Coastal Carolina can make progress without greatness from Tim Beck
Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time.
Good teams in the Group of 5 are almost always fighting to prove they’re the real deal. There is, of course, a perception (and to some extent a reality) that their schedules are weaker, and that putting up lofty numbers against such a poor slate doesn’t prove a team deserves its spot in the top 25. But on top of that, because the G5 lacks the structural talent imbalance that allows so much domination in the P51, the best teams simply don’t have the separation needed to look decisively brilliant week in and week out.
Consider the case of Coastal Carolina, one of FBS’s newest teams and a regular guest in the AP rankings across the last three seasons. Their 2020 results marked them as a major outlier—they didn’t just go 11-1 and dominate the Sun Belt, they did so in style. They only won three games by a single score all season, two of which came against ULL and BYU, top-fifteen finishers both. With the exception of a thrilling 42-38 season finale against 5-6 Troy, every team that even came close to the Chanticleers was among the best in the nation. There was no doubt that they deserved their #14 finish.
Maintaining the reputation they swiftly built in 2020 has been more difficult. Coastal Carolina still won quite a few blowouts in the following season, but they also played with fire more than you’d like to see. They barely escaped from 4-8 Buffalo with an undefeated record intact, and a few weeks later they received their first blemish at the hands of a merely 10-4 App State team. Close games against 5-7 Troy, 5-7 South Alabama, and 9-5 NIU, plus an upset loss to 8-5 Georgia State, all followed, undermining the Chants’ success and leading to an unranked finish despite their 11-2 record and 41-22 average score.
If 2021 called Coastal Carolina’s legitimacy into question, 2022 almost completely destroyed it. The Chants spend virtually the entire year flirting with disaster: they never at any point put together an entire fourth quarter with a lead of over ten points, and they took one-score wins against 7-6 Gardner-Webb, 6-7 Georgia Southern, 4-8 ULM, 6-6 App State, and 7-6 Southern Miss. It was easy to assume they were more lucky—and carried by the phenomenal arm of historically great QB Grayson McCall—than good. That perception was hardly helped by losing their final three games 47-7, 45-26, and 53-29, then seeing Jamey Chadwell book it to Liberty in a move that very much had the air of bailing on a sinking ship.
It’s probably fair to treat Coastal Carolina as a team that peaked with double-digit wins a few years ago, but has now regressed to fighting for bowls, even if their record doesn’t fully reflect that. Perception certainly suggests it, and in this case it’s perfectly reasonable—even by the narrower margins of G5 play, the Chants were really lucky last year to win even six games, let alone nine. So the task at hand for Tim Beck, former OC at Nebraska, Ohio State, Texas, and most recently NC State, is twofold: maintain not only the level of success Chadwell established early in his tenure, but also the knack for wiggling out of close games with wins he found later.
One interesting wrinkle for both goals is the surprising return of one Grayson McCall. When he entered the transfer portal following the 2022 season, rumors that he’d follow Chadwell to Liberty or jump up to the P5 abounded, but his decision to stay with Coastal makes a huge difference for the Chanticleers’ expectations. Had he gone straight to the NFL after last year, his three seasons as the starter would already make him one of the most accomplished quarterbacks in college football history.
In 2021, McCall set the all-time single-season record by averaging a preposterous 11.9 yards per attempt on each pass—a leaderboard where Kyler Murray, Baker Mayfield, Michael Vick, and Jalen Hurts fill out the top five. In the same season, he tossed over 25 touchdowns with no more than three interceptions for the second time in his career, something nobody else but Hendon Hooker has done in FBS this century. If there was any doubt about his legitimacy thanks to Chadwell’s option-like system, 2022 helped dispel it, as he had to throw nearly 300 passes (a respectable 77th of 108 qualified passers) and still averaged 9.1 yards per attempt (6th nationally) while notching a sparkling 24:2 TD-to-INT ratio. He was also, of course, instrumental to Coastal Carolina’s constant narrow escapes in close games, and it’s no surprise that in his two missed games, they scored just 33 total points after averaging 32.2 per game before his injury.
McCall may have been the only thing holding the Chanticleers back from cratering to the bottom of the Sun Belt last year. What role does he hold with a new coach, a new offensive system (installed by Travis Trickett, fresh off turning around USF’s offense), and a roster with far more continuity than the massive turnover he covered for in 2022? I have no idea, but it’s going to be fun. And, even if the on-field reputation CCU has upheld recently stands on a frightfully flimsy foundation, that’s no reason to believe Beck can’t keep the pieces together and assemble them into a G5 power that’ll stand the test of time.
The Last Five Years
Here’s a fun little tidbit: across 2020 and the first half of 2021, Coastal Carolina took two P5 wins (three if you count BYU), knocked off three ranked teams, soared as high as ninth in the AP Poll, and went a remarkable 16-1. And then, in 2021…for the first time in school history, they won a game in which they could earn bowl eligibility. (Since, you know, “bowl eligibility” wasn’t exactly a thing in 2020.) They also immediately tanked out of their #14 ranking after that and got demolished 49-21 upon reaching 6-0 the following season, so maybe bowl ineligibility is the key to the Chanticleers’ success?
2022 and 2023
Much as I hate giving Chadwell credit on account of how fully he’s embraced his position at Liberty, you’ve got to admit he did a solid job wrangling the pieces—or lack thereof—at his disposal in 2022. The Chants had to find a new RB1, build a new receiving corps from scratch, account for the loss of superstar tight end Isaiah Likely, and massively overhaul their defense at every level. McCall was obviously the key, but Coastal Carolina found just enough production across the board to eke out win after win.
Recent history has not been kind to overachieving teams that bring back strong numbers in the next season—such as that 2021 NIU team that lost their bowl to Coastal, for example, which also ran a negative point differential and plunged from 9-5 to 3-9 despite top-ten returning production. If nothing else, though, experience is a valuable asset for Beck as he takes over following the first era of top-level success in program history, looking to build up to a second without much delay.
The Next Five Years
Your friendly neighborhood point of comparison for G5 teams standing at a crossroads, the UCF Knights, are once again here to offer some guidance. Coastal Carolina’s first three seasons in ascendancy (2020-22) are eerily similar to UCF’s recent run of form (2017-19). After reaching the top fifteen in back-to-back years en route to a combined 25-1 record, the Knights also slid back a bit, going 10-3 in 2019 and falling out of the rankings—though that team, admittedly, needed no luck to stay near the top. The 2020 team fell even further, going 6-4 and ending a season with a blowout loss to that BYU team those Chants beat, but Gus Malzahn righted the ship and, after a pair of nine-win seasons, has UCF in fine form entering their first season as a P5 team.
There are differences, obviously—a program in Orlando has a more immediate claim to a spot in the P5 than one in Myrtle Beach—but Malzahn and Beck feel like hires from the same school. Both arrive from the higher level and have a longstanding familiarity with football in the southeast, and…well, they’re both a bit boring, aren’t they? Not bad, but nothing massively inspiring along the lines of grabbing a rising star from FCS, as Coastal Carolina did when they hired Chadwell.
Maybe that’s what UCF needed, and maybe it’s what CCU needs now. Sure, the Chants aren’t finalizing a P5 bid or anything, but stability is undeniably valuable with the framework of their rise to the top starting to give way. If Beck can imitate Malzahn and simply solidify Coastal Carolina’s place among the Group of 5’s best, he’ll be every bit the coach they need.
The classic eight bluebloods of college football—Alabama, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Notre Dame, Michigan, USC, Texas, and Nebraska—probably come to mind here, but there’s more to it than that. Personally, I would add a second group of lesser elites—LSU, Penn State, Florida State, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Miami, Auburn, Oregon, and Clemson—that help complete the stranglehold locking out the likes of West Virginia, Kentucky, Iowa, and so on from regular title contention. Nowhere is their sway more prevalent than the SEC, whose six elites have claimed every shared or outright title since 1964.