RALEIGH, N.C. -- It was a late December morning, more or less like any other for Grayson McCall, except on this day, he awoke with the urge to destroy something beautiful.
A couple weeks earlier, he had committed to NC State after spending five years at Coastal Carolina, saddling up for one last rodeo as a college football quarterback at a bigger school, on a bigger stage. That lit the fuse.
For the past few years -- effectively as long as anyone outside of his hometown of Indian Trail, North Carolina, had known him -- McCall was branded as the swaggering, rollicking, beach bum quarterback of an upstart team from (just outside) Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He won games (32 in 40 starts) and threw touchdowns (87) and, as he noted in slightly more colorful language during the high-flying 2020 season when Coastal was 11-0 and ranked inside the top 10, he was Chanticleer teal through and through.
More than all of that, however, the one thing everyone knew about McCall was this: He sported a glorious, luxurious, cascading mullet.
The front was a precisely quaffed billboard for handling business. In the back, a flowing, wild mane that instantly informed the world that this guy knew how to party.
It was his calling card, but on this morning, McCall was ready to reinvent himself.
"I just chopped it off," McCall said. "I FaceTimed my mom leaving the barbershop, and she's like, 'What the hell happened?'"
McCall was almost entirely ignored as a recruit, then his 2020 season catapulted him to stardom on the national stage. For the next four years, he existed as both a football player (a three-time Sun Belt Player of the Year) and as a brand (college football's favorite blue-collar underdog). But after a nearly career-ending injury in 2023, he figured he needed a new challenge with a new team, one he could help propel to new heights.
And, he needed a haircut.
McCall's mom, Lisa Kottyan, wasn't the only one horrified by this new clean-cut look.
McCall had the mullet for his official visit to NC State in early December. When he arrived back on campus in January, quarterbacks coach Kurt Roper didn't recognize him.
Center Zeke Correll, who'd transferred from Notre Dame, met McCall for the first time on that visit, too. It was what sold him on his new quarterback.
"The first thing I noticed was the mullet," Correll said, "and I was like, this is a guy I can play with."
The world's loss, however, was McCall's catharsis.
This year, he decided, he'd debut the new Grayson McCall: older, wiser, more appreciative of how rare it is to script the right ending.
"And everything I've heard since," McCall said, "is 'Where's the mullet?'"
MCCALL PLAYED HIGH school football at Porter Ridge, where head coach Michael Hertz ran the triple option. McCall put up good numbers, mostly with his legs, but lived in the shadow of more heavily recruited quarterbacks in the area like Sam Howell and Garrett Shrader.
Coastal Carolina, which didn't become an FBS program until 2017, wasn't in the business of landing elite recruits, and in McCall, coach Jamey Chadwell saw a tough quarterback with a good skill set who already knew the basic contours of his option scheme.
"I won't tell you we knew all along, but had the tools to be pretty good," said Chadwell, now the head coach at Liberty. "Where we were surprised is, he threw the ball really well."
McCall redshirted the 2019 season, but by the summer of 2020, he'd blossomed -- and so had the mullet.
The COVID-19 lockdowns led to a lot of bad hairstyles, and a few Coastal veterans decided the mullet would make for good team bonding -- meaning any aspiring QB1 had to do his part.
"I wouldn't say we required it," linebacker Silas Kelly said. "Strongly encouraged."
The Chanticleers, who were picked to finish last in the Sun Belt in 2020, opened the season with an upset win on the road against Kansas. McCall had won the starting job just four days earlier, but he had already delivered the school's biggest win as an FBS program.
A month later, McCall and the Chants knocked off No. 16 Louisiana. From there, they just kept winning and McCall's legend kept growing.
There's a play from Coastal Carolina's otherwise forgettable 51-0 win over Georgia State in 2020 that secured McCall's mythical status. McCall rolled out to his left, forcing the edge rusher to either cover the running back or converge on the quarterback. The defender -- 6-2, 260 pounds -- engaged McCall, who tossed wide to his tailback, then swung the defensive end to the ground like a rag doll.
For any defender worth his salt, it was humiliating.
For McCall, it was the moment he became a social media celebrity, with the clip going viral.
"When your quarterback is out there hip-tossing D-linemen," said former Coastal linebacker Teddy Gallagher, "everyone starts to believe in him. He's a dude. He's tough as nails."
By early December, Coastal Carolina was 9-0, ranked No. 14 in the country, and after a series of unlikely pandemic-related twists, a showdown with fellow Cinderella BYU -- ranked eighth nationally -- was cobbled together with just a few days' notice. The game was branded as "Mormons vs. Mullets" and ESPN's "College GameDay" was on campus. BYU was a heavy favorite, but McCall helped engineer a 13-play touchdown drive in the fourth quarter that keyed a 22-17 win for Team Mullet.
Coastal finished the year 11-0 before falling to Liberty in the FBC Mortgage Cure Bowl, and McCall's final stat line was otherworldly: 26 touchdown passes, three interceptions and more than 3,000 yards of total offense in just 11 games.
Over the next two seasons, he was just as good -- 51 touchdown passes and five interceptions in 2021 and 2022.
It had all been easy -- "always sunshine and rainbows," McCall said. But then Chadwell left to take the Liberty job, and suddenly McCall realized he might be better off in the transfer portal.
"It seemed like I was taking a call from every school in the country," he said.
Only, he couldn't walk away from Coastal.
He doesn't regret staying, he said, but the story didn't have a happy ending.
THE FIRST THING McCall remembers is laying splayed on the turf, surrounded by teammates.
It was Oct. 21, 2023, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. McCall had just scrambled out of the pocket, darted downfield and slid for a first down. An Arkansas State defender dove at him anyway, his helmet catching McCall under the chin. McCall's head whipped back and hit the turf.
McCall had concussions before, but he'd never blacked out. This time, he had no recollection of the play.
Instead, he remembers in vague snippets the confusion, the neck brace, the stretcher, the ambulance.
"When I really acknowledged myself, we were going to the hospital," he said. "It was a scary time."
He spent a night in an Arkansas hospital before returning home. None of his family members had traveled for the game, but they met with doctors a few days later. The news was not good.
The doctor called it a traumatic brain injury.
The family went to lunch afterward, and Grayson was quiet. It was his dad, Jody, who spoke up first.
"This is about your health and your life and not football," he said. "You need to really think about what's best for you to move forward in life."
Grayson played his first football game when he was 5, and though no one was keeping score, Jody remembers Grayson diving for a runner's flag on the final play of the game and missing.
Grayson was quiet in the backseat of his dad's truck on the ride home.
"You alright?" Jody asked.
"No," Grayson replied.
His dad gave him a pat and reminded him that no one wins every game.
Grayson looked up with tears welling in his eyes.
"But if I'd just gotten his flag," he said.
"That's when I knew," Jody said. "This kid is die-hard."
Now, 16 years later, the kid was considering life after football.
"My whole world was crashing down," McCall said. "I love this game so much. But it's a game and there's more to life than playing football."
McCall sat out the rest of the season, though he attended every Coastal practice and game, including the Chants' bowl game in December. By that point, the medical reports were more encouraging. McCall was given the OK to return to the field.
Facing a possible end to his career had changed him though, and he finally felt ready to leave Coastal. This time, however, the pool of portal suitors was thin -- Baylor, UCF, a few others.
But the first coach he heard from, on the day he entered the portal, was NC State's Dave Doeren.
"You want to come home?" he asked McCall, selling him on playing in North Carolina.
McCall did.
"When can you get here?" Doeren asked.
MCCALL SURVEYED THE defense and saw a blitz coming, so he flipped the protection and shifted one of his receivers. He took the snap, and the pressure arrived instantly -- a zero blitz from NC State defensive coordinator Tony Gibson, who'd been trying to fluster the new quarterback throughout fall camp.
McCall sidestepped a defender, set his feet and unleashed a dart for a touchdown.
In the aftermath, McCall calmly turned around, feigned exhaustion and grinned at his coach.
"Wow," he said. "I really had to play quarterback there."
This is what Doeren loves about McCall. He's a veteran who knows the job inside and out. But he also has a swagger to the way he plays, the way he carries himself that's infectious.
"I think I'm the guy that, if I come in every day with that confidence and swagger and aura -- it's very contagious and guys will follow it," McCall said. "And then we have 100 dudes on this football team that are full of confidence that want to go whip the guy in front of them on every play. And if we take that mindset into every week, I don't think there's a team in the country that could play with us."
One of McCall's first orders of business upon arrival in Raleigh was to start feeding his O-line.
"Steaks," Correll said. "That won my heart over right away."
Tight end Justin Joly remembers McCall taking him out for hot chicken in the spring. On the drive home, McCall spotted a makeshift shop selling fireworks on the side of the road. He looked at Joly, a fellow transfer, and smiled: "Why not?" he said. They set them off that night to great fanfare.
"He's just a joy to be around," Joly said.
The response to the practice touchdown also was a subtle nod to all the criticism that still swirls around McCall. Coming out of high school, he was pegged as an option quarterback, and so he was ignored. Five years later, after a mediocre half-season outside of Chadwell's option system, the same criticism applied.
"If you truthfully watched every play from the last four years, you wouldn't say that," McCall said. "But it was kind of like [Chadwell] leaving. We won 30 games in three years, and everyone in the country should want him. And the same for me. Instead, it was like 'I don't know if we take a chance on this guy. Is he a system quarterback or can he get the job done?'"
For NC State, that doubt feels familiar. The Pack have been ranked in six of the past seven seasons, reaching as high as No. 10 nationally, but haven't finished better than 20th. It's a program that has won nine games in four of the past seven years, but has hit 10 wins just once in its history -- 22 years ago. It's a charter member of the ACC, but it hasn't won a conference championship since 1979.
"You just have to walk over hot coals until they're not hot anymore, and then you have the scars to prove it," Doeren said. "That's life, and I believe when you do that, you create karma."
Maybe it was that karma that led McCall to NC State, a place where a chip on the shoulder is a part of the uniform.
"He fits that mold," offensive lineman Anthony Belton said. "As a team, we just feel NC State's always second or third. We've got that sense of like, they're trying to little bro us again. We've got to keep proving people wrong."
Proving people wrong is nearly as much a part of the McCall brand as the flowing locks.
"The mantra and the culture here matches up with how I want to play football," McCall said. "Tough, blue-collar guys that work their asses off and want to win a lot of football games.
"I'm the guy that can lead these guys to where we want to go."
MCCALL GOT HIS first tattoo after that miraculous 2020 season. It's on his right leg, an image of three crosses with "Proverbs 5:6" underneath. The Bible verse is about understanding the future -- that it is both malleable and unknowable. If there's a lesson to be learned from McCall's story, that's it.
He was once an overlooked recruit, then a fan favorite. He gave all of himself to football, then he saw it nearly taken away. He was first wary of a fresh start, then he demanded one.
He's come to appreciate what he can control about his story and what he can't.
The rest of his right leg is a testament to the journey: A Chanticleer logo, his jersey number, an outline of North Carolina with his hometown highlighted, an ace of hearts with the reminder, "Bet on yourself." If NC State wins an ACC championship this year, he's promised to add a wolf tattoo, too.
On the front of his leg is an image his roommate designed last year. It's a sword splitting the words "faith" and "fear," one atop the other, because that's how he sees the world. Faith above fear, always.
McCall has faith in this team. The Wolfpack believe he's the man who can lead them to unprecedented heights. Fate has not ascribed the outcome for the overlooked QB or the "little brother" team, and so they can still keep reaching toward their goal.
McCall isn't thinking as much about the future now though. Nor is he trying to outrun the past. He's in a place of balance and, he's come to realize, he looks a lot better in that place with a mullet.
"Some people think it's a superstition now," McCall said, "but I embrace it. When everyone thinks of that 2020 season and my personality and how I play on the football field, it's, 'He's a tough dude with a mullet who loves football.'"
The hairdo is not quite back to its former greatness -- the business side more corporate casual, the party side a mere cocktail hour. It's a work in progress. Then again, so is McCall. So is NC State. The future malleable and unknowable.
"My journey's been crazy," McCall said. "But ultimately, I'm healthy, and I'm just so excited to be here with this staff and these players and to be playing football again."