A Message To The Pirate Nation
December 03, 2009 | Football
Dec. 3, 2009
The main competitive goal of our athletic program is to WIN CHAMPIONSHIPS on the field and in the classroom. While it can be interesting and entertaining to speculate on bowl opportunities and rumors about who will play in each bowl, we cannot allow such discussion to impact the only way we can control our own destiny - by earning the Conference USA Championship and the opportunity to represent our conference in the AutoZone Liberty Bowl.
The selection to other bowls is determined by NCAA rules, each bowl's interest in various teams, geographic location and the number of open bowl slots on a national level. In addition, the factors below have to be considered:
The only thing we can control is who will win the 2009 C-USA Championship Game and earn a spot in the AutoZone Liberty Bowl. The loser of that game will play in the best available bowl at that time, based on location and opponent as determined by the C-USA office.
Two C-USA pre-Christmas bowls have already been assigned - SMU tied for the West Division title and beat the East Division Champion (ECU) in head-to-head competition, thus earning their Sheraton Hawai'i Bowl opportunity. Also, placing UCF in the St. Petersburg Bowl makes sense if C-USA wants to keep that great bowl location against a BCS opponent. C-USA has an obligation to sell a large number of tickets this year as the 2008 C-USA representative was unable to sell many tickets because of the travel distance for its fans.
If ECU does not earn the right to play in the Liberty Bowl, then we will be placed in one of three remaining C-USA bowls. There will be marginal advantages and disadvantages to any of those three bowls, just as there are marginal advantages and disadvantages for even the Liberty Bowl (making the same rather long trip two years in a row) and the Hawai'i Bowl (very few members of the Pirate Nation can go with the team).
We need to remember that every bowl provides one more opportunity to leave the field as winners or losers. We need only look back to the 2007 Hawaii Bowl to see how a program can take advantage of such opportunities.
When the Pac 10 could not fill the 2007 Hawai'i Bowl, C-USA was willing to pay for ECU to travel to Hawai'i to play a Top 25 team even though we did not win the divisional title that season. Our team took advantage of the Christmas "gift" from C-USA by beating Boise State in Honolulu and I believe that momentum carried over to victories against even more highly-ranked opponents in the first two games of the 2008 season.
Also, Chris Johnson's bowl-record total all-purpose yardage performance propelled him into first-round draft status and he has also continued to take advantage in the NFL because of the opportunity that C-USA provided in 2007 against a highly-respected opponent.
We have a choice this week - we can focus on winning a championship or we can choose to focus on the wrong thing, like the disadvantages of a bowl we might attend as losers even before the championship game is played.
We have an opportunity to do what no ECU team has ever done in our 30 years of Division I-A play - win back to back C-USA championships, record four consecutive winning seasons and earn four consecutive bids to bowl games.
The weather report indicates it might be even tougher to complete passes against our defense so .................
GO PIRATES!
TH
