2021 Preview: Will Healy Is Building Something At Charlotte, Right?
Charlotte has the coaching pedigree and the hype. Can it turn that into wins?
ICYMI: This is a part of The Outside Zone’s full 2021 G5 preview series, which last looked at North Texas. You can find a master list for all of the previews here.
Will Healy has made a name for himself as a program builder with abilities that border on miracle work. The former Richmond quarterback’s story has been told and retold plenty, but it’s worth diving into quickly again here, because it’s a good story. He took over at Austin Peay in 2016 as a 31-year-old, one of the youngest head coaches in college football. He had very little experience (he had served as an assistant at Chattanooga) and got the job largely because no one else wanted it. This was one of the worst programs in America with a truly putrid history and essentially no hope for success within any reasonable time frame.
Healy showed up, immediately produced one of the best recruiting classes in the FCS level in 2016, grabbed the No. 1 class in 2017 and turned a team that had been rudderless for years into an Ohio Valley Contender in just three seasons before jumping to Charlotte as the second-youngest DI head coach after the 2018 season.
It seemed like a perfect fit, and in many ways, it still does. Healy was touted for his energy and that knack for recruiting, while Charlotte is a program lauded for its limitless potential in a rapidly growing city, connections to a strong recruiting base and placement in a conference that lacks any true dominant team right now. Healy would work his magic, build Charlotte into a recruiting machine and then pass the program off to one of his up-and-coming assistants when he jumps to a bigger job. Sounds like a great plan, right?
There’s just one issue: Charlotte isn’t winning yet. That’s certainly not a death knell - Healy has been in town two years and didn’t inherit a killer roster - but it’s not exactly what was expected when he took over. The kind of consistent growth and improvement on the recruiting trail was immediate, but it hasn’t been linear as it was with Austin Peay. Healy scraped together the No. 134 recruiting class in 2019, pulling in seven transfers to patch some holes while landing a number of potentially high-impact prospects, including three-star wideouts Noah Henderson and Micaleous Elder, three-star linebacker Jaylon Sharpe, three-star end (now on the offensive line) Jaxon Hughes and three-star DB Trey Bly. It was a patchwork group - landing any talent at all was a plus.
The real boon came in 2020, as expected. Healy nabbed the No. 71 class in the nation, headlined by four-star tackle Ty'kieast Crawford, three-star halfback Elijah Turner and 18 other three-stars, along with seven more transfers. The 2021 class fell back slightly to 107th, but still saw 15 three-stars join the fold, including a pair of strong offensive tackles in Knox Boyd and BJ Ragland.
That’s all good, obviously. Healy was expected to recruit well, and relative to production on the field, I would say that he has exceeded or at least reached that expectation. He’s increased the level of talent on his roster. This all gets a bit shaky when you look past the rankings, though. Henderson transferred to Furman after one season; Crawford is looking to do the same after one season and seems to be eyeing Arkansas, while the rest of that group has produced only a few consistent contributors, with Elder leading the list.
Granted, it’s difficult to expect too much from underclassmen, but Healy’s pitch is recruiting and development and his 2020 group was led almost entirely by players recruited by his predecessor. In other words, this is not a team that suffered the usual growing pains of a second-year youth movement - that’s this season’s outlook. Those experienced players are gone, and Healy’s roster is now filled with a majority (or near it) of his recruits, many of which have seen the field only sparingly so far.
Like I said, it’s not a death-knell. The team talent has improved, there are impact players returning and it’s easy to imagine a world where that recruiting production shows up this season and Charlotte puts together a bowl run with one of the more talented teams in the CUSA while still suffering through some of those growing pains. None of the player losses are season-ending blows, and quite a few come from a defense that almost literally cannot get worse in 2021.
Still, they are worth mentioning. Running backs Tre Harbison and Aaron McAllister are both gone. Neither was fantastic in 2020 but both were pretty good, and this is an offense that relies heavily on having two good halfbacks, including several two-back sets designed around pre-snap motion from one of the backs (usually the latter).
It wasn’t an integral part of the offense or anything, but Charlotte did have a lot of success with this and would probably like to keep doing it in 2021. It’s tough to defend, because most linebackers just don’t move that fast. It’s also not especially dependent on the offensive line, which was always a plus for Charlotte last season.
Still, I’m not especially worried about it. Charlotte doesn’t necessarily need two good running backs for this offense to work, it’s just a bonus. And it’s not even a sure thing that it won’t have two good running backs. Calvin Camp was good in short bursts last season and Charlotte is not lacking for talent in the room. Iowa transfer Shadrick Byrd; freshman Chavion Smith; Turner; sophomore Chavon McEachern and junior Terrick Smalls Jr. were all three-star prospects, and UNC Pembroke transfer McKinley Nelson rushed for 438 yards and three scores in two years at the DII level.
Even if Charlotte doesn’t find a second back to pair with Camp, it had success with these motion looks with wideout Victor Tucker as well in 2020 and might just keep him as a factor in the running game in 2021. Using your top receiver as an extension of the running game isn’t ideal, but when you’re breaking in several new starters up front and a new face at halfback, you have to take what you can get.
Speaking of the offensive line, the big losses are Crawford and center Jaelin Fisher, but I wouldn’t expect a huge step back here. Tackle D’Mitri Emmanuel is a two-year starter with a ton of potential, and like with the defense, I don’t think this group is really going to be able to take a significant step back. That’s just about it for the departures. Now for the good news:
Quarterback Chris Reynolds is back and will compete with Texas A&M transfer James Foster for the starting job, though I’m not especially sure that either player is a great candidate for the job. Reynolds took a step back in 2020 after a pretty strong campaign in 2019, so I’m curious to see if he can return to form. He wasn’t bad, per se, his limitations just seemed to hold him back a bit more than they had before. He’s a crafty playmaker and a dangerous threat as a runner, but his throws really hang, and Charlotte is without much in the way of developed, proven short-yardage passing plays. Generally with this group, you were either getting a big play like this one:
Or something that looked more like this:
Cutting down on those sacks is going to be big in 2021, but just finding more comfort in short throws is almost as important. Charlotte was strangely averse to taking free yardage in 2020. I’m not sure if it was a play calling issue or a Reynolds issue, bur I lean towards the former, which is almost a bigger problem than the latter would be. Charlotte absolutely needs more in the 5-15-yard range in 2021. Way too much of this offense operated either behind the line of scrimmage or 30 yards away from it last season, and this group just doesn’t have the blocking on the line or on the perimeter to support that kind of lifestyle.
Not to belabor the point, but it would also just fit this offense a whole lot better. The strength of the team is at wide receiver, which returns everybody of importance, led by Tucker - my pick for the CUSA’s Biletnikoff sleeper in 2021. Elder is solid as both a short-yardage wideout and someone that just seems to catch everything; tight end Taylor Thompson was encouraging as hell as a freshman; senior Cam Dollar seems to only make big plays and Rico Arnold is back after essentially losing the 2020 season (though he was good in 2019). Tyler Ringwood is gone, but I am not at all worried about that - this group is going to be awesome in 2021.
With more play design like this and less of the “all-screens-and-verts” offense that we saw in 2020, I think Charlotte has the potential to be one of the most dangerous offenses in the CUSA this season.
I have… fewer things to say about the defense. Co-coordinators Marcus West and Brandon Cooper could not have had a much tougher first season than they did in 2020. Charlotte was pretty good against the big play but could not stop a cold with any sort of consistency, and it loses a ton of production. Ben DeLuca, Nafees Lyon, Romeo McKnight, Tariq Harris and Timmy Horne are all gone, either to the NFL, CFL, or the transfer portal. There’s a ton of young talent here, but that’s about it.
Well, save for the big four. Tyler Murray is a monster out of that weird safety/linebacker hybrid, Lance McMillan is a very encouraging defensive back, Markees Watts can play just about everywhere and Luke Martin appears to be returning for his 45th season of college football. Antone Williams seems to be returning too, which is important primarily because every team needs a short defensive back that plays like this:
Wonderful. Love it. The rest of this defense? Questionable at best. I’m not out on West and Cooper yet - I liked both hires and continue to have confidence in these two, even if that first season was rough - but I would like to see at least some signs of life this season. The additions of safeties Jonathan Alexander (Kansas State) and Tank Robinson (ECU), defensive end Kofi Wardlow (Notre Dame) and linebacker Justin Whisenhunt (Troy) are all encouraging too, but like with the program as a whole, I need to see it to believe it first. I love the Healy story, I love his recruiting, I love his energy. Let’s see it on the field sooner than later.