2021 G5 Preview: Coastal Carolina Is The Greatest Show On (Teal) Turf
Teal Team Six is running it back. Let's enjoy it while we can.
ICYMI: This is a part of The Outside Zone’s full 2021 G5 preview series, which last looked at UCF. You can find a master list for all of the previews here.
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There was not a better story in college football last season than the rise of Coastal Carolina in the Sun Belt. I don’t need to retell the story or recount the background of this program and this staff. The Chanticleers merged a roster of misfit but exciting players with one of the best offensive schemes in America and created a team that made fans of pretty much anyone that watched them play.
Coastal Carolina played compelling football, running a lethal option attack with an RPO-heavy passing game, but it also produced a damn good football team, claiming the Sun Belt crown with wins over Louisiana and Appalachian State and the people’s crown with a win over BYU in the only title game that matters on this newsletter. A loss in the bowl game to Liberty did little to corrode the vibes around this program, and with an offseason now between us and the last time the Chants took the field, it certainly looks as though they’re about to pick right up where they left off.
It would be hard not to, with 20 returning starters and only two significant departures, along with the return of essentially the entirety of head coach Jamey Chadwell’s coaching staff – despite a carousel that certainly saw him draw some interest from larger schools. Even in an improving Sun Belt, Coastal Carolina is still without an elite schedule but should have the in-conference matchups and the team to be one of college football’s most exciting programs to watch for the second year in a row.
The biggest draw is the offense and will remain the offense, but I’ll start with the defense, just so that we can close on the highest possible note. Although its counterpart drew essentially all of the attention last season, this Chad Staggs defense was legitimately great for most of last season. It had a few bad showings, like the near loss to Troy and the actual loss to Liberty, but Coastal Carolina had the only defense last season that seemed to understand how to slow down Louisiana and BYU, holding the two to a combined 44 total points.
It did that primarily with a bunch of guys that, to be overly simple, just do their jobs really well. Coastal had some of the best linebacker play in the country last season with Teddy Gallagher, Silas Kelly and Enock Makonzo and returns all three of them, along with edge rusher specialist Jeffrey Gunter, who will look to replace the production lost in end' Tarron Jackson’s departure to the NFL.
Those linebackers and a really strong secondary, led by safety Alex Spillum, were better against the pass than they were the run, but I would expect both to improve this season. CCU flashed ability against the run all year, it just often didn’t seem quite big enough/committed enough to filling the box to keep up with the better rushing attacks on its schedule. Having linebackers that can do this is a really good place to start, the Chants may just need to be a bit more aggressive in defending against the run. Does that open you up to more passing? Yes.
But when you have nine starting seniors on your defense you have to be able to trust players to make plays, and that’s a lot of what defending the pass is going to come down to. There aren’t any transcendent passing teams on this schedule either, so I have reason to believe that Coastal Carolina will make this a focus and will improve on the ground this season. The defense probably hovers around where it was as a best-case scenario for this season, but if it can be a little more efficient, it may be a better fit with this offense than the turnover-heavy group Coastal rode last year. An efficient defense is more sustainable than an explosive one, and Coastal seems to have the pieces needed to build the former.
I don’t even know where to start with this offense. I don’t think I need to explain how it works at length again, given my propensity for doing that last season, but it’s hard not to with a playbook as detailed and clever as this one. Coastal Carolina ran very few plays last season but ran them out of so many formations and with so many options attached to each one that it became completely impossible to prepare for in just a week’s worth of time. We can assume that defenses will have a slightly better idea of what to expect this season but I really don’t know if that’ll even matter.
Because of this guy, and the offensive line in front of him. There’s not a better option line, or a better option quarterback in America than the Coastal Carolina offensive line, and its star quarterback Grayson McCall. That’s the thing that I’ve touched on so often before with this offense, and the thing that makes Coastal Carolina so hard to defend against. Unless you completely load the box, this offense will be able to isolate a defender against McCall, and McCall will make them wrong. This layered of an option attack will always create a numbers advantage, and McCall will make the right read just about every single time he snaps the ball.
Of course, if you load the box and take away that numbers advantage, McCall will beat you over the top, throwing to either the best receiver (Jaivon Heiligh) or the best tight end (Isaiah Likely) in the conference off of a play action or RPO look that makes your safety’s eyes pop out of his head like a cartoon wolf.
In fact, let’s do a brief history of what this looks like. Liberty shows seven in the box pre-snap, with an eighth lurking. The safety joins the box after the snap, McCall fakes the handoff, and Heiligh has single coverage with its cornerback, and no safety help over the top, because the high safety was playing more like a low safety to defend against the option. It’s not what you want to see as a defensive coordinator.
Liberty, again. Seven in the box with the safety playing in. Coastal Carolina sells its standard triple option hard, but McCall pulls the ball. The entire box and that safety are now completely out of position, leaving three defenders for the three receivers running routes. One of those routes, from the slot, is a decoy to pull the outside cornerback in, the other route to the field is just there for show. The goal is to isolate Likely on a wildly undersized safety, who should be serving as the slot cornerback here. Tight end on a slot cornerback. It’s… not what you want to see as a defensive coordinator.
Even when the defense doesn’t load the box, this rushing attack is so dangerous that even a slight fake, be it on an RPO like this…
Or a QB draw fake like this…
Can easily bring those linebackers in, creating single coverage down the field for defensive backs that just cannot handle these matchups one-on-one.
And that’s the easier part of this offense to defend. Every part of it returns in 2021, and should really only stand to improve with another season of experience. Last season was, just as a reminder, year one for McCall. He had a 68.8 percent completion rate, 10.0 yards per attempt, 26 touchdowns and three interceptions in his first season, in the weaker half of his game.
As for the stronger half, the loss of halfback C.J. Marable is notable because he was excellent, but I really think that the running back position is pretty much plug-and-play here, and there was plenty of talent behind him. Shermari Jones looks like the likely answer and seeing plays like this one, I’ll tell you, I’m not especially worried about that.
This offense was so good at using decoys and counters to create numbers advantages without sacrificing any players of their own, and it’s only going to get better with a full offseason of time to work on new wrinkles for Willy Korn, Newland Isaac and Chadwell.
It helps, too, to have one of the best base running plays in football, C-Down Belly, with the halfback looking to run inside of the center, who pulls outside of the tackle to set the edge on the player held in place by the read threat in the backfield, while a pair of tight ends (or one tight end, or any number of combinations) lead the way into the second-level. It was the staple that held this offense together and the entire offensive line is back to run it.
This team is going to be awesome. I think it’ll probably win the Sun Belt again, and it seems increasingly likely that it goes undefeated, barring a seriously impressive game from either App State or Louisiana. Will the Chants get recognition for that feat? No, not from the power brokers of the sport.
But I’m going to try as hard as I can not to let that bother me. I know these guys could compete at the highest level, and I know it would be a blast to watch them play in those kinds of games, as it was against BYU last year. But I also know that this kind of team doesn’t come together very often, and they certainly don’t last.
A good portion of this group will leave after this season, Chadwell will likely eventually do the same (albeit maybe not this offseason), and the days of Teal Team Six, balling at the beach, or anything else you want to call these guys will be over. It’s the nature of following these smaller schools, and I would like to try to learn something from the post-Lance Leipold Buffalo preview, which bummed me out so much that I almost didn’t post it at all. I know that Coastal Carolina will reach that point sooner than later and I don’t think there’s really anything that can be done for it. This is a sport about things that will end, and this too will end, probably as soon as the final second ticks off the clock on their 2021 season.
But we aren’t there yet. There’s a full season of Chanticleer football ahead, a full season of McCall and this option attack. A full season of a full-capacity CCU crowd, packed to the brim with guys that have mullets. And damn it, I’m going to enjoy every second of it.