The Liberty Flames' big chance
The Red Sea has parted for Liberty to become a mainstream college football program and significant institution in American culture due to the new playoff format.
The new playoff structure is not going to last for more than the two years for which they’ve contracted it (2024 and 2025). I went into it when they released the 5+7, 12-team playoff recently and why it was horribly flawed and doomed.
I also suggested, thanks to my own hard work figuring out how the math works on creating bye weeks for top seeds (it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand), that a 14-team playoff might make more sense as the next option rather than the popularly assumed 16-team model. Sure enough, discussions have been floating a 14-team model for 2026.
In the meantime, opportunity knocks for a fledging program in college football.
The Liberty Flames.
A very young, private school started up by Jerry Falwell (later headed by his son Jerry Junior) and affiliated with the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia, Liberty is entirely a product of 20th century American evangelicalism. That makes it an immediately controversial institution.
In the 2000s they decided that maybe it’d be cool if they were good in football and became a FCS contender. In the late 2010s they made two massive moves in this direction. They stepped up into FBS play and hired the disgraced Hugh Freeze to build the program. After four solid seasons with Mr. Freeze, he left to run Auburn and was replaced by Jamey Chadwell, fresh off a brilliant run with the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers.
Most importantly for our purposes, the hire of Chadwell coincided with a move into Conference-USA after playing as an Independent the first few seasons in FBS. Chadwell immediately went 13-1 as head coach of the Flames and Liberty got to play in a New Year’s Six bowl, where they were pummeled by Oregon.
The Flames are a fascinating institution in modern American culture and are likely to be in the American sports mainstream thanks to the new playoff format which makes a ranked Liberty team based in a weak conference like Conf-USA an annual participant in the playoffs.