Oregon, Liberty could not be farther apart off the field

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When the University of Oregon athletic program bailed on the West Coast for the Big 10 this year, the power of money in athletics was as evident as ever - to no one’s surprise.

A top-flight athletic program has to continually bring in more dollars to keep pace with the other top-flight programs, and the Pac-12 just wasn’t prepared to do that into the future. So, really an easy call for the top-flight Ducks. So long, non-top-flight Oregon State.

That’s athletics, though.

There is no better example of how money and influence from athletics money affects academics than Oregon’s opponent in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 1 - Liberty University. Liberty, a private school in Lynchburg, Va., was created in 1971 by pastor Jerry Falwell, and most of its 95,000 students (80 percent) attend the school online. Williams Stadium, where the Flames play, has a capacity of 25,000, which the school cannot fill. Liberty played host to the conference championshp game, and drew a crowd of 20,077.

So, why is Liberty a Div. I FBS football school? It’s not just about money, it’s about image, and Liberty will pay seemingly anything to continually bump that image forward for marketing purposes much like McDonald’s uses advertising to get people to buy hamburgers.

Liberty is an academic hamburger stand that puts a lot of money into football to get more people to attend classes online so it can spread the gospel of Jerry Falwell, which prohibits pre-marital sex, co-habitaion, alcohol use and any kind of romantic relationship between members of the same sex. It is a football-playing church with the highest moral standing. That’s THE HIGHEST moral standards, and not in the herbal way.

That’s Oregon’s opponent on Jan. 1 in the Fiesta Bowl. Hurrah.

Liberty could simply advertise a ton like Southern New Hampshire University does, and get the same result or better in terms of student registration. SNHU has more than 130,000 registered students, and only 3,000 on its campus at Manchester, N.H. The school actually has an athletic program that plays in the Div. II New England 10 Conference. It does not have a football team. It treats athletics as a resource for the students who attend its campus.

Liberty treats athletics, especially football, as a tool for its commuity image. You could argue Notre Dame, another private, religion-backed school, does the same thing. But that school has a huge community built over generations, and football serves as a way for that community to connect.

Athletics, especially football, work the same way at Oregon. It has generations of students and graduates, and an on-campus attendance of 23,000, which is a pretty large city by itself. The football team can fill a stadium of 59,000. It’s a great way to connect to the community. This is how every other FBS school works, other than Liberty, which is, again, a football-playing church. And it got to FBS through money.