The People vs. Liberty Football
DISCLAIMER: This newsletter may be the only time in human history someone draws a parallel between Jim L. Mora and Larry Flynt.
Yeah…THAT Larry Flynt.
Any similarities presumably begin and end with a single, tenuous connection that the world owes both a debt of gratitude for knocking Liberty University down a peg.
Mora — who deserves a spotlight all his own for the remarkable work he’s done his first season at UConn — won his sixth game of 2022 on Nov. 12, his Huskies outlasting Liberty in a 36-33 shootout.
With the Flames coming off a win at Arkansas, Liberty had skyrocketed into the top 20 of the AP Poll and curried enough interest among college football media that College Football Playoff committee chairman Boo Corrigan was asked about Liberty’s exclusion from the Nov. 8 rankings.
Losing to UConn puts to rest any possibility of LU sneaking into New Year’s Six conversations, but that brief episode serves as an unfortunate reminder: Sportswashing works.
In the case of Liberty, national media figures have proven all-too willing to play along with the clear intent of laundering the school’s less-than-sterling reputation through winning athletics.
Even some of the coverage of Liberty’s gamble on high-profile football as a vehicle for promotion that touches on the unseemly elements seem to have done so with kid gloves, sparing the true invective for those more deserving of it: Like players who lose close conference games1.
Liberty football’s move to FBS in 2018 ranks among the more nefarious sportswashing efforts in recent years, coinciding directly with Jerry Falwell Jr.’s push to weaponize the university’s influence for political purposes.
Of course, Liberty’s very history is rooted in politics. Jerry Falwell Sr. founded the university to be an extension of his congregation, which was inherently political since Falwell himself used his religious pulpit to push his political agenda.
Falwell’s political activism drew the ire of the aforementioned pornographer Flynt.
Regardless of one's personal feelings toward Flynt or his profession — and please don’t mistake this commentary as an endorsement of Flynt — his war with Falwell during the 1980s over a parody advertisement mocking the reverend served as a landmark moment for the First Amendment (and dramatized in the 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt).
Flynt won a major victory for satire of public figures. Falwell attempted to invoke “emotional distress” to suppress ridicule — crude as it was — of himself as a public figure. A Falwell win would have had profound negative repercussions for generations, establishing as legal precedent the ability for public figures to attack others on a macro level while those figures on a micro level could not be lampooned.
Meanwhile, the rhetoric Falwell promoted in this era was far more poisonous than any parody advertisement Flynt could have run about the preacher. Falwell’s was an agenda rooted in racism that bled into the formation of his university. The college’s K-12 predecessor operated as a “segregation academy.”
Now, plenty of institutions were founded on racist beliefs in eras when such ideology was the norm. And, in the context of employing these institutions football programs as a conduit through which to promote racist and segregationist politics.
Football fanatic Richard Nixon famously inserted himself front-and-center in the 1969 Texas-Arkansas game, a matchup of two all-white teams vying for the national championship. As Commander-in-Chief, Nixon took it upon himself to declare the winner champion2, in the process spurning an undefeated (and racially integrated) Penn State team with just as much claim to the title as Texas.
Nixon’s stunt was as a political maneuver, however, intended to engender goodwill for the Californian president among the displaced Dixiecrats in what came to be the Southern Strategy.
That same year, members of the Wyoming football team were booted from the roster in retaliation for their plans to wear black arm bands in a game against BYU, a protest of the Church of Jesus Christ of Ladder-Day Saints’ policies on race. Members of Wyoming’s “Black 14” were honored at BYU this past season to offer some measure of amends for the injustice they faced 53 years ago.
That’s all to say Liberty isn’t unique in it having some unsavory history. What separates Liberty, and specifically Liberty football, to make it worthy of condemnation is that the program’s current rise is a direct result of Jerry Falwell Jr. using the sport as a vessel for his own megalomania.
Two days after UConn and Mora put to bed any nonsense consideration of Liberty receiving an invitation to one of the New Year’s Six bowls, I watched Hulu’s documentary chronicling the sex and extortion scandal that forced Jerry Falwell Jr.’s resignation as Liberty’s president in 2020.
Billy Corben directed God Forbid, keeping loose ties to the topic at hand and college football; Corben also directed ESPN’s 30 For 30 entries on the University of Miami football program.
The Miami-based filmmaker is also responsible for the Cocaine Cowboys series. Viewers of those movies and the 2021 Netflix limited series know Corben excels at digging into a scandalous story, and in God Forbid, he presents a compelling examination of Falwell’s cultivation of Liberty into an arm of a specific political party.
What’s more — and at the heart of the problems with sportswashing Liberty — the university’s committed to a code of conduct that fostered a culture of sexual abuse insidious enough that the Department of Education launched an investigation into the university this year.
This brings to mind unfortunate reminders of similar scandals, like that which forced Art Briles out at Baylor. The rampant sexual violence plaguing Baylor football in the mid-2010s also forced out athletic director Ian McCaw — who’s now the athletic director at Liberty.
McCaw has never publicly accepted a shred of responsibility for the problems at Baylor. On the contrary, we’re at about the half-decade mark of McCaw’s attorneys promising exoneration that’s never come, and McCaw promising exoneration of Briles that’s also never come.
My initial assumption when I first learned of McCaw’s declarations about Briles was that it was a smokescreen for McCaw to justify hiring Briles at Liberty. Instead, the Flames head coach is a different former Power Five-conference coach who left in disgrace under the cloud of a sex scandal, Hugh Freeze. Seems to be a recurring theme in Lynchburg, bringing us back to Falwell.
Yes, Jerry Falwell Jr. has been out at Liberty for two years. But while he did indeed step down — lying about his role to the bitter end — it’s not unfair to speculate he’d remain in that same post today, watching a winning Liberty football team from his luxury box, had Giancarlo Granda not gone public with evidence incriminating Falwell.
I don’t begrudge an athlete who plays for Liberty. Landing a Div. I scholarship is hard, as is navigating the college process. Until Liberty makes dramatic reforms, however, every win an opponent scores against the Flames on Saturdays is another victory for some semblance of morality.
And, hey: You can’t spell morality without L. Mora.
The same author of the Los Angeles Times’ deep dive into Liberty chasing FBS glory this week wrote a venomous column insulting UCLA for “a choke” against Arizona, 34-28.
Only a slightly more exhausting means of crowning a champion than the current College Football Playoff structure.