Grimsley’s Faizon Brandon cemented his legacy in the best way possible: on the field

Faizon Brandon’s decision to return to the field late in his senior senior was eerily similar to the decision made by another Grimsley player just five seasons earlier.

“I’m very glad to end it the right way,” he said.

Travis Shaw, who at the time was ranked as high as the No. 4 defensive lineman in his senior class class, was — like Brandon — coming off a state championship the year before. Also like Brandon, Shaw was injured early in the year — Shaw missed all eight of the first games to start the 2021 season, returning to the field just in time for senior night and a playoff run.

But Brandon, the nation’s top-ranked quarterback and 2024 N.C. Gatorade Player of the Year, had to have had more on his mind than Shaw did.

After all, a lot has changed in five years.

Shaw had to weigh the possibility of returning to the field and getting re-injured and how that might affect his ability to play right away as a freshman.

The birth of the “NIL era” in college football means players have a real financial risk.

Brandon’s injury — a ligament on his right thumb — was in an area where you can’t be too careful.

“Faizon,” who has earned the first-name-only recognition statewide that few players reach in four years in any sport, was also the athlete who challenged the state’s NIL rules and won.

If anyone understood what was at stake, he did.

But sports are not made with the spirit of accounting.

They were made for competitors.

“When he goes out and everybody that thinks they know says ‘You shouldn’t come back.’ I got phone calls saying he had already moved to Tennessee. I thought that was funny because he was in my office when I got that call,” Grimsley coach Darryl Brown said. “And everything else, you know, like he’s done, he’s not playing at Grimsley High School anymore. And he does everything within his power to get himself back to be a part of this run with his teammates. He could have said, I’m good, I already won a state championship.”

In his final year, he returned to the playoffs after missing all but the season opener, wasn’t quite himself. Yet, while playing a total of just six games, and throwing 11 touchdowns, he also walked away as a two-time N.C. High School Athletic Association champion and a two-time MVP.

“Playing high school football in anywhere, playing varsity high school football, for anybody listening, it means something,” Brown said. “It matters. It’s important. A lot of times everybody wants to speed stuff up. But that school you’re at and the teammates you’re with, and the coaches you play for, that matters. And you can see that it means something to our kids.”

He had all the reasons, probably millions if you count every potential dollar, to not play again for the Whirlies. He would have still walked away as one of the best North Carolina high school quarterbacks since the turn of the century.

But he didn’t go out as a healthy scratch.

He went out as a two-time champion, two-time MVP, and his legacy at Grimsley — like Shaw’s — was cemented where it should have always been: on the field.

“I was just trying to give it everything I got, you know, go out there and lay it on the line,” Brandon said. “That was the biggest thing that I felt whenever I came to realization that it would be in my last high school game is just giving it everything I got.”