Inside the Sun Belt · recap

East Carolina 20, Old Dominion 17: the whole night fit in one quarter

Old Dominion scored 17 points on Saturday night. Every one of them came in the second quarter.

We spent the week writing that this team warms up somewhere around the third quarter. Saturday it warmed up early instead, put 17 unanswered points on the board in fifteen minutes, and then never scored again. East Carolina 20, Old Dominion 17, in front of 21,444 at Ballard Stadium, and The Breakdown watched it from the press box.

The quarter that looked like an answer

It started with a stop. On East Carolina's opening drive, Mario Thompson put a hit on the quarterback that set the tone for the half, and the Pirates went three and out.

The second quarter is when everything the Monarchs will want to keep happened at once. Nathanial Eichner hit a 38-yard field goal. Roughly a minute later, Daevon Iles scooped a Pirates fumble and took it 23 yards for a touchdown. Then Quinn Henicle ran 18 yards for another with 4:14 left. Seventeen unanswered, a 17-7 lead, and Ballard doing the Swag Surf twice in one quarter, student section and band and cheerleaders all in on it.

East Carolina got three back on a 36-yard Noah Perez field goal with two seconds on the clock. That kick mattered more than it looked.

Two passing yards

Here is the number that explains the rest of the night. Henicle went into halftime with 92 passing yards. He finished the game with 94.

His final line was 8-of-20 for 94 yards with no touchdowns and one interception, and the second half accounted for a single completion. We asked in the preview whether his running was the plan or the escape hatch. The answer that showed up Saturday is closer to the second one. He carried 16 times for 73 yards, and plenty of those were scrambles that started as something else.

To be fair to him, this was not a night when anyone threw. East Carolina used two quarterbacks, Emory Williams and Mitch Griffis, and got 103 net passing yards out of the pair. Total offense finished almost exactly even, 276 for the Pirates and 274 for the Monarchs.

The only touchdown pass came from a wide receiver

That is not a line written for effect. It is the box score.

East Carolina's lone offensive touchdown was a double pass in the first quarter, receiver Jason Dickerson throwing 25 yards to Ja'Keith Hamilton. Neither team's quarterbacks threw for a score all night. Both defenses did score, which tells you what kind of game this was.

The one that decided it came 2:24 into the third quarter. Devin Roche had just broken a 41-yard run to put Old Dominion in East Carolina territory, the drive stalled, and Henicle's throw went to Ayden Duncanson, who returned it 67 yards. Tie game, 17-17, and the Monarchs had been on the field for three plays.

The last ten minutes

Perez put East Carolina ahead 20-17 with 9:39 left, and from there the game turned into a question of whether Old Dominion's offense could produce one more drive. It could not.

The Monarchs punted. East Carolina gave the ball back on downs at the Old Dominion 27 with 4:36 remaining after a fake field goal on fourth and eight lost two yards, which was the opening. Old Dominion took over at its own 29 with 4:32 on the clock and went three and out.

The Pirates got the ball at their own 34 with 3:50 left. Old Dominion spent its last two timeouts inside forty seconds trying to save clock, and then on third and six, with a stop ending the drive, a pass interference call on safety Greg Johnson gave East Carolina a fresh set of downs. TJ Engleman, who finished with 99 yards on 16 carries including a 40-yard run earlier in the quarter, took care of the rest. The Pirates knelt it out.

The honest part

Old Dominion's defense scored a touchdown, held East Carolina's quarterbacks out of the end zone entirely, and lost. That is a hard way to spend an evening, and the offense owns it. Two turnovers to East Carolina's one, five of fifteen on third down, and nine penalties for 95 yards, including an illegal touching call that wiped out a 74-yard punt that would have been among the longest in program history.

Roche was genuinely good, 102 yards on 18 carries plus a 25-yard catch. Thompson left with a shoulder problem after a hit and came back. There are pieces here. What there is not, three games in, is a passing game, and at 1-2 that has stopped being a question about adjustment and started being the thing the season rests on.

James Madison comes to Ballard next Saturday at 6. That is a considerably harder night than this one, and the Monarchs will need more than seventeen good minutes.