- January 30th, 2006, 2:17 pm
#2113
A familiar name did this story:
Liberty boasts a horrible record but high hopeshttp://www.realfootball365.com/college/ ... 300106.php
By Darrell Laurant
01/30/06
After this past season, it might seem strange to call the Division 1-AA Liberty University football program a sleeping giant.
For the Flames weren't just sleeping in the fall of 2005 -- they were comatose. The team finished 1-10 and proved the perfect foil for that old joke about bad teams.
Q: Why is the Liberty University football team like a possum? A: Because they play dead at home and get killed on the road.
The team particularly resembled road kill during a ghastly stretch early in the season, losing 59-0 to Connecticut, 42-0 to Youngstown State and 56-0 to William & Mary in succession. The average final tally during that 1-10 death march, which cost coach Ken Karcher his job, was 33-13, and the Flames were outscored 348-146 overall.
All this, however, is deceptive. After Karcher was fired and energetic young University of Virginia assistant Danny Rocco hired as his replacement, the Rev. Jerry Falwell (televangelist, school president and No. 1 football fan) declared: "I want us to be in the Division I Top 20 in my lifetime."
They’d better hurry. Falwell is 71 years old and underwent heart surgery last year.
Yet an autopsy of the 2005 season reveals reasons for hope. Liberty had 31 freshmen and 13 redshirt freshmen on its roster, and at least half received extensive playing time. RB/KR/occasional QB Zach Terrell was named Freshman of the Year among all Virginia colleges, even though Karcher never seemed to know quite what to do with him.
Rocco recruited the state of Virginia as his "territory" at UVa, and he obviously has the gift of persuasion. So far, he has induced two Central Virginia products -- RB Rashad Jennings and LB Stevie Ray Lloyd, to transfer to Liberty from Pitt and Virginia Tech, respectively. He also got OL Zach Davis from East Carolina -- and since Liberty is Division 1-AA, this trio can play immediately. Jennings was Pitt's leading rusher as a freshman (which admittedly isn't saying much), and his 240 pounds will be a solid complement to Terrell's explosiveness in the backfield. The starting quarterback in 2005, Brock Smith, was also a freshman and showed promise, and he'll be throwing primarily to three rising sophomore receivers.
More than that, though, Rocco comes to a school where the president is willing to spend whatever it takes to turn the program around. And Liberty is unique among Division 1-AA schools for having its own "feeder" school -- Lynchburg Christian Academy, located on the same campus, which produced an undefeated season and a state title last year. The coach is Danny Rocco's older brother.
It shouldn't take much to lift Liberty to the top of the Big South, but Division I? Laughable as it sounds, though, Lou Holtz spent some time on campus last year advising Falwell on the direction of the program, and the good Reverend has similar contacts all over the country.
His miscalculation in the early years was that Liberty would immediately become a fundamentalist Christian version of Notre Dame, drawing all the "saved" 300-pounders and 4.3 sprinters like critters to Noah's Ark. He forgot that it's possible to be just as "Christian" at Alabama or Clemson, thanks to the Fellowship of Christian Athlete chapters there.
Yet as Falwell has retreated from the national political scene, he has devoted a lot of his time and energy (the latter still considerable) to saving his football program. He may not succeed, but it's going to be fun to watch.
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