Bill Oram: What is Liberty doing in the Fiesta Bowl? Saving the spirit of college football

I felt a little bad for Jamey Chadwell. The coach of the Liberty Flames inadvertently delivered his own punchline on Sunday morning when he shared the story of the first time he coached opposite coach Dan Lanning, when Chadwell coached at tiny Charleston Southern and Lanning was a grad assistant at Alabama.

“I’ve tried to forget that Alabama game,” Chadwell said, “because it was over as soon as the ball kicked off.” He told his story to a room of people who, if we’re being frank, probably expect Monday’s Fiesta Bowl to be just as gruesome as Bama’s 56 6 win over Chadwell’s old team back in 2015.

Nobody is giving Liberty much of a chance to hang with the eighth ranked Ducks. Even the rhinoceros at the Phoenix Zoo picked the Flames to lose. You know it’s bad if the pachyderms have turned on Liberty. I’m not about to argue with a 3,000 pound rhino. This game has blowout written all over it.

But while there are a million reasons to find something to do with your Monday morning other than watch another lopsided bowl game, I do want to take a minute to appreciate what the Fiesta Bowl does actually offer. As Chadwell noted on Friday: “This is the only bowl game in America where everybody is opting in.” Well, not everyone.

Oregon’s leading receiver, Troy Franklin, and Rimington Trophy winning center, Jackson Power Johnson, stayed home. But this is the rare bowl matchup outside of the playoff in which both teams’ top players will be on the field. And as bowl season has become corrupted by opt outs and transfers and has given us punchless, throw away affairs like Oregon State’s 40 8 loss to Notre Dame and Georgia’s 63 3 win over undefeated Florida State, that is worth appreciating.

This game is important to Liberty for obvious reasons. It’s only been a few years since the Flames were playing Charleston Southern in the FCS. But it’s only important to Oregon because the Ducks decided to treat it like it was important. Bo Nix could be long gone, preparing for the NFL draft. NFL folks will tell you the quarterback is making a mistake playing on Monday.

That it’s a decision potentially worth tens of millions of dollars if something goes wrong. Virtually every other top quarterback in the country, including Heisman winners Jayden Daniels and USC’s Caleb Williams, chose to protect their health and financial interests rather than finish the season with their teams.

And nobody can even blame them for it. It’s what the system allows and encourages. Thank heavens we are doing away with a system that only incentivizes players from four teams to show up at the end of the year. At least next year, we will have 12 schools in the playoff who believe they have something to play for.

Maybe it’s unsophisticated rah rah stuff to get caught up in a star showing up in a relatively meaningless bowl game and makes me a rube, but I believe there is power in pushing back against the machine. Sports can’t only be about draft stock and money and analytics. They have to be about love of the game, too, otherwise they’re just another arm of the same corporate apparatus that controls everything else and we should really find our entertainment elsewhere.

It’s like Georgia coach Kirby Smart said after his team flattened Florida State: “People have got to decide what they want and what they want to get out of it.” Nix decided what he wanted and it was contagious within the Ducks‘ locker room. Bucky Irving could have played it safe. So could edge rusher Brandon Dorlus.

Instead, they’re suiting up on Monday. “When you have a quarterback like Bo Nix say, ‘Hey, I’m playing this game, I certainly think it makes other people around him go compete,” Lanning said. I’m pretty sure I know who’s going to win on Monday morning. Liberty is not on the same level as Oregon.

The Flames skated in a weak conference. I can’t conceive a way Oregon loses this game other than being so mentally checked out that they forgot to pack their helmets when they left Eugene. But if Oregon wins by 100 points it’s because they are 100 points better than the Flames, not because half of Liberty’s players opted out, are preparing for the draft or cashing in on their 12 0 season and transferring to bigger programs.

And I would rather see Liberty get pulverized fair and square than another Top 25 matchup reduced to a one sided snoozer because the sport lacks the oversight and vision to ensure it puts its best foot forward during its most visible time of year. Because outside of the four universities appearing in Monday’s national semifinal games, the rest of the sport is going through the motions, waiting for the 12 team playoff to get here next year.

That’s not true of Liberty. The Flames are legitimately thrilled to be playing in the Fiesta Bowl. Just like Oregon State in last year’s Las Vegas Bowl and Arizona in the Alamo Bowl against Oklahoma, the Flames have a lot of incentive to go out and perform on the biggest stage. They have something to prove.

I’ve poked fun or at Liberty being as out of place in the Fiesta Bowl as rubber ducky in a shark tank. But for all the examples of college football‘s broken system, Liberty playing — or even getting blown out — in the Fiesta Bowl isn’t one of them. If anything, Liberty reaching this stage in Glendale is a rare example of college football getting something right.

Because if there isn’t room for an FBS program that won every game on its schedule and its conference championship game in a New Year’s Six bowl, then the sport would be even more doomed than we thought. It would be a message to every school outside the Power Five that there isn’t room for the little guy.

And that’s the antithesis of sports, particularly at the collegiate level. What is Liberty doing in the Fiesta Bowl? Saving the spirit of college football, in its own way. The Flames won all 13 of their games this season. That has to be rewarded. Getting to play Oregon, getting the chance to beat Oregon, is that reward.

And even if they lose as badly as Charleston Southern did all those years ago to mighty Alabama, which went on to win a national title that year, I don’t think it’s an experience Chadwell will want to wipe from his memory. It will be a game for Liberty to remember. And, as a counterpunch to a sport losing its way, for the rest of us to appreciate..