East Carolina Pirates: The Treacherous Road to the Bowls
The East Carolina Pirates may have beaten UConn, but they have a lot of work to get to six wins.
It was rough there for awhile, but the East Carolina Pirates came out of a five game tailspin last week. They dismantled UConn in a performance that is hopefully prologue for the last few games of the season because East Carolina is in a dangerous position right now.
They sit at 3-5. Bowl eligibility is gained at six wins. This means the Pirates must take three of their final four games in order to make a postseason appearance to cap off the year. That quest begins with Tulsa this weekend.
Tulsa and SMU are the next two games. Both teams feature high scoring offenses but both also feature nondescript defenses. The Pirates just need to play their style and get one more defensive stop than those two teams in order to get the first two wins needed for the bowl counter.
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The next two weeks is where it gets tricky. They face Navy and then Temple to end the year. The Midshipmen run an option style that overran the Pirates defense last year when it had a couple of better pieces. Keenan Reynolds may be gone but the style has not changed. The benefit with the Midshipmen is that their recruiting doesn’t give them the same kind of athletes that other college programs have.
This is not a knock on Navy or the bravery of our future warfighters, but there should be an athletic difference on the field. This is probably most evident in speed, which is why the Pirates probably have a better chance to get this win than the one against Temple a week later. Isaiah Jones will be looking to get open in this one.
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If all else fails, the Pirates will have to try and clinch against Temple the last week of the season. The Owls have been riding a three year run that the Pirates saw the beginning of. Their lone conference loss was to Memphis. They beat South Florida by sixteen.
My advice to the Pirates is beat Navy and not try to throw it all together in Philly the next week. The chance of going to a bowl game could be riding on a razor’s edge.