Of mullets and men: Grayson McCall’s chance to rewrite his ending at NC State
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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
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.”
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Bill Connelly
Back in May, ESPN’s team of college football reporters voted on the sport’s best coaches for 2025. The results were about as you would expect: Start with the three active guys who have most recently won national titles (Georgia’s Kirby Smart, Ohio State’s Ryan Day, Clemson’s Dabo Swinney), move on to guys with recent top-five finishes or national title game appearances (Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman, Texas’ Steve Sarkisian, Oregon’s Dan Lanning, Alabama’s Kalen DeBoer, Penn State’s James Franklin), then squeeze in a couple of long-term overachievers at the end (Utah’s Kyle Whittingham, Iowa State’s Matt Campbell).
The rankings made plenty of sense, but I couldn’t help but notice that the top eight coaches on the list all work for some of the richest, most well-supported programs in the country. There are some epic pressures associated with leading these programs — just ask Day — but there are also major advantages. It might only take a good head coach to do great things in those jobs, while at programs with smaller alumni bases or lesser historic track records, it might take a great coach to do merely good things. They’re such different jobs that it’s almost impossible to even know how to compare the performance of, say, Matt Campbell to Steve Sarkisian. Could Campbell have led Texas to back-to-back CFP semifinals? Could Sark have brought ISU its first two AP top-15 finishes?
The May rankings made me want to see if there were a way to apply stats to the conversation. If you think about it, we’re basically measuring two things when we’re gauging coach performance: overall quality and quality relative to the expectations of the job. I thought it would be fun to come up with a blend of those two things and see what the results told us.
Performance versus expectation
Gauging overall performance is easy enough. You could simply look at win percentage, and it would tell you quite a bit. From 2015 to 2024, the active coaches with the best FBS win percentages (minimum 30 games) were Day (.870), Lanning (.854), Swinney (.850) and Smart (.847). All ranked high in the May rankings. I tend to want to get fancy and use my SP+ ratings whenever possible, and they tell a similar tale. Looking at average SP+ ratings for the past decade, the top active coaches are Day (30.4), Smart (27.0), Lanning (22.3), Swinney (21.9), Franklin (20.3) and Freeman (19.0). They’re all in the May top 10 too.
Again, though, all of those coaches are employed by college football royalty. (Granted, Swinney gets bonus points for helping Clemson turn into college football royalty, but still.) Isn’t it more impressive to win 11 regular-season games at Indiana, as Curt Cignetti did in 2024, than to go 10-4 like Swinney did? Isn’t it probably harder to finish 12th in SP+ at SMU, as Rhett Lashlee did in 2024, than to finish fifth like Franklin did?
I’ve begun to incorporate teams’ performance against long-term averages into my preseason SP+ projections, and it seems we could use a very similar concept to evaluate coach performances. For each year someone is a head coach, we could compare his team’s SP+ rating for that season to the school’s average from the 20 previous years. (If the school is newer to FBS and doesn’t have a 20-year average, we can use whatever average exists to date. And for a program’s first FBS season, we can simply compare the team’s SP+ rating to the overall average for first-year programs.)
By this method, the 10 best single-season coaching performances of the past 20 years include Art Briles at Baylor in 2013-14, Jim Harbaugh at Stanford in 2010, Mark Mangino at Kansas in 2007, Bobby Petrino at Louisville in 2006, Greg Schiano at Rutgers in 2006 and Jamey Chadwell at Coastal Carolina in 2020 — legendary seasons of overachievement — plus perhaps lesser-remembered performances such as Gary Andersen at Utah State in 2012, Matt Wells at Utah State in 2018 and Brian Kelly at Cincinnati in 2007.
As far as single-season overachievement goes, that’s a pretty good list. And if we look at a longer-term sample — coaches who have led FBS programs for at least nine of the past 20 years — here are the 15 best performance versus baseline averages.
(Note: I’m looking only at performances within the past 20 years, so Nick Saban’s work at LSU (2000-04) or Michigan State (1995-99), for instance, isn’t included. I also went with nine years instead of 10 so Smart’s current nine-year run at Georgia could be included in the sample.)
Best performance vs. historic baseline averages for the past 20 years (min. nine seasons):
1. Chris Petersen, Boise State (2006-13) and Washington (2014-19): +12.8 points above historic baseline
2. Art Briles, Houston (2005-07) and Baylor (2008-15): +12.8
3. Gary Pinkel, Missouri (2005-15): +12.5
4. Nick Saban, Alabama (2007-23): +10.7
5. Jeff Monken, Army (2014-24): +10.3
6. Willie Fritz, Georgia Southern (2014-15), Tulane (2016-23) and Houston (2024): +10.0
7. Lance Leipold, Buffalo (2015-20) and Kansas (2021-24): +9.5
8. Bobby Petrino, Louisville (2005-06), Arkansas (2008-11), Western Kentucky (2013) and Louisville (2014-18): +9.5
9. Gary Patterson, TCU (2005-21): +8.6
10. Jim Harbaugh, Stanford (2007-10) and Michigan (2015-23): +8.5
11. Blake Anderson, Arkansas State (2014-20) and Utah State (2021-23): +8.5
12. Steve Spurrier, South Carolina (2005-15): +8.2
13. Greg Schiano, Rutgers (2005-11 and 2020-24): +7.8
14. Jeff Brohm, Western Kentucky (2014-16), Purdue (2017-22) and Louisville (2023-24): +7.7
15. David Cutcliffe, Duke (2008-21): +7.7
If we are looking for pure overachievement and aren’t in the mood to reward coaches for winning at schools that always win, this is again a pretty good list. Petersen was spectacular at both Boise State and Washington, while Briles, Pinkel, Monken and Patterson all won big at schools that hadn’t won big in quite a while. (Monken, in fact, is still winning big.) Blake Anderson’s presence surprised me, but most of the names here are extremely well regarded. And Saban’s presence at No. 4, despite coaching at one of the bluest of blue-blood programs, is a pretty good indicator of just how special his reign at Alabama was.
Still, looking only at performance against expectations obviously sells coaches like Saban and Smart short. Saban is probably the best head coach in the sport’s history but ranks only fourth on the above list. Meanwhile, Smart has overachieved by only 6.0 points above the historic baseline in his nine seasons at Georgia thanks to the high bar predecessor Mark Richt set. But he has also won two national titles, overcoming Georgia’s history of falling just short and at least briefly surpassing Saban as well. If our goal is to measure coaching prowess, we need to account for raw quality too.
The best coaches of the past 20 years
If we combine raw SP+ averages with this performance versus baseline average, we can come up with a pretty decent overall coach rating. We can debate the weights involved, but here’s what an overall rating looks like if we use 60% performance versus baseline and 40% SP+ average:
I always like to say that numbers make great starting points for a conversation, and this is a pretty good starting point. Anyone reading this would probably tweak this list to suit their own preferences, and while it probably isn’t surprising that Pinkel is in the top 20, seeing him fourth, ahead of Meyer, Harbaugh and others, is a bit jarring. (I promise that this Mizzou alum didn’t put his finger on the scales.) Regardless, this is a fun mix of guys who won big at big schools and guys who won pretty big at pretty big schools. That was the goal of the exercise.
Maybe the most confusing coach in this top 20 is Dabo Swinney. Clemson had enjoyed just one AP top-five finish in its history before he took over 16 years ago, and he has led the Tigers to 2 national titles, 6 top-five finishes and 7 CFP appearances. And while they haven’t had a true, title-caliber team in a few years, they’ve still won two of the past three ACC crowns. How is he only 10th?
The main culprit for Swinney’s lower-than-expected ranking is his recent performance — it has been inferior to both national title standards and his standards. Since we’re using a team’s performance against 20-year averages, a lot of this rating is basically comparing Swinney to himself, and he hasn’t quite measured up of late.
From 2012 to 2020, Swinney’s average rating was an incredible 17.0, which would have ranked second to only Saban on the list above. But his average over the past four seasons is only 3.6.
Part of what made Saban so impressive was how long he managed to clear the bar he himself was setting in Tuscaloosa. Per SP+, his best team was his 14th — the 2020 team that won his sixth and final title at Bama. While Swinney was basically matching Saban’s standard 12 years into their respective tenures, Saban continued at a particularly high level for at least three more years while Swinney fell off the pace.
Comparing Saban, Swinney and Smart year by year, we see that Smart was hitting Saban-esque levels seven seasons into his tenure, but his rating has fallen off each of the past two seasons. Even Saban slipped starting in Year 15, even though he still had nearly the best program in the sport for a couple more years.
The best coaches of 2025
Six of the top seven coaches on the list above are either retired or coaching in the NFL now, so let’s focus our gaze specifically on the guys who will be leading college teams out onto the field in 2025. Using the same 20-year sample as above — which cuts off the tenure of Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz but includes everything else — here’s how the current crop of FBS head coaches has performed at the FBS level. We’ll break this into two samples: the guys who have coached for at least four years in this sample and the guys who have coached between one and three years.
Our May top 10 list featured eight guys who have been head coaches for at least four years; all eight are represented on this list, including four of the top five. (Sarkisian has averaged a 13.8 rating over the past two seasons, which is a top-five level, but his overall run as head coach at Washington, USC and Texas has featured a number of ups and downs.)
Maybe the name that jumps out the most above is Josh Heupel. I think anyone would consider him a very good coach (he’s 37-15 overall), but he doesn’t exactly draw any “best in the game?” hype. He benefited from a positive situation at UCF, where he inherited a rising program from Scott Frost in 2019 and produced big ratings in his first couple of years on the job. But his average rating at Tennessee has been a solid 14.0 as well; the Volunteers had been up and down for years, but he has produced four top-20 SP+ ratings in a row and two top-10s in the past three years. He might not be getting the credit he deserves for that.
All in all, I enjoy this list. We’ve got mostly predictable names at the top, we’ve got some oldies but (mostly) goodies spread throughout, and we’ve got room for up-and-comers like Jeff Traylor too. This 60-40 approach probably doesn’t give enough respect to the Chris Creightons of the world — the Eastern Michigan coach has overachieved against EMU’s baseline by 7.2 points per season, which is a fantastic average, but at such a hard job, his Eagles have still averaged only a minus-14.4 SP+ rating during his tenure. Still, this is a mostly solid approach.
Now let’s talk about some small-sample all-stars.
Four of the top six of this list coached in the College Football Playoff last season, and while the guys ranked fifth and sixth made our May top 10 list, the guys who won big at SMU and Indiana, not Oregon and Notre Dame, take priority here. I was honestly floored that Curt Cignetti didn’t make our top 10 list; he led James Madison to one of the best FBS debuts ever, going 19-4 in 2022-23, then he moved to Bloomington and led Indiana — INDIANA! — to 11 wins in his first season there.
On this list, however, Rhett Lashlee tops even Cignetti. I’m not sure we’ve talked enough about the job he has done at SMU. He, too, inherited a rising program, as Sonny Dykes had done some of the nitty-gritty work in getting the Mustangs back on their feet (with help from an offensive coordinator named Rhett Lashlee). SMU hadn’t produced a top-50 ranking since 1985 before Dykes did so for three straight seasons (2019-21). But after holding steady in his first year replacing Dykes, Lashlee’s program has ignited: 12-2 and 24th in SP+ in 2023, then 11-3 and 12th in 2024. Looking specifically at the 2021-24 range, as the game has undergone so much change, Lashlee’s 16.8 average rating ranks second overall, behind only Smart (18.0) and ahead of Kiffin (15.1), Cignetti (15.0), Odom (15.0), Heupel (14.0) and Day (13.9).
Along with quite a few others here, Lashlee made my 2024 list of 30 coaches who would define the next decade; he’d definitely still be on the list — along with new additions like GJ Kinne and perhaps Fran Brown — if I remade that list today.
It’s 2025 MLB All-Star Home Run Derby day in Atlanta!
Some of the most dynamic home run hitters in baseball will be taking aim at the Truist Park stands on Monday (8 p.m. ET on ESPN) in one of the most anticipated events of the summer.
While the prospect of a back-to-back champion is out of the picture — 2024 winner Teoscar Hernandez is not a part of this year’s field — a number of exciting stars will be taking the field, including Atlanta’s own Matt Olson, who replaced Ronald Acuna Jr. just three days before the event. Will Olson make a run in front of his home crowd? Will Cal Raleigh show off the power that led to 38 home runs in the first half? Or will one of the younger participants take the title?
We have your one-stop shop for everything Derby related, from predictions to live updates once we get underway to analysis and takeaways at the night’s end.
MLB Home Run Derby field
Cal Raleigh, Seattle Mariners (38 home runs in 2025)
James Wood, Washington Nationals (24)
Junior Caminero, Tampa Bay Rays (23)
Byron Buxton, Minnesota Twins (21)
Brent Rooker, Athletics (20)
Matt Olson, Atlanta Braves (17)
Jazz Chisholm Jr., New York Yankees (17)
Oneil Cruz, Pittsburgh Pirates (16)
Live updates
Who is going to win the Derby and who will be the runner-up?
Jeff Passan: Raleigh. His swing is perfect for the Derby: He leads MLB this season in both pull percentage and fly ball percentage, so it’s not as if he needs to recalibrate it to succeed. He has also become a prolific hitter from the right side this season — 16 home runs in 102 at-bats — and his ability to switch between right- and left-handed pitching offers a potential advantage. No switch-hitter (or catcher for that matter) has won a Home Run Derby. The Big Dumper is primed to be the first, beating Buxton in the finals.
Alden Gonzalez: Cruz. He might be wildly inconsistent at this point in his career, but he is perfect for the Derby — young enough to possess the stamina required for a taxing event that could become exhausting in the Atlanta heat; left-handed, in a ballpark where the ball carries out better to right field; and, most importantly, capable of hitting balls at incomprehensible velocities. Raleigh will put on a good show from both sides of the plate but will come in second.
Buster Olney: Olson. He is effectively pinch-hitting for Acuna, and because he received word in the past 72 hours of his participation, he hasn’t had the practice rounds that the other competitors have been going through. But he’s the only person in this group who has done the Derby before, which means he has experienced the accelerated pace, adrenaline and push of the crowd.
His pitcher, Eddie Perez, knows something about performing in a full stadium in Atlanta. And, as Olson acknowledged in a conversation Sunday, the park generally favors left-handed hitters because of the larger distances that right-handed hitters must cover in left field.
Jesse Rogers: Olson. Home-field advantage will mean something this year as hitting in 90-plus degree heat and humidity will be an extra challenge in Atlanta. Olson understands that and can pace himself accordingly. Plus, he was a late addition. He has got nothing to lose. He’ll outlast the young bucks in the field. And I’m not putting Raleigh any lower than second — his first half screams that he’ll be in the finals against Olson.
Jorge Castillo: Wood. His mammoth power isn’t disputed — he can jack baseballs to all fields. But the slight defect in his power package is that he doesn’t hit the ball in the air nearly as often as a typical slugger. Wood ranks 126th out of 155 qualified hitters across the majors in fly ball percentage. And he still has swatted 24 home runs this season. So, in an event where he’s going to do everything he can to lift baseballs, hitting fly balls won’t be an issue, and Wood is going to show off that gigantic power en route to a victory over Cruz in the finals.
Who will hit the longest home run of the night — and how far?
Passan: Cruz hits the ball harder than anyone in baseball history. He’s the choice here, at 493 feet.
Gonzalez: If you exclude the Coors Field version, there have been just six Statcast-era Derby home runs that have traveled 497-plus feet. They were compiled by two men: Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton. James Wood — all 6-foot-7, 234 pounds of him — will become the third.
Olney: James Wood has the easy Stanton- and Judge-type power, and he will clear the Chophouse with the longest homer. Let’s say 497 feet.
Rogers: Hopefully he doesn’t injure himself doing it, but Buxton will break out his massive strength and crush a ball at least 505 feet. I don’t see him advancing far in the event, but for one swing, he’ll own the night.
Castillo: Cruz hits baseballs hard and far. He’ll crush a few bombs, and one will reach an even 500 feet.
Who is the one slugger fans will know much better after the Derby?
Passan: Buxton capped his first half with a cycle on Saturday, and he’ll carry that into the Derby, where he will remind the world why he was baseball’s No. 1 prospect in 2015. Buxton’s talent has never been in question, just his health. And with his body feeling right, he has the opportunity to put on a show fans won’t soon forget.
Olney: Caminero isn’t a big name and wasn’t a high-end prospect like Wood was earlier in his career. Just 3½ years ago, Caminero was dealt to the Rays by the Cleveland Guardians in a relatively minor November trade for pitcher Tobias Myers. But since then, he has refined his ability to cover inside pitches and is blossoming this year into a player with ridiculous power. He won’t win the Derby, but he’ll open some eyes.
What’s the one moment we’ll all be talking about long after this Derby ends?
Gonzalez: The incredible distances and velocities that will be reached, particularly by Wood, Cruz, Caminero, Raleigh and Buxton. The hot, humid weather at Truist Park will only aid the mind-blowing power that will be on display Monday night.
Rogers: The exhaustion on the hitter’s faces, swinging for home run after home run in the heat and humidity of Hot-lanta!
Castillo: Cruz’s 500-foot blast and a bunch of other lasers he hits in the first two rounds before running out of gas in the finals.
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