Falwell fires football coach, two administrators
Jerry Falwell and I do agree on one thing: Liberty University’s football team is pretty awful. When Susan I are were in Williamsburg, VA for Parents’ Weekend at the College of William and Mary, we saw Liberty get disassembled 54-0 by William and Mary. It was like watching my own alma mater, Macalester College (only with more false religiosity) getting their butts handed to them.
You have to admire Falwell, though. Liberty University’s mission is to turn out productive, well-educated Evangelicals…and he’s worried about the football team? Not only that, he wants Liberty to eventually become a Top 20 Division 1-A team. Yeah, like THAT’S going to happen….
‘Course, when you’re convinced that the power of the Lord is on your side, all things are possible, right? Whatever….
LYNCHBURG, Va. — The Rev. Jerry Falwell cleaned house at Liberty University’s athletic department, firing the football coach and two top administrators while another resigned.
“For the past year we have been very unhappy with the direction of football here,” Falwell said Friday in a phone interview with The Associated Press. “We have good men … but we just have different philosophies of getting to where we want to go. … We want to go I-A.”
“We’re winning in everything except in football,” he added. “So we’ve taken a clean sweep.”
Yes, when you own half of Lynchburg AND your very own college, you can dream big…even if your dreams might just be a tad out there….
“We’re not even playing par I-AA football here, so obviously we have to start over, and that’s what we’re doing,” said Falwell, chancellor of the school he founded.
The school’s athletic program lost $7.4 million in 2004, the biggest drain by any department on Liberty’s overall budget.
Falwell said he already has talked to three head coaching candidates and plans to have the positions filled within two weeks.
“I’m 72,” he told The News & Advance of Lynchburg. “I don’t have much time to get the football program in the Top 20.”
Nothing like keeping your priorities straight, eh?
