President Donald Trump was this year’s commencement speaker at Liberty University, the evangelical Virginia school run by Jerry Falwell Jr. The school’s football program is making the jump in 2018 from the Football Championship Subdivision to the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top classification in Division I.
At his Saturday morning speech, Trump used the Liberty football team as part of an analogy about dreaming big.
Trump likened Liberty’s athletic program to that at another Christian school, Notre Dame. He said “the future belongs to the dreamers” and got into Flames football.
Some of the transcript:
At Liberty, your leaders knew from the very beginning that a strong athletic program would help this campus grow so that this school might transform more lives. That is why a crucial part of Reverend Falwell’s vision for making Liberty a world-class institution was having a world-class football team, much like the great teams of Notre Dame — great school, great place.
Trump referenced a New York Times story from a few years ago (probably this one) about Liberty’s grand football ambitions. That letter, in Trump’s telling via Falwell, came from former Notre Dame university president Theodore Hesburgh and described Notre Dame’s “meteoric rise” and passed along a message that Liberty was on the same “trajectory” to football greatness.
Then Trump talked about current events, noting that Liberty was making the leap to the FBS for the 2018 season. The crowd started to cheer, and Trump responded.
Don’t clap. That could be tough. That could be tough. I’m a little worried. I don’t wanna look at some of those scores here. Jerry, you sure you know what you’re doing here? Those other players are big and fast and strong, but I have a feeling you’re gonna do very well, right?
Trump read out future opponents’ names: UMass, Virginia, Auburn, Rutgers, Old Dominion, Brigham Young, Army, Buffalo, Troy, Virginia Tech, Ole Miss, and Wake Forest.
“Jerry, are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Trump riffed at one point. “Jerry, Auburn? I don’t know about that, Jerry. This could be trouble, Jerry.”
Trump said he might be at the Liberty-Army game and didn’t know who he’d be supposed to root for. (Probably Army, as he’s the commander-in-chief, but whatever.)
“Those are really top schools,” Trump said. “Maybe in four or five years I’ll come to a game, right? You’ll build it up. Well, good luck.”
Trump appears to have literally announced a couple of scheduling series: with BYU, Auburn, and Virginia. The Flames are pumped up, and they even decided to bump Army and BYU up to Power 5 status in announcing their schedule.
FBS ALERT @LibertyFootball's future schedule welcomes Power 5 opponents to Williams Stadium!#GoFlames pic.twitter.com/kCijnvuIfy
— Liberty Flames (@libertyflames) May 13, 2017
This was all part of Trump drawing a line for Liberty’s students about starting small, pursuing a “big vision,” and reaching “the big-time.” The whole speech is here, with Trump’s football talk coming around the two-hour, 44-minute mark.
Making the jump from FCS to FBS confers a status bump on a football program.
But in Liberty’s case, the move is a weird one. The Flames are moving to FBS without a conference, so they’ll go it alone as an independent, and it’s not clear that there’s much upside in the move. SB Nation’s Matt Brown explains:
First, there’s the practical matter. What does a lower-level FBS independent hope to play for? At the FCS level, Liberty was a successful program, one that could compete for Big South titles and playoff appearances, and often did.
As an FBS independent, there’s no trophy. There’s no established postseason tie-in. With a small stadium and modest history, there are no home-and-homes with major, power-conference opponents. There’s no foreseeable path to the Playoff or even a New Year’s Six bowl game.
That’s a problem if you’re trying to continue to build fan interest, especially in a state with two ACC programs, a rapidly improving Old Dominion, an FCS powerhouse in James Madison, and lots of NFL fans. BYU — a program with fans all over the country, a national title, an ESPN contract, and a trophy case full of shiny awards — isn’t really a program Liberty can hope to emulate. And even BYU has struggled to secure meaningful bowl tie-ins. Instead, Liberty would just be another UMass, hoping to scrape together a schedule of cast-offs and the assorted paycheck game.
Liberty would also be without a lucrative conference television contract, in an era of even more dramatic gaps between the financials haves and have-nots. Even if Liberty is able to play into a conference in the next five years, changes in the industry may make those contracts even less valuable than they are now.
Liberty’s probably going to take tons of losses as an FBS program, despite being pretty strong in the lower DI classification. While playing in the FBS at all is indeed “the big-time,” like Trump called it, the Flames will have a lot of challenges. It’s possible that they’ll get whooped for along time before having any success at all.