Ada — East Central University head coach Tim McCarty doesn’t remember the last time the Tigers won a football game. He isn’t suffering from amnesia...he just wasn’t there.

McCarty was in his final season as an assistant at Kansas State when ECU clubbed Southwestern, 42-21, in Week 9 of the 2008 campaign. The victory wasn’t only the most complete by a Tiger squad against a Lone Star Conference opponent in more than a decade in the league — it was also a complete surprise. ECU carried a 2-6 record into the game and totally dominated a Bulldog  squad coming off a string of solid efforts. 

Kurt Nichols’ last ECU team went on to lose its final two games in 2008, McCarty finished 0-11 last fall in his first season back as coach of the Tigers after a three-year absence, and ECU has lost to three teams — Fort Hays State, Texas A&M-Kingsville and Abilene Christian — who are all undefeated this season.

All of that history translates into a school-record 16-game losing streak that becomes a little more of a distraction with each loss. So McCarty said that even if Saturday’s home date with Southwestern wasn’t the Tigers’ LSC North opener, it would still be a huge game for the present and future of his program.

“We’ve got this monkey on our back that we have to get off,” McCarty said. “We can win football games at East Central; we just have to keep fighting.

“We’re right there,” he added. “We need something positive to happen, but we’re getting no gifts. We’re the ones who will have to create something positive. The day we do that is the day we start winning.”  

If McCarty’s young team had been able to protect a 13-0 fourth-quarter lead last year, the Bulldogs — not the Tigers — would be trying to end a long losing streak. Southwestern’s 14-13 win was the only once for that program since 2008, and, like the Tigers, the Bulldogs will come into Saturday’s game having gone 0-3 this fall against a brutal schedule. 

“They’re a team that plays with very good emotion,” McCarty said. “They’ve had some issues that are similar to us. They started off playing a tough schedule. All of the teams they’ve played (Emporia State, West Texas State and Midwestern) are undefeated.”

Unlike Southwestern, though, McCarty’s club was competitive in two of its first three games. The Tigers trailed just 31-21 in the second half of a 45-23 loss to Fort Hays and threw a scare into sixth-ranked TAMUK in Week 2 before dropping a 20-7 decision.

The momentum carried over to the opening minutes at Abilene last week, but after taking an early 7-0 lead on a 70-yard touchdown pass from Tyler Vanderzee to Tyra Watts, the Tigers surrendered 47 unanswered points and a season-high 552 yards en route to a 47-7 loss.

“(The Wildcats) were a legitimate buzzsaw and a creative buzzsaw,” McCarty said. “But we created a lot of our own issues.

“Some of our operational errors were because of our lack of attention and our inability to handle having something good happening right off the bat,” he explained. “We were real loose before the game, and we had a great opening drive, and that was it. Nothing else showed up the rest of the night.”

After seeing his team gain only 215 total yards the past two weeks against two of the best defensive units in all of Division II and surrender more than 500 yards per game through three weeks, McCarty said he expects a turnaround on both sides of the ball Saturday.

“My concern is never the opponent — it’s what we’re doing,” he said. “I didn’t like the way we played last week, and I guarantee you our players didn’t like it. We’ve flushed that game, and we have to rebound this week.

“We have to find some rhythm offensively — we haven’t had that since our first game,” McCarty said. “We played a ferocious defense (intercepting four passes and recording six sacks) against Kingsville, then we played on our heels a little bit last week. That’s not who we are. We’re close to having an identity...we just have to break free of that stuff that’s holding us back.”

Although Southwestern’s talent level doesn’t compare with that of ECU’s first three opponents, McCarty said the Tigers haven’t reached a point where they can take any team lightly.

“We haven’t done anything yet to say we deserve to win this game,” he noted. “I’m sure Soutwestern is looking at this at a game they can win, and that’s what we’re saying.

“I guarantee you they see this game as a great opportunity the same way we see it as an opportunity,” McCarty added. “This game will come down to who takes advantage of that opportunity.”

ECU started 18 freshmen at different times during the 2009 season, and despite a year of experience for that group and an infusion of junior college talent via recruiting this winter, McCarty said his team is still a work in progress.

“Some of the stuff we’re going through right now is because of our youth,” he explained. “Teams that win have age and experience. We don’t have the age yet, but we’re gaining the experience. It’s just a matter of what day it’s going to show up on the scoreboard for us.

“I like this team — I like their moxey and I like the way they take care of business,” McCarty said. “I’ve got to figure out a way for them to go out and cut it loose. We don’t want excuses in our program.”