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Bad mojo marks first half of Pirates’ season
I’m convinced the ECU Athletics Director Terry Holland has put the bad mojo on this team.
Apparently no one, not even Mr. Holland can’t just monkey around with the football scheduling gods, give up a game against what turned out to be a sad NCSU team and start makin’ deals with the Double-A devil without some sort of gridiron karma biting us on the collective behind.
I should’ve recognized it earlier. The whole App experience was as weird, unnatural even. With the ironic hoisting of the “No Quarter” flag, where we promptly laid down and tried our best to lose, something may have told me then. I just refused to listen.
How else could you explain the mystery surrounding this PIrate football team? What else could have made the injuries to our defensive backfield before they even worked up a sweat in Game One? How else could you explain the resulting defensive adjustments that made us look like saps against West Virginia and Chapel Hill? The subsequent malaise even in the wins over UCF and Marshall? And finally, the spate of Texas-sized mistakes that cost us the game in Big D?
OK, so maybe it isn’t karma, just kismet that finds us where we are today with this Pirate program. Maybe we all were looking to last year’s start and wishfully thinking that was our natural spot in the college football pecking order. Instead here we stand, at 3-3 through the first half of the season, with homecoming a few days away and four of our last six at home. We’re halfway into the forrest metaphorically speaking. The question is now about how we find a way out.
We followed a similar course last year, batting .500 through the first half of the season. But we recovered nicely to go 6-2 over the remaining games. Picked a Championship banner to boot. Once we got over giving away the Liberty Bowl to Kentucky, everyone was all warm and fuzzy again.
But still I can’t help but to think back to the last time that the preseason expectations were this high for a Pirate football team. Steve Logan’s 2001 team was coming off an impressive 8-4 year and a bowl win over Texas Tech. We had a senior quarterback in David Garrard and in that heady summer, a schedule that looked to fall like dominos. We were 3-3 after six games that year too. That team faded down the stretch and capped the season with the historic meltdown against Marshall in the bowl game.
I point those two examples because it illustrates just how much football is yet to be played and how dramatically our fortunes could turn.
This team has problems on offense and on special teams that need to be resolved, but we really shouldn’t let the debacle in Dallas obscure the bigger picture. I’m not sure why, but I still feel like this team has the talent to repeat as CUSA champs. Maybe it’s the irrepressible human spirit. Maybe it’s just that the Pirates have hit bottom and are ready to live up to their potential.
Or maybe the football gods have decided we’ve paid our dues.
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