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Late bowl date has pluses and minuses

By Brett Friedlander
©2014 Bonesville.net
All rights reserved.

By the time the East Carolina football team charges out of the tunnel onto historic Legion Field for its Birmingham Bowl game against Florida on Saturday, all but two of the 39 games on the postseason schedule will have already been completed.

So what does a college football player do for that seemingly endless month while waiting for his turn to play?

Watch football, of course.

“I’ll be watching bowl games the whole time,” senior linebacker Brandon Williams said before leaving with the Pirates for Alabama. “I mean, our game isn’t until Jan. 3, so we’ve got a long way to go.”

The latest bowl date in school history comes with its share of both pros and cons for the Pirates.

For Williams and his teammates, the 30-day break between games does offer a chance to get healthy and build up a hunger to play again. But it’s also a long time to just sit around stewing about that heartbreaking Senior Night loss to Central Florida and letting the competitive edge get dull.

While we won’t know until Saturday whether the long layoff will have a positive or negative effect on the Pirates’ play, it’s already been a major boost for a coaching staff that — after some brief flirtation with other jobs by offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley — remains intact for at least another season.

Unlike in-state rival N.C. State, which only got in 11 extra postseason practices before its Dec. 26 Bitcoin Bowl game with UCF in St. Petersburg because of final exams and the early date, ECU got its full complement of 15.

Those extra four workouts might not seem like a lot. But considering the extra reps they provided for backups and redshirts who will be thrust into more prominent roles next season because of graduation and attrition, it’s almost like getting a second spring practice.

And as coach Ruffin McNeill will attest, a team can never get too much practice.

“It’s fantastic having a late bowl. I was excited when I found out when we’d be playing,” said McNeill, who unlike his players, was too busy studying tape on Florida to waste time watching others play their bowls.

“During the summer we plan fall, we plan bowl experiences and from our conference we know which ones we have a chance to be in. We don’t know the exact dates, but we plan practices for each day and we use them all.”

As beneficial as the break has been for the Pirates, it hasn’t been without its downside.

Just last week, two key members of ECU’s defense — All-American Athletic Conference nose tackle Terry Williams and starting free safety Domonique Lennon — were declared ineligible, presumably for academics, and didn’t make the trip to Birmingham. Had the game been played earlier in the bowl schedule, before grades were posted, they probably would have been able to play.

The Pirates will also have to face the Gators without leading ground gainer Breon Allen, whose season and college career ended with a freak knee injury in practice on Wednesday that would have sidelined him regardless the game’s timing.

If there’s any consolation to the key personnel losses, its that ECU isn’t alone in its misfortune. On Wednesday, shortly after Allen was carted off the practice field by trainers, Florida’s interim coach D.J. Durkin announced that disruptive defensive tackle Darius Cummings and return specialist Andre Dubose had been left home in Gainesville for varying off-the-field reasons.

The Gators that did make the trip will have to deal with the distraction of playing for a lame duck coaching staff — a situation that didn’t work out well for either Nebraska or Colorado State this bowl season — against an opponent they might not know or respect — as evidenced by the shirts they were issued on which the Pirates were identified as being from Eastern Carolina.

How motivated they will be to play, especially after being idle for nearly a month, is an even bigger question than with ECU.

The only real certainty is that with no other college games on the schedule Saturday, a lot of people will be watching. Because as Brandon Williams suggested, there’s one thing college football players love to do during bowl season when they’re not playing in a bowl of their own.

And that’s watching football, of course.

Contact Brett Friedlander

PAGE UPDATED 01/01/15 04:18 PM.

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