One of college football's most fun shows is in Conway, South Carolina
With a creative offense, rowdy fans and a unique environment, Grayson McCall, Jamey Chadwell and the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers are spreading teal fever.
CONWAY, S.C. — It’s Labor Day weekend. And college football is back.
They played in places like Annapolis, where a foot meeting a pigskin usually marks the start of the death of Maryland’s season of thick and sticky humidity. They mashed helmets in Atlanta, signifying the end of a harsh summer in the South, while reviving hopes for glory on the gridiron. They scored boatloads of points in Boone, missed kicks in Greenville, and appreciated punts and safeties in Iowa City.
In Conway, South Carolina – a tiny city of about 24,000 people along the Waccamaw River, planted between Myrtle Beach and I-95 – the sounds of shoulder pads smashing and cleats click-clacking represents of the final rush of beach-seeking tourists driving toward the ocean, and the beginning of fans clad in teal invading bars, restaurants and parking lots.
September symbolizes the start of Chanticleer season.
But what exactly is a Chanticleer, anyway?
The folks at Coastal Carolina University admit that the nickname for their mascot – obviously one of the most unique in college athletics – comes from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Has anyone in Conway ever read that collection of 24 stories? The answer to that question doesn’t really matter. (And besides, you probably haven’t, either.)
A Chanticleer is really a rooster, but one that is booming with confidence. The Chanticleer is the leader of its barnyard. It is keen, slick, ruthless, agile and brilliant. And it has a competitive nature that is hot, wild and unmatched – like it’s been marinating in ghost peppers and kerosene.
Under head coach Jamey Chadwell, Coastal Carolina’s football team has embodied the swagger of this dominant and reckless rooster. On offense, they’ve taken the modern triple-option formula, meshed it with a spread system, thrown hot sauce and Mountain Dew on it, and jacked up the chicanery. The end result is an offensive attack that is a heck of a lot fun to watch, and difficult to stop.
On Saturday, against the Army Black Knights, a sellout crowd – the first in program history – of 21,156 people packed-in to see Coastal top the troops 38-28. And Coastal’s Brooks’ Stadium has a listed capacity of only 20,000. Folks got real close as they witnessed the Chants run and throw their way past the Black Knights.
Army, a team that runs a far more traditional version of the triple-option, learned a lesson quickly. This isn’t backyard or barnyard bullcrap. It’s Coastal football. And it’s effective. And it led to the program’s 150th victory.
For a while, Jeff Monken’s Black Knights matched the Chants punch-for-punch, but just couldn’t engineer anything effective on offense in the waning moments of the fourth quarter.
Under Chadwell, Coastal is now 31-19. In 2020, they won the Sun Belt. Last season, the Chanticleers were victorious in 11 games while scoring an average of 40.9 points per-contest, which was fifth in the nation.
The maestro of the Chanticleers’ offensive hurricane is quarterback Grayson McCall. In the past two seasons, he’s flung 53 touchdown passes through the air and only been intercepted six times. He’s also used his legs to rush for 870 yards and 11 scores. Last year, he led college football in passing yards per-attempt with 11.9, and passer efficiency rating with a mark of 207.6.
In other words, he can score by land or air, and if he had a boat, he could score by sea too. McCall is mobile, strong, smart and efficient, and he’s a nightmare for opposing defenses. He showed as much on Saturday.
The 6-foot-3 redshirt junior from Indian Trail, North Carolina put the game out of reach with a red-zone rush with about three minutes to play. On second-and-goal at the Army five-yard line, he pulled a handoff out of Reese White’s gut, cut to his left, bobbed and weaved, zigged and zagged, and powered his way into the endzone, giving his team a comfortable 10-point lead.
McCall passed with pinpoint accuracy, totaling just five incompletions on his way to 174 yards and three touchdowns through the air. On the ground, he had 27 yards on six carries, including that timely fourth quarter score.
The two-time Sun Belt Player of the Year is the real deal. And his NFL Draft stock continues to climb.
Army couldn’t stop McCall and the Chanticleers, even with a rare and legitimate first-round NFL Draft talent of their own lining up as an edge rusher. Andre Carter – who racked up every preseason accolade you can think of and had 14.5 sacks last season – finished with just three tackles against the Chants, and just one of them was behind the line of scrimmage.
As good as Coastal’s offense is, there’s two sides to football right? And there were a whole lot of questions on the other side of the ball for Chants. Such as, who the heck would make the stops? Coastal brought back just 35% of its defensive production – in terms of total tackles – from last season. Eight of its top 10 tacklers were gone.
But against Army, dudes stepped up. Manny Stokes Jr. and Kennedy Roberts each had career-highs in tackles, combining for 11 in all. Tavyn Jackson grabbed an interception, and Coastal notched five stops in Army’s backfield. Edge rusher Josiah Stewart – the preseason Sun Belt Defensive Player of the Year, and a sophomore hailing from the Bronx, N.Y. – led the team with six tackles and had 1.5 for loss.
So, yeah; consider those questions answered. The Chants’ creative offense will grab headlines, but that stout defense is more than equipped enough to create some noise and make a few halts.
Admittedly, the Army Black Knights are far from the country’s top college football team, but the Cadets are well-coached, talented and have aspirations of winning the Commander-In-Chief’s Trophy and going bowling this season.
If Army – a team that prides itself in grinding out the clock, and had a top-35 defense last season – couldn’t slow down the Chanticleers, can anyone else?
The best bets – if there are any – are Marshall and Appalachian State. Those are the only two remaining opponents on Coastal’s schedule that ranked in the top 45 nationally last season in team defense, with the Herd checking in at No. 44 and the Mountaineers at No. 30.
That game against App is a nationally televised one too, on ESPN on Nov. 3.
Coastal is planning for a “Black Out” theme that night. Even though it’s on a Thursday, if the Chanticleers roll into that game unbeaten, it could be Coastal’s second sellout as a program. App might be the team that Coastal fans most thirst for a win over, because they’ve only had the opportunity to relish in that victory once. The Chanticleers are 1-7 all-time against the Mountaineers, and App won six straight in the series before Coastal won by 11 at home in 2020. The beach isn’t typically crowded in November, but McCall and co. might give folks a reason to pack out Brooks Stadium that Thursday night. Even on Saturday against Army, it wasn’t difficult to hear chants of “F**k App State” from young Coastal fans. Needless to say, the folks who root for the Chants were pleased with the final score in Boone earlier that day — App State 61, UNC 63.
They’ll hope for a similar — but not too similar — result in November.
On the third floor of the Marrio and Josh Norman Field House, which sits just behind the north endzone of Brooks Stadium, there is a quote in big, all-cap teal letters that reads. “WHO HAS MORE FUN THAN COASTAL?” Then, in white and gold below it, “NOOOBODY!”
That much was clear on Saturday afternoon, as a giant teal-colored rooster rode a motorcycle out of the tunnel onto a teal turf to more than 20,000 screaming fans, and then Coastal’s offense entered the endzone five times as it ran away from Army.
Young men at Coastal Carolina have now been playing football for 20 seasons. Football was approved in 1999 and the first game in school history was played in 2003. In that opener, the Tyler Thigpen-led Chanticleers engineered a 97-yard game-winning drive – scoring with just seven ticks left on the clock – to beat Division II Newberry 21-14 in front of nearly 8,000 people. The Chants finished that season 6-5. Coastal went to the FCS playoffs six times and won seven Big South championships.
Perhaps bored with domination, they followed in the footsteps of their now-conference rivals App and Georgia Southern, and moved up to the FBS ranks in 2017, joining the Sun Belt. Those first few years were rough, going 13-23 in their first three seasons.
But Coastal has now ripped off back-to-back 11-win campaigns, appeared in a pair of bowl games, and popped up on the AP Top 25 Poll, ranking as high as ninth. Coastal is one of just six FBS teams that had two straight winning seasons in 2020 and 2021, amidst the pandemic.
If their opener against Army is any indication of what the next several weeks will be like, this season of Chants football should be akin to the last two. Expect double-digit wins. Expect a team that contends for the Sun Belt title. Expect Grayson McCall to put up video game numbers in a video game offense. Expect NFL scouts to talk about him more. Expect those games against Marshall and App to be a whole lot of fun.
And expect that teal fever to spread.
You can support All in the Game by subscribing. When you hit the subscribe button, you’ll notice there’s options for free, monthly and yearly subscriptions. All of these posts are free and visible to everyone. But if you want to throw me $5 a month, or $41 a year, I won’t stop you. I’ll probably spend it all on coffee or books.