WRAL Sports Fan

Is this forum really necessary?

There have been a total of five posts on this forum in the past eight weeks. Two of them about the possibility of ASU joining C-USA and two about the Iowa State - Kansas basketball game.

This doesn't speak well about the support in this area for the Pirates, and undermines Holland's efforts to promote ECU as a desirable conference partner for BCS leagues. By my count, there don't seem to be more than four or five of us making serious posts here. Where are all the Pirate fans?

RE: Is this forum really necessary?

I don't see how you equate no forum threads to little ECU support in the Triangle area. WRAL does a HORRIBLE job reporting on ECU sports, most of the time they don't post the article a day or two late, or not at all, so I think that deters lots of ECU supporters from posting on here. If you want to talk about ECU sports check out Hoist the Colours (http://www.hoistthecolours.net).

There are probably just as many serious posts here as there are on States, UNC, and Dukes, where every single post is just a stupid insult toward another school.

RE: Is this forum really necessary?

I certainly agree there is a much higher percentage of serious commentary here. 90% of the posts on the three main threads are adolescent garbage.

But I think we may have a chicken and egg thing going on with WRAL. Their stories are aimed at what they perceive as their audience. This forum doesn't help the perception that there is a sizable base of support this far west of Greenville. So just like they don't publish a lot of stories about UVa or South Carolina, or Appalachian State, they don't give as much coverage to the Pirates as we might like to see.

That creates a downward spiral. They don't publish, we don't comment, so they publish even less. If the only time we post in large numbers is when ECU plays either State or UNC, it's not unreasonable for them to assume that those schools are the catalyst for the interest, not ECU.

RE: Is this forum really necessary?

There have been a total of five posts on this forum in the past eight weeks. Two of them about the possibility of ASU joining C-USA and two about the Iowa State - Kansas basketball game.

This doesn't speak well about the support in this area for the Pirates, and undermines Holland's efforts to promote ECU as a desirable conference partner for BCS leagues. By my count, there don't seem to be more than four or five of us making serious posts here. Where are all the Pirate fans? 

- Posted by Ken D.

Boneyard banter, hoist the colors, theres a few more....but is this the only website you use to talk about your team?? Why waste your time talking with trolls, find a website just dedicated to YOUR team.

BTW This is a Raleigh news site, not a Raleigh sports talk website, why would pirate fans bother posting on a Raleigh news site?

RE: Is this forum really necessary?

There have been a total of five posts on this forum in the past eight weeks. Two of them about the possibility of ASU joining C-USA and two about the Iowa State - Kansas basketball game.

This doesn't speak well about the support in this area for the Pirates, and undermines Holland's efforts to promote ECU as a desirable conference partner for BCS leagues. By my count, there don't seem to be more than four or five of us making serious posts here. Where are all the Pirate fans? 

- Posted by Ken D.

Boneyard banter, hoist the colors, theres a few more....but is this the only website you use to talk about your team?? Why waste your time talking with trolls, find a website just dedicated to YOUR team.

BTW This is a Raleigh news site, not a Raleigh sports talk website, why would pirate fans bother posting on a Raleigh news site? 

- Posted by NC4Me252

Which gets back to my original question. Is the Pirate's Cove smack talk forum really necessary? Or the Caniac's Corner or Panther Talk, for that matter?

In fact, why have more than one smack talk forum? The Wolves Den isn't just for State fans to talk among themselves. You don't talk smack to your own fans.

What would be nice is to have one forum just for smack talk (which by definition isn't serious or adult) and another forum for actual discussions about sports topics of local interest.

RE: Is this forum really necessary?

I hear you Ken, the only time we the fans of ECU really use this forum is for football and not much else but I do stop by and check to see if there is something posted

RE: Is this forum really necessary?

Go ECU!

RE: Is this forum really necessary?

Well ECU is the 2nd/3rd largest public university in North Carolina. Those 28k students come from all over the state. I think the difference in the number of posts for ECU and State, Duke and Carolina is related to the number of sports fans that have no academic connection to one of the schools. Most all the Pirate fans in the Piedmont and western extremes of the Coastal Plain are fans because of a direct connection to the University. Either you went there, your child went there, you are taking distance learning classes from there or sometime in the past someone with one or more of those connections loaded you up in the SUV and hauled you to an ECU football game when you were a kid. Naturally if you have no connection like that to a school down east you are going to pick one of the schools closer to where you live or one that gets lots of media attention.

But with that said you also have to take into consideration the second team fans. Here I think you can explain some of tv ratings that ECU gets in the triangle, triad and Charlotte areas. Plenty of people will watch ECU play a football game on TV even if their primary team is State, Duke or Carolina. Lots of people will site ECU, Wake, or ASU as teams they pull for in addition to their favorite team. Lots of people grow up a Carolina, Blue Devil or Wolfpack fan but most of us don't attend those three schools. We go to ASU, UNCC, FSU, ECU, UNCP, etc. etc. Then we end up either converting (ECU, ASU) or having two teams especially if your school doesn't field a big time football program. So I think Holland still has a good argument for ECU having statewide support.

RE: Is this forum really necessary?

No it's not

RE: Is this forum really necessary?

There are many Pirate fans all up and down the east coast. We also have a very large contingent here in Washington, DC. Go Pirates!

RE: Is this forum really necessary?

With an ECU graduate son, I try to give the Pirates their props when I can. As a matter of fact, just posted to below as a retort to a Pack poster that said no one can make a logical argument against NCSU being the best football program in the state since 1998. [from The Wolves Den, "Jones and Paige-Moss..." thread].

I am of the opinion that ECU can make a logical argument over the aforementioned timeframe...especially when considering NCSU has had zero conference championships or runner-ups. Pirate Nation feel free to chime in ;-)

Verbatum...page 3, post 5.

And nobody is saying that State is a powerhouse like Alabama, just that State's football program is clearly better than UNC's or any other program in the state.

Again, a logical argument to the contrary simply cannot be mounted.
- Posted by Juicy E Fruit 

That said, UNC can not claim to be better in said window...nor can the ACC claim very much in the same timeframe wrt consistent national (BCS) football relevance. 

- Posted by kato_karma.01

Okay, again...is that all you've got? I did reference the logical argument at least a couple of times previously...so is that all you've got? One error on my part?

You are right: UNC cannot claim to be better. And neither can any other program in the state. Since I made the claim, I will stick with it. Not even Wake. Wake can claim to have one season in that time frame that certainly was better than any of ours, but overall, in that time frame, they are NOT, under any measure of sustained success, better than State.

Jim Grobe, for all the good times he's had at Wake, is 68-67 there.
He's been to 5 bowls, and Caldwell went to one in that time frame.

Now Grobe DID win the ACC one year, and that's nothing to sneer at, but that's it.
He gets a lot of credit for making ANY bowls on a semi-consistent basis at a school like Wake, but once you eliminate the "that's really good at a school like Wake" factor, all you have left is the records.

And Wake has less bowls, less winning seasons, less wins total. So I don't see any logical argument that Wake has been better since 1998 than State.

However, they HAVE been better than UNC, lol. That's a much closer argument there, but Wake wins that one.  

- Posted by Juice E Fruit

Seems the wolffies are conveniently forgetting ECU (see page 5, post 1).
Since Mack left UNC, the Pirates' won/loss is not quite as good as NCSU's, but they've gone 3-3 heads-up against the Pack (including the most recent match-up). Add ECU's advantages in conference championships (2 to 0) and runner-ups (4 to 0) and bowl appearances (10 to 9), then a logical argument can be made that they are the better program in the referenced timeframe. 

- Posted by kato_karma.01