Good, bad, good. That’s how the last three years have gone for the East Carolina Pirates. And we’re not talking some two-or-three-game swing, we’re talking a mountain range consisting of 8-5, 2-10, and 8-5 again.
But perhaps I need to lighten up, right? It’s just a few flighty years which, while extreme, does happen in sports from time to time, so what’s the big deal? Well, the long and short of it is that these past few years serve merely as a reminder of how turbulent East Carolina football has been not just in recent seasons, but the entire 21st century.
The glaring nature of this problem told me two things upon my first notice of it: 1) It must be humbling to live life as an ECU fan, and 2) a guy could make a darn-good challenge out of predicting how well the team will endure its upcoming slate…or so I thought.
In all actuality, the Pirates have a 2025 schedule that appears surprisingly vanilla on the chaos scale. I mean sure, they’ve got a couple of hazy non-conference opponents, and maybe one in league play as well, but outside of that? They’re either heavy favorites, or heavy underdogs.
For the sake of putting some names to these claims, I see the following foes giving ECU relatively clear shots at victory: NC State (beat the Wolfpack in a bowl last season, and they infamously struggle against Group of 5 competition), Campbell, Coastal Carolina (though the game being in Conway does jostle the certainty a little), Tulsa, Temple, Charlotte, UTSA (similarly to the Chanticleers, I could see the Roadrunners bringing something to the table with their home-field advantage), and FAU.
Again, maybe a couple of fellas in there are “iffy,” but if they’re predominantly so simply because they’re home teams, they obviously haven’t done much to assert themselves as being objectively superior to the Pirates.
And sure, that still leaves several games as likely losses (BYU, Army, at Tulane, Memphis), but if that were to be where the failures ended, East Carolina would be looking to finish 9-4 and cap off the program’s best run in over a decade. If that's the result the fans get, I highly doubt they'll mind.
To wrap things up here, nothing can feel particularly promised with a squad like the Pirates, but this just might be one of the most hopeful outlooks they’ve had on their calendar in a while. So if I ever had to put money on them making some noise, it would be this year.