ECU offense too much for Tar Heels

GREENVILLE — It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

The East Carolina football team might not know this saying too well.

Senior ECU running back Breon Allen — who ran for a career-high 211 yards— sure didn’t Saturday at Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium.

Senior Pirate quarterback Shane Carden handed the ball off to Allen inside the North Carolina football team’s territory in the beginning of the fourth quarter. Allen turned the corner and kicked into high gear, sprinting right until a UNC defensive back finally managed to bring him down.

One run for 16 yards.

It might not have been as impressive as some of Allen’s other carries on the evening, but it meant the most.

With the rush, Allen solidified a dominant performance from ECU’s no-huddle offense, which sprinted past the Tar Heels all day long in a 70-41 rout. The 16 yards broke a 10-year record, set by Utah in 2004 with 669, for the most yards UNC has allowed in a single game in program history. The Pirates finished the evening with 789 yards of total offense, and the 70 points are also the most UNC has ever allowed, a record previously set by Louisville in 2005 with 69.

“Any way you cut it, there’s nothing good about it, you know?” coach Larry Fedora said. “Nothing I can say that’s going to make it any better or to ease, take the edge off of it. I mean, we got it handed to us tonight.”

In 2013, Carden showcased the speed that the Pirate offense thrives off of in ECU’s 55-31 defeat of the Tar Heels at Kenan Memorial Stadium.

But Carden displayed Saturday that the ECU offense can go that much faster.

ECU capped off eight of its nine offensive touchdown drives in fewer than two minutes and 15 seconds. Carden threw for 438 yards and four touchdowns, adding two rushing touchdowns to his stat line.

In addition to his 211 yards, Allen rushed for two touchdowns, including a 44-yard carry he took to the end zone on 3rd and 28 in the second quarter to give ECU a 28-20 lead.

“They did the same thing (as last year) and we didn’t execute,” said redshirt junior linebacker Jeff Schoettmer. “They were really killing us, you know. You face adversity like that, you gotta be able to bounce back and we didn’t do that.”

Meanwhile, the North Carolina offense struggled for the majority of the evening. The two teams traded the lead for the entire first quarter, but both of UNC’s first two touchdowns came off of trick plays.

Sophomore wide receiver Ryan Switzer tossed a touchdown to fellow redshirt junior wideout T.J. Thorpe with 9:43 remaining in the first, before UNC scored on a fake field goal when senior placeholder Tommy Hibbard found wide open senior tight end Eric Albright nearly three minutes into the second. 

Redshirt junior starting quarterback Marquise Williams received pressure from ECU’s front seven from the beginning, going just 14-for-25 with 127 yards, no touchdowns and one interception. Backup quarterback Mitch Trubisky also played several drives. The redshirt freshman went 8-for-16 with 103 yards and one touchdown.

“Just couldn’t find a rhythm. We gotta find that little spark we’re missing,” Williams said. “We need to be the power offense that we should be — running the tempo. We just gotta keep pushing and be hungrier than we were on the offensive side of the ball.”

Neither Williams nor Trubisky could get in the groove enough to overcome the flow of ECU’s offense. The Pirates took a 21-20 lead five minutes into the second quarter that they wouldn’t relinquish for the rest of the game.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the fourth quarter that Allen carried the ball for 16 yards to erase the record for the most yards UNC’s defense has ever surrendered to an opponent.

UNC will see that play, and many others like it, while watching game film Sunday.

“This is one of the games I want to burn (the game film) now,” Thorpe said.

This run from Allen won’t be mentioned in the UNC record books. Neither will the rushing touchdown from backup ECU quarterback Kurt Benkert in the fourth quarter. As the crowd chanted “We want 70!” with less than eight minutes left to play, Benkert’s four-yard rush got the Pirates to the coveted 70 points.

The numbers 789 and 70 will be inked into the record books, though. They’ll haunt UNC for quite some time, thanks to ECU’s fast offense.

On Saturday, Allen, Carden and the rest of the ECU attack showed sometimes to win the marathon, you have to first win the sprint.