Flak Magazine: Kick Out the Sports! 11.21.05

The Liberty University football team's media guide, in the section detailing the accomplishments of the school's founder and chancellor, contains the following passage: "For more than 30 years, Jerry Falwell has been telling students, 'You don't determine a man's greatness by his talent or wealth, as the world does, but rather, by what it takes to discourage him.'"

The Rev. Falwell has had his greatness praised or damned by what it takes to discourage him: church-state separation, sodomy, homosexuals, the American Civil Liberties Union, abortion, liberals, Muslims, Jews, Hustler magazine running a parody ad about his first sexual experience, a drunken encounter with his mother in an outhouse.

Now, add losing football to this list.

With his Liberty Flames football team losing like, well, the Christians to the lions, Falwell last week smote his athletic department: one fired football coach, two fired associate athletic directors, and one resigning athletic director. It was a destruction so complete, the wife of ex-football coach Ken Karcher would have turned into a pillar of salt had she looked back on their way out of Lynchburg, Va.

A college firing its football coach and athletic staff for losing is hardly new particularly in the South, where the unholy down-and-distance between college football worship and fire-and-brimstone religion is second-and-goal.

Still, Falwell would appear to deserve the same kind of criticism levied at Notre Dame after last season for departing from its stated high moral standards in the act of firing its football coach.

Read over the Liberty web site, and everything you see is about upholding Christian standards, to the point that couples — heterosexual, of course — engaging in any activity more physical than hand-holding are subject to discipline. The Liberty Flames football mission statement focuses on the sport "as a unique educational tool that will glorify God by developing Biblical character qualities as we equip young men intellectually, physically, socially and spiritually in Christ so that they may use their gifts and talents to impact their culture with the gospel of Jesus Christ."

Karcher, a former NFL quarterback, certainly bought into that part of the program. "We have a commitment to help each player understand who he is in Christ," reads a quote attributed to Karcher in his Liberty biography. "That is objective number one."

Well, actually, as at any other school, winning is "objective number one." Quoting Falwell, or whatever press flunky wrote this in his name for the press release: "For the past year we have been very unhappy with the direction of football here. We have good men ... but we just have different philosophies of getting to where we want to go. ... We want to go I-A."

That's I-A as in NCAA Division I-A, the top division of college football. Right now Liberty is a I-AA, one step below. Liberty's football stadium seats 12,000 now, but Falwell is ready to expand it to 36,000 the moment the next coach finds enough football players ready to conform to Liberty's code of modest dress and no "countercultural" wear, which would restrict anyone who has tattoos or gold teeth. (Though, to be fair, Liberty's casual dress code allows sandals and flip-flops, making it more liberal than the NBA's new dress code.)

That Falwell would fire a good part of his athletic staff over something as relatively unimportant as wins and losses, when it seemingly undermines his Christian values, shouldn't be all that shocking, and not just because that's what college presidents do. You don't start with a little Baptist church in rural Virginia and make it the underpinning for America's conservative Christian movement, probably the most influential political movement of the last 25 years, without an eye on wins and losses.

So Falwell, whether his coach and athletic directors are good Christians or not, is not going to countenance losing in his organization, whether or not anyone believes that firing the coach and athletic staff is not WWJD. God may forgive them; Falwell will not. If you're going to coach the Flames, Falwell will tell you to give him Liberty victories, or he will give you death.

How discouraging.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.