A Sea Of Red

I didn't realize but apparently it's re-directing you to http://www.liberty.edu/flames/ now.

part of the ongoing branding effort?

I'd think that's gonna be a pain to go back and re-do everything

The same is true for luonline.com. It now redirects to http://www.liberty.edu/online

It's kind of strange. It seems like just 5-7 years ago when all schools were schoolname.edu/athletics and then anybody who's anybody in college sports started using their own sports domain names. You could actually judge a program by it. Why would they go back?

Liberty Flames Nation.

Probably a branding decision as noted by another poster earlier...branding is under the Marketing department (both athletic and general) now so when that happened they probably wanted to unify the web addresses as part of that change...that's my guess anyway

Branding. I know some schools (I know of one instance from first hand experience) don't want to go the .com route because they don't want athletics to be "commercialized" and want athletics to appear as if it's a part of the school and not greater than the school. Normally part of a campus wide philosophy of a consistent message across all digital entities under the .edu brand. Most schools that go that route aren't D1 though where the athletics brand generally always reaches a much smaller audience and thus needs to serve the brand identity of the institution, as opposed to like Alabama where football is the brand driver for the school.

I think the logic is all a bunch of garbage but it's not my decision. As long as the website is still fully functional and reliable I don't think it matters too much. Schools can still buy a .com address that just serves as a redirect to the athletics .edu site for promotional purposes. Liberty.edu/athletics obviously is not something that will work well for promotions of any sort.