Last Dec. 5 in Greenville, Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium rocked with delight after its primary occupant finished off Houston to win the first-ever Conference USA championship game staged at East Carolina University.

The Pirates' win that day marked their second straight C-USA football title and served as a prelude to the team's fourth straight bowl trip last January. It also put ECU athletics in the most desirable position imaginable in terms of potentially selling itself to a different conference in the future.

Exactly 10 days later, in the chill of pre-Christmas, crane operators began plucking away pieces of the stadium's long-standing scoreboard behind the east end zone, and so began an effort to launch ECU even further into the NCAA mainstream.

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