By Denny O'Brien
©2010 Bonesville.net
All Rights Reserved.

Of all the names connected to the search to replace departed East Carolina football coach Skip Holtz, it’s hard to ignore Rick Stockstill.

If you were to evaluate the candidates solely by the criteria that athletics director Terry Holland said he will use to name Holtz’s successor, Stockstill seems to be the most prepared to lead the ECU program.

Especially when you compare the résumés.

His work at Middle Tennessee State alone speaks volumes about his credentials. All he has done is take a program with zero tradition in the Football Bowl Subdivision and guide it to the only two bowls it has attended in school history.

That makes him a builder.

When you can recruit like Stockstill, how can you not be a builder? Ask any guru who is paid to closely follow recruiting and you’ll quickly learn that Stockstill is widely recognized as an elite recruiter who is challenged by few in the Southeast.

When your program resides in a state with four schools in BCS automatic qualifier conferences that are run by decorated head coaches, that’s an important trait to have. In most of the head-to-head battles with the Triangle Two, Holtz didn’t win too many in the recruiting war.

Stockstill would give the Pirates a fighting chance. Though he certainly wouldn’t win them all, you can rest assured he would get his share. It’s hardly a stretch to suggest that ECU would attract and sign a different caliber of athlete under Stockstill’s watch than it did while Holtz was the chief salesman.

That’s not an indictment on Holtz’s ability to recruit. It’s just that Stockstill is on a completely different level when it comes to closing the deal.

Perhaps an even bigger selling point with Stockstill is his ability to assemble a staff. When you consider Middle Tennessee's relative lack of resources, it’s downright amazing the caliber of assistants he lured to Murfreesboro.

It starts with offensive coordinator Tony Franklin, one of the more acclaimed architects of the spread offense around. There also is Les Herrin, who served on Art Baker’s staff at East Carolina, and a roster of assistants who have spent time at Clemson, Florida, Ole Miss, South Carolina, Tennessee, and others.

He also has worked with current ECU assistants Phil Petty and Steve Shankweiler, so the possibility of retaining members of Holtz’s staff exists. That certainly wouldn’t hurt continuity, and would help ease the transition.

Then there are the relationships he built at both Clemson and South Carolina, where Woody McCorvey and Rick Minter immediately come to mind. It wouldn’t be out of the question that either might join his staff if hired by ECU.

If there is one negative detail about Stockstill’s career, it’s that he spent a year as the offensive coordinator at East Carolina during John Thompson’s first season. The offense sputtered — that’s putting it nicely — but you can’t pin too much of the Pirates’ offensive troubles on him when you consider his working conditions.

Stockstill was instructed by Thompson to implement an offense that focused on power running and deep passing. He was asked to do this using personnel from the Logan era that was geared more towards a modified West Coast system.

There aren’t too many offensive coordinators, if any, who would be successful given those parameters. Not when you’re asking Marvin Townes to be a physical runner between the tackles, or when Desmond Robinson is your starting quarterback.

Yet there are some who are convinced that this one season was more reflective of his abilities than the four he has spent as a head coach or the 22 others he spent as an assistant. Subtract that one year from his career, and you have the overwhelming fan favorite for the job.

It’s tough to gauge exactly which direction Holland will turn or when he will name Holtz’s successor. All we can do is speculate and make any confirmation that we can on the candidates.

It’s clear that Stockstill is one of them. And he certainly seems like a good choice to lead ECU.