Chants open playoffs with one final chance at an FCS championship

When the Coastal Carolina football team opens the NCAA FCS playoffs on Saturday against The Citadel, the Chanticleers will be launching their last postseason push with star senior quarterback Alex Ross as well as a handful of other key senior contributors.

More than that, though, all of the Chants realize there is a bit of finality to this playoff run.

With the program’s upcoming move to the Sun Belt Conference and the NCAA’s FBS level, which involves a mandatory two-year transition process that will leave the team ineligible for any postseason play in that time, this is the Chants’ last climb toward the goal of an FCS national championship.

And the last time for a few years that the stakes could possibly be this high.

“It’s extremely important, not just for me, for all the other guys on the team,” Ross said this week. “For all the seniors and a lot of those guys who won’t be able to play for a conference championship soon in the future. So it’s important for a lot of the guys on the team.”

Junior linebacker Alex Scearce took an even more big-picture view in assessing the urgency the No. 9/10-ranked Chants (9-2) feel as they open the postseason at home against the No. 18 Bulldogs (8-3).

“I’ll be a senior next year, but we won’t be able to win anything next year. Really this is everyone’s last chance to win a national championship because even if we win all of our games in the Sun Belt, because of the conference not being like an SEC or something like that, we probably won’t get a shot to the playoffs,” Scearce said. “I mean, we can win bowl games [in the future], but this is really everyone’s last chance to be able to win a national championship.”

So here it is.

With a loss to Liberty in their regular-season finale last week, the Chants didn’t get the first-round bye they were hoping for and instead face a daunting challenge Saturday against a Bulldogs team that ranks second in the FCS in averaging 344.3 rushing yards per game and that just pulled off a momentous 23-22 upset victory at South Carolina last weekend.

Coastal Carolina earned a 31-16 win over The Citadel in the opener last season, but that was Mike Houston’s first game as coach of the Bulldogs and they’ve come a long ways since then.

Both Houston and Chants head coach Joe Moglia used the phrase “night and day” to describe the improvements the Bulldogs have made in that time.

Their only three losses this fall came to an FBS-level Georgia Southern team and against Charleston Southern and Chattanooga, who both finished the regular season ranked in the top 10 of the FCS polls.

Whoever wins this game would then get a rematch next Saturday at Charleston Southern, which defeated the Chants in the regular season as well. While The Citadel operates a traditional triple-option offense, Charleston Southern employs a shotgun-oriented variation of it and both can make for challenging matchups (as the Chants well know).

Coastal Carolina defensive coordinator Clayton Carlin said he didn’t think it was a bad playoff draw for the team, though.

“The season started with [123] FCS teams and there’s 24 left and after this weekend they’ll be 16 left. ... So here you are,” he said.

That’s the same point Houston made this week as well – there are no easy draws in the playoffs.

“No matter who you are, there’s 24 teams left in the country. Everybody’s good and certainly Coastal falls into that category,” he said. “There’s a reason they were ranked No. 1 in the country for most of the season. It’s a lot of the same guys we saw on offense the beginning of last year and certainly I remember how talented they are.”

The Chants (34.8 points per game) and Bulldogs (32.1 points per game) rank 19th and 26th, respectively, in the FCS in scoring. Coastal Carolina ranks 14th defensively in holding teams to an average of 18.2 points per game despite a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde type season, while The Citadel is significantly improved this year under defensive coordinator Maurice Drayton – who was the Chants’ special teams coordinator and receivers coach from 2010-11. The Bulldogs’ defense is giving up a respectable 21.0 points per game to rank 30th nationally.

The one area where the Chants would have a distinct advantage, though, is in terms of postseason experience. This is The Citadel’s first playoff appearance since 1992, while Coastal Carolina is making its fourth playoff appearance in four years under Moglia, having advanced to the third round each of the last two seasons.

For his part, he said he is not making a big deal about this being the Chants’ last chance at an FCS national championship.

“It’s special. It’s special because it’s our fourth time in the playoffs, it is the last opportunity we’re going to have to be able to do that. [But] let’s make believe it’s not the last – I still don’t know how that changes how we would prepare,” Moglia said. “... If they’re not giving it their very, very best, then I’m not doing my job. So we ask our guys to give 100 percent 100 percent of the time. That means if it’s our last opportunity to win a championship, [or] that means if you’re going to have another opportunity down the road to win a championship, we have to take care of business today. We don’t know what’s going to happen down the road.”

As for Ross, the Chants’ steely senior leader who doesn’t have much else but a national championship left to add to his resume, he feels his team is as ready as can be to follow through on that goal.

“It’s high as it’s ever been,” Ross said of the collective confidence. “We’re ready to go, we’re prepared, we’re confident and we’re champing at the bit to get out there.”

This story was originally published November 27, 2015 at 8:09 PM with the headline "Chants open playoffs with one final chance at an FCS championship."