only financial
support, but the Eastern North Carolina support in this program. That's the
only way we're going to get there. Everybody can make a difference, and
every one person does count. We're trying to take the program to another
level and build it for the future."
Another translation might be the 'next
level'. After all, that is the advanced position in the college football
pecking order for which ECU fans long have yearned, though you will be
hard-pressed to find any two whose formula for reaching it is the same.
My personal definition is the evolution
into a program with attendance that meets the stadium's capacity against its
lower-profile foes. When that occurs on a regular basis, in my mind Pirates
fans can then be prideful in the school's achievement of having reached the
next level.
That could be tough if Holland quickly
executes on his plans to expand ECU's football palace. Fans could make it
easier by validating his thinking.
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02/23/2007 02:03:04 AM |
