GREENVILLE
East Carolina's football team has either improved or held its ground in Conference USA in each of fifth-year Coach Skip Holtz's previous four seasons.
The Pirates have gone 4-4, 5-3, 6-2 and 6-2 in the league, winning a conference title last season. They are 5-4 overall and 4-1 in C-USA this season, leading the league's East Division by a game over four teams going into tonight's game at Tulsa.
ECU's coaching staff cites the strength of the team's non-conference schedule in recent years to account for its success in the conference, but the coaches have come up with a decidedly non-football way to describe it.
"We're swinging a weighted bat," offensive coordinator Todd Fitch said, giving credit to defensive coordinator Greg Hudson for creating the baseball analogy. "You've got the donut on the bat in the circle, and then you take that donut off and get up to the plate."
The Pirates, with three league games remaining, will next take their hacks at Tulsa (4-5, 2-3), the team they beat in the league-championship game last December. Tonight's game comes after a late-season nonconference loss to then No. 22 Virginia Tech, the latest in a parade of high-profile BCS teams to find themselves on ECU's schedule.
Since Holtz arrived in 2005, the Pirates have faced West Virginia, Wake Forest, Virginia, North Carolina and N.C. State, going 9-14 outside the league including a 1-2 mark in bowl games against South Florida, Boise State and Kentucky. ECU is 1-3 in nonconference games this season but has been close in all but one loss, a 35-20 setback at West Virginia, until late in the second half.
Fitch said that the quality of ECU's nonconference opponents has gone a long way toward slowing down games in the league.
"I think that's one of the reasons Coach Holtz's teams have been good in the conference every year -- progressively gotten better," he said. "Sometimes it's frustrating playing those teams because it's such a challenge for our kids."
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