East Carolina and the Ghosts of the Air Raid

Andrew Bucholtz
July 28, 2011

The saga of Craig James, Mike Leach and Texas Tech has left its impacts all over the map of college football, but one of the most interesting residues of that era is at a small Conference USA school: East Carolina University.

The ECU Pirates have been playing football since 1932 but haven’t found all that much success over time, and are perhaps mostly known to college football fans for having coaches Pat Dye and Skip Holtz pass through on their way to jobs at more powerful schools. Since Holtz’s departure for the University of South Florida after the 2009 season, though, ECU’s undergone a makeover, and it’s one that looks very familiar.

Holtz, son of former Notre Dame coach and current ESPN commentator Lou Holtz, left big shoes to fill. The Pirates won only a combined total of three games over the 2003 and 2004 seasons under former Florida Gators’ defensive coordinator John Thompson, and a change had to be made. Skip Holtz had been a I-AA head coach at Connecticut and had served with his father at South Carolina, but hadn’t coached at the I-A level before, so the Pirates took a risk on him. That gamble paid off.

Holtz’s team won five games in their first year and seven the next with a bowl appearance, then rose to eight wins in 2008 and nine in 2009. With his exit for USF, though, the program appeared in danger of falling back to its previous inauspicious levels.

To avert that, East Carolina elected to go with an alumnus, but they chose a name many wouldn’t have expected. Ruffin McNeill played for the Pirates for four years in the 1970s and 1980s as a defensive back, but had barely even worked as a coordinator. He started his coaching career at Clemson in 1985, looking after the linebackers, and held similar positions at a variety of small schools until 1991. He then headed back to ECU to coach the defensive line, but only spent a year there before moving up to the defensive coordinator job at tiny Appalachian State.

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After brief stints with UNLV and Fresno State, McNeill found a home at Texas Tech in 2000, That year marked a dramatic shift for Texas Tech and college football as a whole, as it was the same year they brought in an eccentric coach who talked about pirates and swords off the field, but looted and pillaged his way to incredible success on the field. That man’s name? Mike Leach.

Leach certainly wasn’t the first coach to bring in incredibly pass-focused offenses, but he did so in a way few had seen before. The “Air Raid”, which Leach developed as Hal Mumme’s offensive coordinator during Mumme’s time at Valdosta State and Kentucky and then brought to Oklahoma before taking the Texas Tech job, is a scheme notably different from most offensive setups. It focuses on often throwing 70 to 75 percent of the time, generally running sets with four receivers and a single back, leaving gaps between offensive linemen and frequently audibling based on the way the defense is set up.

At Texas Tech, Leach fully implemented the system and turned college football on its head; his teams generally weren’t known for big names or high-profile recruits, but their unconventional style made them incredible to watch, and it led to plenty of results. From 2000 to 2009, the Red Raiders went 84-43, made a bowl every year and hit a particular high in 2008, when they went 11-2 with wins over No. 1 Texas and No. 8 Oklahoma State and wound up in a three-way tie for the Big 12 South championship.

That 2008 team owed a lot to McNeill’s influence as well. After serving as linebackers coach for most of the Leach era, McNeill moved up to interim defensive coordinator partway through the 2007 season after the resignation of Lyle Setencich. The team’s defensive rankings shot up under him, jumping from seventh to first in the Big 12 in pass defense, ninth to first in total defence and 10th to fourth in total defense. Leach then hired McNeill as the full-time defensive coordinator before 2008, and the Red Raiders’ defense played a crucial part in their run that season.

McNeill soon got a chance to further prove his ability, but probably not in the way he would have liked. When Leach was first suspended and then fired in December 2009 following the Adam James incident, McNeill took over as interim head coach. In some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable, he rallied the team and led them to a 41-31 victory over Michigan State in the Alamo Bowl. That win certainly raised McNeill’s profile, and probably helped him land the ECU job.

McNeill’s first year at East Carolina was an interesting one. He brought along Texas Tech wide receivers coach Lincoln Riley, who called the offensive plays (Leach’s normal job) in that Alamo Bowl. With the 27-year-old Riley as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, McNeill installed the Air Raid, and the offensive results were spectacular. An offense that was already solid under Holtz put up the 21st-biggest single-season offensive improvement from 2007-10 according to Football Outsiders‘ F+ metrics, and the Pirates scored 36.8 points per game, sixth-highest in the country.

Unfortunately for East Carolina, the defense didn’t turn out as well. Thanks to a combination of injuries, personnel issues, and a complete inability to stop the run, the Pirates conceded 44 points per game. That marked 119th-worst total in the country, and their defense registered the third-worst regression from 2007-10. They still beat some decent teams, such as Tulsa and North Carolina State, but they gave up 76 points to Navy’s plodding triple option and 62 more to unheralded Rice. That brought back memories of some of the lesser years at Texas Tech, when the Red Raiders could score but couldn’t stop anyone. The Pirates still finished 5-3 in conference, second in the East, but were just 6-7 overall after a 50-21 pounding by Maryland in the Military Bowl.

What’s the East Carolina forecast for 2011? Well, it’s not all that negative. The offense rounded into form nicely last season, and returning quarterback Dominque Davis looks to be a great fit for the Air Raid system. They should put up a lot of points and deliver some exciting football. Whether that leads to success or not, though, is likely to depend on what McNeill and defensive coordinator Brian Mitchell can do with the defense.

Unlike Texas Tech, ECU isn’t a power-conference school, so they’re not going to be making too many intrusions on the national stage. Still, the offense alone is already bringing back memories of the ghosts of the Red Raiders. If the man at the top can further channel the past and produce another respectable defense, you won’t want to run into these Pirates.

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The Author:

Andrew Bucholtz