Jamey Chadwell is showing his true colors at Liberty

Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time.

Content warning: this article briefly discusses sexual assault allegations in its fifth paragraph.

Happy Pride Month, everybody! Let’s talk about the school that wants queer people dead.

For anybody who doesn’t turn into a killjoy the instant a G5 team finds sustainable success, the early 2020s Coastal Carolina teams were a ton of fun. Led by sensational tight end Isaiah Likely, record-setting passer Grayson McCall, and innovative head coach Jamey Chadwell, they went from having never reached a bowl to a peak ranking of ninth, reaching the top 25 in three straight seasons. They beat Power 5 teams, wore mullets, used a teal field, and hell, they played half an hour from Myrtle Beach. What could be more fun than that?

Of course, all good things must come to an end, but the way things went down for CCU was rather odd. The team took heavy losses in 2022 and still scraped together a 9-1 start with five wins by a single score, but the wheels came off down the stretch as they dropped their last three games by 47-7, 45-26, and 53-29 scores. McCall’s absence was conspicuous in the first of those three affairs, and the idea that most of Chadwell’s success came because of his quarterback was a talking point during the Chanticleers’ decline. It seemed likely that, given his considerable accolades, he would be a top target in the transfer portal. The trajectory of Chadwell’s impending decline seemed likely to center around McCall’s departure to a more visible program or directly to the NFL Draft, leaving the Chants exposed without a superstar under center.

Instead, it turned out to be Chadwell who left and McCall who stayed. There hasn’t been any further on-field decline for the head coach (yet), but the job he chose to take scuttles every bit of the goodwill he built as the architect of football’s most likable team. Nothing will do that faster than joining Liberty.

I have a certain word count I like to stay loosely within for these previews and I would like to get around to what Chadwell will actually be like as a football coach with the Flames, so let’s not mince words. Liberty University, for those not in the know, is a deeply conservative university in Virginia that prohibits and punishes premarital sex, cohabitation, alcohol use, and (this is the big one) being queer. There’s always going to be debate about the validity of those decisions, but the way Liberty enforces them has never been defensible. The so-called honor code is frequently weaponized against students who report being sexually assaulted, with school reviews of such incidents focusing on violations that are used to shift blame onto rape victims. The university also pressures queer students to undergo conversion therapy—though, due to Virginia’s partial 2020 ban on the practice, it is instead called “pastoral counseling”.

Okay, so Liberty has a terrible, extremely fundamentalist approach to minority students. But the Liberty Flames are a football team and, as far as we know, it’s not like athletes are involved in any part of this process. Other schools, like BYU and TCU, have staunch religious rules that follow similar lines, though almost none is as extreme as Liberty. What’s the difference?

There are two key ones. First, Liberty’s football team exists, first and foremost, to sportswash the school of its negative reputation by putting a visible, positive product out there. How much of a success this has been is debatable—hiring Hugh Freeze definitely helped on-field results, but the program felt a bit of the cost of rehabilitating his image—but it’s clearly the point. This is the reason the Flames consistently schedule terrible opponents to rack up easy wins, such as in 2023, where TERSE ranks their strength of schedule dead last in FBS and, impossibly, also behind FCS Nicholls. Most of this claim isn’t even speculation; even before Liberty had a football program, it was their stated goal to use this team as a standard-bearer for fundamentalism on the national stage. The leaders of this program are despicable, but they’re not stupid—they understand the value and importance of a high-profile football program as much as any athletic department does.

But if you still need to be convinced that Flames football and Liberty’s general awfulness are intrinsically intertwined, Chadwell himself is happy to remove all doubt. Just take a look at his opening statement from the press conference where he was introduced as their new head coach:

God is good. I’d like to thank Ian and the administration for this unbelievable opportunity to be at Liberty University. I’m not only a believer, I’m a follower of Jesus Christ. When you get an opportunity to impact people at the most prestigious institution of higher learning for a Christian background which is Liberty University, you don’t pass that up. I believe God has ordained this opportunity. I am blessed to be the football coach here.

Chadwell also alluded to his past at North Greenville, whose honor code suggests expulsion for queer students, and Charleston Southern, which infamously fired one of its RAs when he came out as gay, saying he was “glad to be back in an environment like this”. There’s not much room for ambiguity here—Chadwell views Liberty’s fundamentalist, queerphobic, racist, and sexist culture as one of the main draws of the position.

The frustrating thing is that…well, having gotten to this point where we’re hopefully on the same page, what exactly are we supposed to do? Grumpily rooting against Liberty whenever they take the field is all well and good, and it makes their upset losses (2021 against ULM, 2022 against UConn) far more fun, but it doesn’t help matters. The likes of ESPN and CBS are always going to be complicit in their sportswashing, because no major network is suicidal enough to offer even the slightest criticism of even the most radical fundamentalist Christianity. In a practical sense, there’s not really much that can be done aside from supporting legislation that would further restrict universities’ ability to obtain religious exemptions that allow them to demean and disrespect their students.

Aside from that, the best thing you can do is to avoid treating the Flames like an ordinary program, because they aren’t. This is the fourth year I’ve done some sort of college football previews series, and I’ve rehashed a variant of this story every time. It’s not fun, and it’s never easy to find the words to talk about this university delicately while still taking a firm stance against its behavior, but until things change, it’s the only correct way to talk about Liberty. The most important tool we have at our disposal is knowledge—the outright facts of the situation that too many people are unaware of. If you have the opportunity to discuss this program’s shortcomings, I implore you not to hold back for the sake of politeness or tolerance. Liberty has never shown those virtues to its students who aren’t straight cis white males; as long as we continue to give them that unearned respect, they’ll never have to.

The Last Five Years

Say what you will about Hugh Freeze and Liberty—and goodness, is there ever a lot to say—but they were perfect for each other both on and off the field. Freeze inherited a team that won six games, two over FCS teams and three more over teams that didn’t crack the five-win mark, and four years later he left for Auburn having never won fewer than eight games. The schedule never improved much, but Freeze did pick up some banner wins (Syracuse, Virginia Tech, and Coastal Carolina in 2020, Arkansas in 2022), and he managed to convince the college football world that coaching the Flames was enough to clean up his image. After Chadwell seemingly failed to garner P5 interest due to his idiosyncratic system and lack of proven success at multiple jobs, there’s a good chance he sees Liberty as the next step to reaching that level as well.

2022 and 2023

The fact that the Flames’ general awfulness requires a detailed discursion whenever they come up is a shame, because it makes it harder to idly remark on bizarreries like their 2022 season. This team lost four of its five games by a combined seven points—and the other, against an opponent with one bowl in the last 60 seasons, by five touchdowns. They were a two-point try away from stunning #19 Wake Forest one week, then let an Akron team that finished 2-10 take them down to the wire the next. And, of course, in their two consecutive games as a member of the top 25, they beat a winning SEC team and were beaten by a losing UConn.

The 2023 team will probably be mediocre again—their returning production and recruiting are nothing to write home about, and they’ll have to manage the switch from Freeze to Chadwell—but there’s a good chance they’ll also win eight games again. Among all D1 teams, TERSE ranks their opponents 103rd, 107th, 97th, 138th, 156th, 116th, 76th, 56th, 134th, 118th, 168th, and 123rd. Ten of those teams are in the bottom 40 of FBS, and only one is even above average. Another hellish match made in heaven: this team’s penchant for facing the absolute worst slate it can compile and the shambling corpse of Conference USA.

The Next Five Years

Is it even possible for Liberty to ever become a net positive? I mean, theoretically one could imagine President Dondi E. Costin¹ waking up tomorrow and having the epiphany that a school forcing its students to change personal attributes that harm nobody is bad, then going on a years-long crusade to fix things. But (a) that’s not going to happen and (b) he would just get removed by the school board.

The fact of the matter is, no single voice protesting against the injustice and corruption of Liberty can do much of anything. Change can only come when we decide, together, that radical bigotry doesn’t have a place in Lynchburg, Virginia, just as it doesn’t have a place in the rest of the world. This university exists because some people do not see, or do not want to see, that it is a bastion of prejudice. We cannot change this by ignoring it—those of us who can act must act, and those who can speak must speak.

There may come a day when Liberty University shutters its gates, and a relic of a (mercifully mostly bygone) age finally falls into ruin. Until that day, the future here will never be bright. It will only become so if those with a power, and those with a voice, use the tools they have to break the foundation of hate on which this institution stands.

1. Who, as it turns out, arrived at his current position fresh off of the same role at Charleston Southern. Do we need to start looking at CSU askance?