CCU Notebook: Will starting freshman QB Grayson McCall play next week? The latest
Coastal Carolina managed to defeat Georgia Southern 28-14 without its young phenom quarterback Grayson McCall on Saturday at Brooks Stadium to keep its undefeated season and top 25 national rankingS intact.
Will the No. 24/25 Chants have to do it again without McCall next Saturday at Georgia State (2-2)? They just might.
“We don’t even know if he’ll be ready for next week. Right now it’s up in the air,” Coastal coach Jamey Chadwell said Saturday after the game.
McCall suffered an upper body injury last Wednesday in the win at Louisiana, yet finished the game by leading the Chants on a late game-winning drive that culminated in a 40-yard Massimo Biscardi field goal for a 30-27 win.
“He started having some issues once we got back and you’re thinking, ‘Oh it’s no big deal,’ and it just never got to the point where you could stick him out there and him be 100 percent without getting hurt,” Chadwell said. “The healing has been slower than we anticipated and our doctors anticipated.
“. . . We’ll see what happens. It’s another six or seven days. But if he can’t practice by Wednesday or Thursday then we’ll go with Fred again.”
Fred Payton, who started 10 games over the past two seasons, threw for 252 yards and three touchdowns in the win, completing 15 of 28 passes with two interceptions. The three TDs ties a career high set last season at Louisiana-Monroe.
“For him to come in and be able to throw three touchdowns and there in the fourth quarter he really changed the game for us, I’m really proud of him and the way he handled himself and the way he stepped up,” Chadwel said. “. . . Fred had a couple of really big runs on third down [in the second half] and when we needed some passes he put them in there.”
Payton took the majority of snaps with the first team offense in practice this past week in anticipation of his start, which he said he was told on Thursday was likely.
“We prepared all week that [Payton] was the starter, but there was a chance. You see how [McCall] went through the week. We confirmed it really today. You look at warmups to see how they were doing, you wanted to see if he had a shot to play, and he didn’t. Our whole plan all week was Fred was going to have to be the guy.
“If [McCall] could have went and been 100 percent he would have played, but if he couldn’t go at 70 or 80 it wasn’t worth him being hurt the rest of the year for one game. And we felt comfortable with Fred. Fred has won some games for us and this was a big win for us and he handled himself well.”
In his CCU career, Payton has completed 183 of 291 passes (63 percent) for 2,350 yards and 21 touchdowns with 11 interceptions. He has also rushed for 324 yards on 101 carries with two rushing TDs in the Chants’ spread option offense.
Coastal’s offense has been both explosive and efficient under McCall.
McCall entered this weekend third in college football in QB Rating (passing efficiency), fifth in total QBR, third in passing yards per completion (15.76) and per attempt (10.69), 10th in passing touchdowns (11) and 13th in completion percentage (67.8).
Coastal has just three turnovers through four games with McCall at the helm of the offense.
It had both more sacks and more interceptions in the first half alone Saturday than it had in the first four games combined. Payton was sacked three times and threw two interceptions.
Before his injury, McCall had been sacked twice and threw one interception in his four starts.
The offensive line struggled to block the Georgia Southern front in the first half, however, allowing the sacks while leading the way for just 2 rushing yards on 15 carries. The Eagles had just four sacks in their first four games combined.
“When you have a new guy back there maybe he does some things a little bit differently, but they swarmed us pretty good,” Chadwell said. “I don’t know if we’d have had Patrick Mahomes back there in the first half if we wouldn’t have given up some sacks. I don’t know if that’s on the quarterback.”
CCU got back to mistake-free football in the second half, as Payton was not sacked and the Chants did not turn the ball over. “We weren’t as clean in the first half, and part of that though is the head coach calling plays,” Chadwell said. “You’re calling plays obviously you think will work, but also I’ve got to try to make sure I’m calling things where Fred feels comfortable and that he can perform. In the second half we did a better job of that.”
Running on empty
Coastal entered the game with nearly 202 rushing yards per game to rank 20th in the country. But the Chants were held to 2 rushing yards on 15 carries in the first half.
“You could tell they prepared for our run game very well with C.J. Marable in the backfield, so we had to find another way to get it done,” quarterback Fred Payton said.
In the second half, Payton scrambled effectively and the Chants found running lanes. Payton gained 49 yards on five carries, and backup running backs Shermari Jones and Reese White combined for 64 yards and a touchdown on seven carries and the Chants ended up outgaining Georgia Southern’s vaunted ground game, 130-119.
“We saw what they were doing and how they were trying to play us,” Chadwell said. “They obviously knew too that Grayson was down, somebody had let them in on that because they played some things a little differently than they had shown, so we had to adjust at halftime.”
The Eagles entered the game fourth in the nation in rushing with 281.3 yards per game.
“We could have loosened up their defense a little bit if we could have done a better job in that pass game,” Eagles coach Chad Lunsford said. “When they’re able to stack the box like that and we don’t get the run, I mean, we got outrushed today. That doesn’t happen at Georgia Southern. We got outrushed and that’s a problem.”
The Mak Daddy
Enock Makonzo, a redshirt junior linebacker who is just 5-foot-11 and 195 pounds but is lightning fast, had perhaps his best game in his four years at CCU.
Makonzo led the Chants with two sacks for a total loss of 19 yards, forced a fumble that was recovered by Georgia Southern and had a quarterback hurry. Makonzo, who got to CCU from Quebec, Canada, via New Mexico Military Institute, beat 300-pound tackles around the end on Saturday.
“We’re going to come and do what we’ve got to do and what we’ve been doing since the first week, whether we have our first quarterback or not,” Makonzo said. “We trust everybody that comes in to step up. That was the word of the week, is ‘step up’ like coach says. And anybody that was going in just stepped up and did their job.”
Third and Latushko
Senior receiver Greg Latushko has seven catches this season for 89 yards, including two for 19 yards on Saturday.
The one thing all seven have in common? They have all resulted in a first down, and six of them have come on third down.
With the game tied early in the fourth quarter Saturday, Latushko made a 9-yard catch over the middle at the GSU 19 to convert a third-and-6.
Short yardage
Coastal is 5-0 for the first time since 2015 and only the fourth time in program history, joining 2013, 2014 and 2015, when then coach Joe Moglia decided it didn’t benefit the program to play FBS schools as an FCS member. . . .
The five-straight wins are the most consecutive wins for the Chants in a single season in the program’s young FBS history. It’s’ six straight going back to last year’s season-ending win over Texas State. . . .
Jaivon Heiligh recorded his second-straight 100-yard receiving game, catching five passes for 107 yards. . . .
With 19 yards on 19 carries, C.J. Marable tied former NFL running back Lorenzo Taliaferro for fourth on the all-time CCU career rushing list with 2,086 yards.
This story was originally published October 24, 2020 at 9:15 PM.
