SUMMERS: Devil is in the details for East Carolina's football team

The world was watching, and they were so close.

The East Carolina football team once again swam into the snarl of teeth that is the non-conference schedule as plotted by ECU athletics director Terry Holland.

With an ESPN national audience at its disposal, ECU football was prompted for an answer to visiting Virginia Tech on Thursday night time and again, but the response in the grand scheme of things and the grade on the performance, was, well, incomplete.

Disappointed were those who banked on last season's ECU upset of the Hokies as a blueprint for winning more than a year later.

Let down were those who believed a sold-out student section and black T-shirts were the catalyst for yet another upset.

It was remarkable, in fact, in Thursday night's 16-3 Virginia Tech win inside Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium how seemingly underwhelming of a win it was by the Hokies. There was no blowout, no emphatic statement from the measuring-stick program from the vaunted Atlantic Coast Conference.

Again, it was the fine details which revealed the difference between the teams and nothing more.

ECU seemingly had no trouble scoring on the Hokies in the first half as Dominique Lindsay bounced and bounded 20 yards into the Tech end zone, but a holding penalty held the Pirates back. Later in the first half, Giavanni Ruffin's fumble deep in Tech territory allowed the game to stay close.

Familiar miscues, in other words, served as great separation evidence.

With another installment of an ACC rivalry game in the books, the question looms. What if?

Seemingly everyone on this side of the conversation wants to know what would happen, right now, if conference expansion happened again in college athletics. Where would ECU land?

The Big East? The ACC?

What kind of national profile does playing such a non-conference slate build?

If Thursday's game is accurate, ECU is ever closer to the ACC's kind of spotlight, but only if the word spotlight means being in a bigger league with bigger money to spend and a far smaller share of the actual beam of light cast upon the athletic program itself.

The measuring stick is always out, and the Pirates did not quite measure up this time around. For those in search of instant satisfaction, it wasn't a passing grade.

But those who understand that even Virginia Tech — which came into Thursday night with nothing left to play for this season but pride — has its own set of tough results by which to measure progress can perhaps gauge where ECU might fit into a new conference expansion.

Those who expected ECU to robotically beat the same teams the Pirates beat a season ago must think the program needs a change, but as always, the only recipe for success is dominating your own digs.

That means a win next Sunday at Tulsa measures a good deal more than a loss to Virginia Tech last Thursday.

So while the Pirates are undoubtedly close to that elusive next step, they might still be a Conference USA title or two away.

ECU has long since grown accustomed to playing games with all sorts of cameras following the Pirates on the football field.

The thing keeping them from a full share of the national spotlight, however, is the fine print those cameras reveal.

Contact Nathan Summers at nsummers@reflector.com or (252)329-9595.