JMU's Kirkpatrick Ready To Face Old Team

At the time, Kirkpatrick was the wide receivers coach in limbo at East Carolina, where the Dukes open their season Saturday at 6 p.m. against the FBS Pirates. This weekend marks his first return to Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium since leaving after an 11-year stint at ECU that ended following the 2015 season.

His boss in the late 2000s was Skip Holtz, who had decided to leave the head job at ECU to take the same role at South Florida. Kirkpatrick’s son was already committed to play baseball at ECU and his daughter was set on attending school at the University of South Carolina — a reasonable four-hour drive from Greenville, N.C.

“I was from North Carolina. I had established some roots there and I really liked that school,” Kirkpatrick said.

He wanted to stay. The only problem was he didn’t know if the next coach — Ruffin McNeill — would keep him around.

“I had known Donnie and we knew each other since when we started coaching,” said McNeill, who’s now an assistant at Oklahoma. “That’s number one. And then I knew what kind of person he was and what kind of coach he was, so it wasn’t a very hard decision.”

Kirkpatrick was the lone holdover from Holtz’s staff that McNeill kept on board.

“It was an interesting thing because we were having great success there under Skip Holtz, and East Carolina is one of those jobs that a lot of people use as a stepping stone a little bit at that level,” Kirkpatrick said. “I know a lot of Skip’s staff was really hoping that Skip would get a job.

“At that time, we weren’t considered [Bowl Championship Series] and that was the thing, everyone wanted to be BCS just like everyone now wants to be Power Five. At that time you were either BCS or not BCS, so they wanted Skip to get a BCS job. I wasn’t opposed to that, but I didn’t just want it to be any job.

“No offense to South Florida, which was where Skip was going, we didn’t feel like that was that much of an improvement, if one at all.”

When Kirkpatrick learned McNeill was bringing offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley and the air-raid offense with him from Texas Tech, he said he really wanted to stay and help build the system at ECU.

Kirkpatrick said he thought his familiarity with the air raid is probably one of the reasons why McNeill kept him on staff.

Riley, now the head coach at Oklahoma, was a first-time offensive coordinator at the age of 25. Though Riley had learned the system from originator Mike Leach and innovator Dana Holgorsen in Lubbock, Texas, he was still young.

Leach helped develop the offense under Hal Mumme when the two worked together at Iowa Wesleyan in 1989. Kirkpatrick crossed paths with Mumme when he was at Louisville and Mumme was at Kentucky. Some of those principles and formations can be found across college football, and more specific to Kirkpatrick, in JMU’s offense today.

“So I spent some time with Hal,” Kirkpatrick said. “And I had incorporated a lot of that system into what I was doing at Chattanooga as the offensive coordinator and as the head coach. So I had a background in what we were doing.”

McNeill recognized that.

“He related well to the kids and understood offensive concepts,” McNeill said. “And he knew it from the quarterback position to the upfront positions as well as the skills. He was well rounded in all aspects.”

And ECU’s offense immediately took off under Riley with the help of Kirkpatrick.

Quarterback Dominique Davis threw for 3,967 yards and 37 touchdowns in 2010 — the first season McNeill’s staff was there. ECU had the nation’s eighth-best passing offense. Once Davis left, Shane Carden took over at the position and threw for more than 4,000 yards in his junior and senior seasons.

“I think a lot of people, defensively, weren’t ready to defend that offense at that time,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s a little more common right now. There are more people — as the family of air-raid coaches have started to spread out — doing it. But at that time no one in that league had seen anyone doing that.

“We just kind of jumped on people and they weren’t ready to defend it.”

This past spring, Kirkpatrick spent three days at Oklahoma with Riley. He said he was able to meet former Sooners coach Bob Stoops for the first time and that he and Riley were able to exchange ideas about offense just like they did at East Carolina.

Stoops’ brother is on the Youngstown State staff, so he said they discussed the FCS championship game, too.

“I had gone out and taken our tape. They had shared their tape with me,” Kirkpatrick said. “I had sat in the quarterback meetings with them and we bounced ideas off of each other about what to do with this, what they do here, how this bothers them. If they had anything new or we had anything new.”

It’s possible Kirkpatrick shows something he learned from Riley this weekend when Dukes square off with the two coaches’ old squad.

Current ECU coach Scottie Montgomery said when he took over the program following McNeill’s firing last year, he did think about keeping Kirkpatrick on staff.

“We thought about a lot of different things and with just the change and the shift in the room, we definitely thought about it,” Montgomery said. “I think he’s a fantastic offensive mind and I’m glad everything is working out great for him.

“Our kids love him, so it’s one of those situations where sometimes, when changes happen, it benefits both parties because it looks like it’s definitely benefited Coach K. I’m just really happy to see him doing well.”

Kirkpatrick said he’s anxious to get the season started and that he’s looking forward for the return to his old stomping grounds.

“It’s been hard not to think about it,” he said. “I probably tried not to think about it very much during camp because camp is a time when you really prepare for the whole season.

“However, because of some really good friends back there that I vacationed with and was in some areas where there were a lot of Pirate fans and ran into those people, it was hard not to think about it because they kept bringing it up.”