Palsgrove’s Points: Liberty Football

Liberty University lost a football game, and everything is falling apart. The Flames’ first regular-season loss in 18 games and 697 days (or one year, 10 months and 27 days) was to Kennesaw State, granting the Owls their first ever Football Bowl Subdivision (aka FBS, I’m being forced to spell that out; I have beef with The Associated Press) victory after an 0-6 start. To call the loss catastrophic and an embarrassment to our institution might be underselling it. 

Was this game a fluke? Or is this the Flames’ true form?

The simple answer is neither, but that’s not the whole truth. There’s a saying I like from The Ringer’s Craig Horlbeck, “Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems.” It’s a good way of looking at sports especially, but it’s also a decent (if not a tad nihilistic) approach to life overall. According to that policy, we shouldn’t be surprised the Flames lost, but we also shouldn’t treat it like Chicken Little. 

Even considering the perfect record this season, I don’t think I could find anyone, Flames Head Coach Jamey Chadwell included, who would say the Flames’ first five wins were an indication of the team’s talent and its return to juggernaut status. Last season, through the Flames’ first six games, they had an average margin of victory of 18.2 points per game, and that number fell to 11.8 points this season. If you add in Liberty’s 3-point Kennesaw loss to those calculations, that leaves the Flames with an average of only 9.3 points more than their opponents per game. 

Sure, those five Liberty wins may have indicated that the Flames know how to close out games and win in the close ones, but there was an element missing all season, and against the Owls, every one of the Flames’ issues was magnified on national television. 

So, to answer my original question, the loss feels more like a sign of things to come or the true form of the Liberty Flames than it does a fluke. Upsets happen, sure. But this loss was a long time coming, and now we have to look at the repercussions of a possible collapse if the Flames can’t rally against Jacksonville State. 

Who’s at fault?

The buck stops with the coaching staff. Yes, the passing game struggled, the run game looked like a mess and the secondary looked like month-old Swiss cheese. But if we’re making a “blame pie” and handing out whose fault this season has been, it’s rather difficult not to blame Chadwell and his staff. They’re the ones who call the plays, create the coverages and lack creativity in the passing game while having one of the most electric backfields in college football and a genuine NFL prospect as their signal-caller. 

With the cancellation of the Appalachian State game, the Flames’ schedule was thrown into a blender, and the result was a strange 31-day period when the Flames only played one football game (the 31-24 victory over FIU). That wacky window of two 15-plus days off in a row, broken up by a Tuesday night game, would throw off the circadian rhythm of the best of teams, and Liberty wasn’t playing like the best of teams going into that window. It’s the duty of the coaching staff to keep the players at peak physical form over both of those two-week breaks and get the players into the mental headspace needed to pacify a team looking for its first FBS win against the conference’s best team. 

The Flames looked unprepared for the Owls’ counterpunch and stunned by the ferocity that the offense and, specifically, the defensive line played with. They underestimated their opponent and overestimated themselves, resulting in the first time this season we’ve seen the true Flames.

What’s next?

The Flames need a win. They are clamoring for changes to be made and heads to roll, and the only way to avoid an embarrassing collapse and national harassment is to silence the fans, the haters and the Gamecocks in 60 minutes of football. 

On the field, I want to see the Flames scheme their wide receivers open instead of forcing Salter to launch one into the rafters and hope his guy comes down with it, and maybe help out your DBs by playing some zone. But more than anything that I want schematically, I want to see a cold-blooded fury and so much of a desire to improve that the Flames leave smoke trails on the turf. Liberty needs to come out of the tunnel, run up the score to an offensive level and reassert themselves as the royalty of the conference. Anything short of that is a failure. 

But I’m sure it’ll all be fine. 

Palsgrove is the sports editor for the Liberty Champion. Follow him on X.