Head coach Kalani Sitake's BYU football team will be well-rested and mostly healthy Saturday when it travels across the country for its third game of the 2025 season.
The Cougars ' opponent will be confident, hungry, and eager to prove that it can compete with and defeat a foe from a Power Four conference.
The East Carolina Pirates of the American Conference showed they will be ready for the 5:30 p.m. MDT nonconference showdown on ESPN2 by walloping Coastal Carolina 38-0 in Conway, South Carolina, on Saturday. But even before that, the Cougars (2-0) knew they would have their hands full against the Pirates (2-1) of Greenville, North Carolina .
"The quarterback ( Katin Houser ) is really good, maybe one of the best throwers we will see all year," said BYU defensive ends coach Kelly Poppinga on his "Coordinators' Corner" show last week. "Then he has a bunch of weapons around him, a bunch of fast, speedy receivers. … It is a great atmosphere out there, too."
Houser, a 6-foot-3, 225-pound senior from Anaheim, California, threw for 293 yards and two touchdowns against the Chanticleers and is on the Manning Award Watch List. He played two years at Michigan State before transferring to ECU before the 2024 season.
East Carolina opened the season with a 24-17 loss at North Carolina State before drubbing FCS Campbell 56-3, meaning the defense directed by first-year defensive coordinator Josh Aldridge has given up just three points in his last two games.
North Carolina State (3-0) has since defeated Virginia and Wake Forest.
"They should have won the NC State game," BYU offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick said. "… East Carolina is very good defensively and their offense took a big step forward (against Campbell) last week. It is a multiple, blitzing defense. I am expecting a blitz-fest from them."
Against Coastal Carolina, which fell to 1-2, ECU put up 497 yards and allowed just 239. The uptempo Pirates ran 86 plays. Their defense came up with five sacks and nine tackles-for-loss and forced five turnovers.
East Carolina led 10-0 at halftime and 17-0 after three quarters.
Bear Bachmeier, BYU's true freshman quarterback, struggled a bit against the blitz in the Cougars' 27-3 win over Stanford eight days ago, getting sacked three times. Stanford barely moved the ball against BYU, but found its offense Saturday in Palo Alto and rolled past Boston College 30-20 for its first victory of the season.
That was the Cardinal's first home game, while this game at ECU will mark BYU's first road affair. The Cougars will fly to North Carolina two days before kickoff, which they always do when a game is in the East.
"Obviously the noise will shift the other way. There are a lot of things we can do to help prep our team for it. This is our first road game. It is going to be a really good experience. It is going to be a lot of fun. We are counting on seeing our fans out that way," Sitake said on Monday.
East Carolina leads the series 2-1, having won the last two matchups. Saturday's game was initially scheduled to be played in October 2024, but BYU's move to the Big 12 caused it to be pushed back to 2025.
The atmosphere in Greenville is expected to be rowdy and noisy, much as it was in 2017 when BYU made the 2,233-mile trip and took a six-game losing streak into the Emerald City and was blasted 33-17 to prolong its misery in Sitake's second season.
Gardner Minshew came off the bench to throw two fourth-quarter touchdowns for the Pirates at Dowdy-Ficken Stadium in front of a crowd of 38,835 at the 51,000-seat venue, the second-largest college stadium in North Carolina.
BYU is 30-4 in its last 34 night games, but one of those night losses came in 2022 at LaVell Edwards Stadium, when East Carolina prevailed 27-24 on a last-second field goal by Andrew Conrad .
The 33-yard boot as time expired came after a controversial 15-yard pass interference penalty on fourth-and-8 that moved the ball to BYU's 22-yard-line. It was BYU's fourth-straight loss and put the Cougars' bowl hopes in serious jeopardy, but Sitake's squad won its next four games, including a 31-28 upset of Boise State , to finish 8-5.
Before the season, ESPN's FPI gave BYU a 79% chance to win Saturday's game in Greenville, but that was before ECU showed it will be a contender to win the American Conference title.
BYU's chances of winning are now 71.6%, according to the data-driven metric that assesses team strength and projects future performance. The Cougars opened as a 6-point favorite, according to Circa Sports. East Carolina has lost its last six regular-season games against Power Four opponents.
BYU received a couple of pieces of bad news the past week while on its first of two byes this season.
First, redshirt sophomore receiver JoJo Phillips, a starter, sustained an upper body injury in the win over Stanford that required surgery. Sitake said Phillips will be out for awhile, but did not proclaim the injury to be season-ending.
Second, senior running back Hinckley Ropati's appeal to the NCAA for an extra year of eligibility has been denied, according to a BYU football spokesperson via a BYU compliance officer.
Ropati entered the transfer portal after the 2024 season, then decided to stay at BYU and apply for a medical hardship waiver after sustaining several season-ending injuries during his time in Provo.
BYU running back Hinckley Ropati (7) is flipped around after being hit by Kansas Jayhawks linebacker JB Brown (1) as BYU and Kansas play at LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo on Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News
