User:PGPirate/Rushing

This is a list of East Carolina Pirates football rushing records. East Carolina University began organized football in 1932. The football team plays under the nickname Pirates. The team plays on the collegiality at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division-I Football Bowl Subdivision level. Currently, the Pirates play in Conference USA. The team has also completed in the North State Conference, Southern Conference and Independent.

These are complied lists of the career, season and game rushing yard records. The longest rushing plays are also included. Junior Smith is the current rushing yards leader. He also holds three of the top 11 rushing yard seasons. Scott Hartley holds the most single game rushing records: verses NC State in 1996, South Carolina in 1996, Ohio in 1996 and Temple in 1995.

There are two controversies with this list. The two biases give more weight to recent athletic excellence. In 1972, the NCAA allowed freshmen to participate in college football competition. In addition, college football season have lengthened significantly since East Carolina began playing football. East Carolina played just five games in 1932. By 1939, the season had lengthened to eight games, and by 1963, the East Carolina team was playing 10 games a season. The 2007 East Carolina Pirates football team played 13 games: 12 regular-season games and the 2007 Hawai'i Bowl.

When freshmen were ineligible to play and seasons were as short as 7 or 8 games, players could not play more than 25 games in their entire career. Now, a thirteen-game season is common for modern East Carolina football teams and a player may be eligible to play over 50 games in his career. Single-season records and career records are naturally held by more recent players who have been eligible to play more games in a season and who have been eligible to play more seasons. There are several controversies among the lists below resulting from these biases.

In addition to these biases, football has changed. Originally, football had no passing until 1906 when the rules committee (including Amos Alonzo Stagg) took action to lessen onfield deaths. Passing did not really become popular until the 1930s when both the NCAA and the National Football League adopted standardized football sizes.