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Schools urging fans to
trek to Birmingham
From staff and
electronic reports
©2006 Bonesville.net. All rights reserved.
(A story published in The
[Lakeland, FL] Ledger
provided some of the material in this article.)
East Carolina's Skip Holtz
is not the only coach exhorting his team's supporters to pack their bags
and take a trip to Birmingham, AL, just before Christmas.
While South Florida coach
Jim Leavitt's primary objective in next Saturday's PapaJohn.com Bowl in
Birmingham is beating ECU, he is also paying attention to the importance
of the Bulls having a strong fan presence at the game, according to an
account in The (Lakeland, FL) Ledger.
The paper reports that
Leavitt is encouraging Bulls fans to take an interest in the game and
travel to Legion Field in greater numbers than the 5,000 or so USF
followers that made their way to Charlotte for last year's Meineke Car
Care Bowl. That outing versus N.C. State was South Florida's first-ever
postseason trip.
Leavitt wants to see more
Bulls fans in Birmingham in order to establish the program as a
desirable participant for other bowls in future years. The number of
people that follow a team to a bowl can be an important factor in determining
which postseason games — particularly non-BCS bowls — might consider
extending an invitation to the team in the future.
At the present time,
according to The Ledger story, bowl executives are leery of South
Florida because it has virtually no track record in this regard.
The report — which
observed that the interest in South Florida's program is difficult to
gauge even in the Tampa Bay area — noted that USF's regular season
ticket sales have pretty much stayed flat the past few years despite the
fact the Bulls have been moving steadily up the college football ladder.
"It's important how people
look at us,'' Leavitt.
East Carolina athletic
officials and Holtz began appealing to Pirate partisans more than a week
ago to descend en masse on Birmingham, though the school's fan base
already has a reputation for showing up at bowl games as well as at
regular season road games against regional rivals.
In a recorded phone
message dialed out to a large number of boosters after ECU accepted its
invitation to the bowl, Holtz pitched ticket sales, urging fans to
“Please help us pack historic Legion Field with purple and gold, sending
a strong message to our Big East Conference opponent, the University of
South Florida, that the Pirates have the best fans in the country."
ECU has appeared in six
bowl games since 1990 and has customarily been accompanied on those
excursions by more fans than those that trekked to Charlotte last season
to cheer on the Bulls against the Wolfpack.
Since a New Year's Day
appearance in 1992 in the Peach Bowl in Atlanta, East Carolina's
subsequent bowl destinations — Memphis twice (Liberty Bowl), Mobile
twice (Mobile Alabama Bowl, GMAC Bowl) and Houston (GalleryFurniture.com
Bowl) — have been a greater distance from Greenville than the Dec. 23
matchup with the Bulls at Birmingham's Legion Field.
According to at least two
sources, ECU had sold about 6,000 tickets through Wednesday but is
hoping fans will step up and increase that total.
In a way, South Florida
could be a victim of its own quick success after establishing its
football program from scratch several years ago.
"I think part of it is the
newness of the program,'' Leavitt was quoted as saying in The Ledger
article. "And we haven't gone to bowls before, even when we were
eligible. And some schools just travel well.
"We had about 5,000 in
Charlotte. I'd like to see 7,000, 8,000 in Birmingham. Can we improve?
That's what I'd like to see."
Leavitt refused to buy
into the notion that the timing of the bowl — two days before Christmas
— will keep people home.
"I don't think you can
have excuses,'' the USF coach said. "It's only about an eight-hour drive
(from Tampa to Birmingham.) You have time to go to the bowl and still be
home before Christmas.''
According to Google Maps,
the travel time by car from Greenville to Birmingham is about 12 hours,
the second-shortest travel duration to an East Carolina bowl destination
since the school entered Division I-A almost 30 years ago.
For many of their team's
previous bowls, ECU fans logged extensive road time — about 15 hours to
Mobile (1999 and 2001), 16 hours to Memphis (1994 and 1995) and 25 hours
to Houston (2000.)
Atlanta's
since-demolished Fulton County Stadium, the site of the Pirates'
1992 meeting with N.C. State in the Peach Bowl, was less than 10
hours from Greenville by car. Between 20-25,000 East Carolina
fans are believed to have been present for that game, though a
significant number of them acquired tickets from sources other
than the ECU ticket office.
In 1978, Pirate supporters
drove more than 20 hours to attend the team's first-ever I-A
postseason game, the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, LA.
PAGE UPDATED
02/23/07 11:33 AM.
©2006 Bonesville.net and
other Publishers. All rights rights reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Game accounts and
statistics may be compiled from various sources, including but not limited
to staff, East Carolina University, opposing team and Conference USA reports.
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