GREENVILLE — East Carolina saw the target Saturday.
Below the gold helmets they wore black britches, and the legs in them moved swiftly and with precision. Central Florida’s firepower was as good as advertised, and the nation’s 13th-ranked team out of Orlando had little trouble dispatching the Pirates 51-28 in nearly empty Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium.
ECU actually flirted with both upset and disaster in the opening 25 minutes of its season. They fumbled it away three times in a row but their defense forced a field goal and two punts. Trailing 13-7 with seven-plus minutes to go before half, the Pirates had a chance to drive to the lead against a team that embarrassed Georgia Tech in Atlanta last week.
Instead, sophomore Dillon Gabriel threw touchdown passes on four straight possessions bridging intermission on the way to 18 completions in a row. Down 41-7 barely five minutes into the third, the Pirates went from hanging in to hanging on against a team about to score half a hundred.
“I have high expectations, and we didn’t live up to that today,” second-year head coach Mike Houston said.
And it had all started so well.
Junior lefty Holton Ahlers, unquestionably ECU’s most valuable weapon, was 5-for-5 on the game’s opening drive in taking a 7-0 lead. He completed a curl, a downfield post to overcome a 15-yard penalty, threw against his body scrambling right as a receiver scrambled with him, and got the payoff dumping to Darius Pinnix out of the backfield.
He and the Pirates looked terrific, primed and ready to spring the upset.
And the Knights, before even running a play, looked like one of North Carolina’s missing high school teams. They had four false start penalties and were on their 5 before lurching forward. When they did, it was in gulps of yardage. The guests had nine penalties in nine minutes — another was declined on Ahlers’ first completion — yet it hardly mattered.
The 60 penalties in 60 minutes pace subsided, as did Ahlers’ hot streak on the other side.
“We really had an opportunity to get some control in the ballgame, and then we had three turnovers,” Houston said. “You’re around midfield, a chance to stick the ball in again, against the team that is considered the best in the league — you’ve got to take advantage there.”
The Pirates probably deserved a better appearance than the final score indicates. But on this day, it did define them. Opportunities while Gabriel and Co. were struggling passed by, and the Knights’ explosive personnel in all three phases eventually caught up.
Two of the four touchdown passes he threw didn’t have a defender close, either by blown coverage or sheer ability to make a play. He finished 32 of 47 with four TD passes and 408 yards. Ahlers was 14 of 29 with a pickoff and three TDs, but none of usual playmakers had more than two catches against man-to-man coverage.
UCF won the turnover battle 4-zip.
“As the game went on, the tempo got us a little,” junior linebacker Xavier Smith said. “We’ve got to do a better job, and make the plays we have to make.”
COVID-19 permitting, the Pirates will go to Georgia State next. Houston insists their defenders grew up a bit on Saturday, with tough lessons but some positive results despite the 632 yards and 51 points.
“I think anybody who saw the game today saw the improvement,” he said.
Playing physical, playing hard — those were not in question. Houston added how much he liked the team’s demeanor in the 24 hours leading up to kickoff some 58 days since fall camp began. It meant even more when Ahlers described every text or video call as a worry, not knowing if it will mean a shutdown because of the virus.
Houston likes what he saw. Smith says they believe they’re going to win every time out, even if Saturday was a matchup of a program with four losses over the last three seasons against a home program with only four wins last season.
“They’re one of the best teams in the country, and in the conference,” Ahlers said. “But we’ve got a good team, too. We’ve got to battle.”
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