Say Good Bye To Old Dowdy-Ficklin

Yesterday cranes started taking down the score board at the ECU Football stadium. Next year ECU fans will return to a horseshoed stadium with 7,000 more seats. This will up the capacity to more than 50,000.

So far for the Liberty Bowl game against Arkansas in Memphis the Pirates have sold 4,500 tickets. When the football stadium is fully renovated the Pirates will seat 60,000 putting them on par with Tar Heels and Wolfpack.

I'm just throwing this out there for thought. Just maybe the Pirates one day might replace Boston college in the ACC. Would make sense to me. BC joined the ACC because they felt jilted in the bowl selections. Where are they going again this year? California another low pay heavy on expenses bowl game for the Eagles.
I don't think the ACC has turned out for BC like it was intended.

Look at their travel cost compared to everyone else in the league. They are stuck up in the Northeast at least 300 miles from their closes conference foe Maryland. Maryland have six conference foes within 300 miles. Virginia Tech and even Miami have natural rivals in the ACC but not BC.

Back in the old days when ECU was in the Southern conference with William and Mary, Richmond,Marshall,Appalachian State, Western Carolina and Furman that was a good league.

Look at what the others have done when Pat Dye convinced ECU that division one was the only way. App State has three national titles, I think Marshall has had at least two and Richmond has one. If ECU had of stayed in that league they may very well already have a 75,000 seat stadium and every conference would have been begging them in the 1990's to join their conference.

When all the expansion is finished in Greenville there will be no reason that ECU cannot be part of a home and home series with anybody.

I know this is not about sports but looking at the community as a whole was there ever a better decision for Eastern North Carolina than to put a medical school at ECU?

Today all of the small community hospitals all over Eastern North Carolina are tied in to the medical school. I know they have a cancer center named after him But Leo Jenkins ought to have a monument some where in Greenville.

I was on the UNC systems web site recently and ECU is third as far as largest institution in the UNC system just a few hundred behind Carolina and a couple of thousand behind State.

The 1960's ECU was still East carolina teachers College. They have come a long way since then.