Liberty Football Is the Cure to School’s Scandalous Summer

(Bloomberg) -- Liberty University, the school founded by evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell, has gone from scandal-plagued to college-football darling with a plot dripping in irony.

In August, President Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned amid a sex scandal and questions about his use of alcohol -- students and faculty are prohibited from drinking -- that dragged out for weeks and tarnished the school’s reputation.

Say Liberty to a college-football fan now and you’re more likely to hear about the Lynchburg, Virginia, school’s 22nd-ranked football team. The Flames beat Virginia Tech, the state’s traditional football power, on Nov. 7 with a last-second 51-yard field goal. The upset comes in just the school’s third season playing in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of college football.

The credit for Liberty’s football success goes to coach Hugh Freeze, a man with his own blemished history.

Freeze is a former head coach at the University of Mississippi, where he fell from the lofty perch of coaching in the Southeastern Conference to the backroads of independent college football after a personal scandal.

After taking Ole Miss from perpetual SEC laggard to as high as No. 3 in the country, Freeze was forced to resign in July 2017 after a series of recruiting violations and after evidence emerged that he used a phone provided by the school to make calls to an escort service.

The Oxford, Mississippi, school was later hit with scholarship reductions and bowl bans, and it had to forfeit wins from Freeze’s tenure. Freeze was given a one-year show-cause penalty, a punishment that effectively made him unemployable in college football as a head coach for the 2018 season.

Shortly after the penalty lapsed in December 2018, Liberty pounced.

‘Family Man’

“What really impressed us the most with him is he’s a man of great faith, a great family man,” Liberty Athletic Director Ian McCaw said at the time.

Freeze’s hiring at Liberty was the latest twist in a coaching career that has been anything but typical.

He’s one of the few coaches -- Auburn’s Gus Malzahn being another -- to parlay success at the high-school level into a job at a major college-football program. And at Ole Miss, he became one of just a handful of coaches who can claim that they beat Nick Saban’s University of Alabama juggernaut two or more times.

Freeze was a legend in Tennessee, where he led Briarcrest Christian, a small private school in Eads, to state championships behind an unconventional no-huddle offense. At Briarcrest, Freeze reached national notoriety for the first time when he was featured in Michael Lewis’s best-selling book “The Blind Side,” which centered on Michael Oher, an offensive lineman on the team.

College football has always shown a willingness to forgive personal shortcomings -- or at least look the other way -- in exchange for wins and the financial windfall they bring. For Liberty, that willingness has already paid off, and it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.

The Liberty Flames have 15 wins and five losses during Freeze’s first two seasons, including their first bowl victory. In 2020, the team is undefeated with seven wins.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.