I would liken the 2009 East Carolina football team to a pirate ship caught in a heavy squall. Water is flooding on every deck, the ship is being tossed back and forth, and it’s all the crew can do to keep the ship out of Davy Jones’ locker. Eventually, the squall will subside and the crew will continue their journey towards pillage and plunder, but for the moment the outlook is bleak. Before you decide to abandon ship, I have a few observations I have made in the past three games on how Skip and crew can right the ship and sail out of the storm.
To start, our offense and defense have been scouted and completely figured out. My dad was able to call our next play every single time from the stands during the game, and his vision is horrible. During the ESPN broadcast, one of the commentators revealed that the Defensive Coordinator of UNC-Chapel Hill talked to him about Pinkney’s tendency to throw to the right, so they were going to pressure him to throw in that direction and have a “wall” of players ready. There is an easy solution to this problem, and it involves going back to the multiple-quarterback system, which I will talk about later.
Another thing I have noticed is that Pinkney is not comfortable with the offensive schemes that we run. Pinkney is a spread-option quarterback and needs that spread field to find his receivers. How many times have we had a single receiver open and ready to make a big play, only to have a quick dump pass cause a loss of yards. Jamar Bryant managed to get open several times during the Chapel Hill game, but Pinkney couldn’t see him. Bring in Pinkney for the spread-option, Harris for the single wing, and Kass and Jordan when you want to try something else, and keep switching between different schemes to keep the defense off balance and force Defensive Coordinators to have to prepare their players for several styles instead of focusing in on just one. In this age of college football, bland offenses are predictable offenses.
The world and the season are not over. ECU was competitive in the West Virginia and Chapel Hill games and in the former, faced a QB that appears to be even better than Pat White was, and in the latter, was a typical ACC referee intentionally botched call away from forcing them to a field goal, or even better, blocking the kick and needing only a touchdown to win the game.
With a few fixes, this ship is still seaworthy, and this season is far from over.
