Arkansas welcomes the Liberty Flames to Fayetteville for Homecoming this Saturday. Liberty cracked the top-25 this week. Our numbers say they have the 23rd-best resume, and AP voters seemed to agree, ranking them 23rd.
Series & Program History
Saturday will be the first-ever meeting between these programs. Liberty is the third “new” opponent Arkansas has faced this season, with the first two being Cincinnati and BYU.
Liberty is a relative newcomer to football. The school launched a football program two years after its founding in 1971, initially competing as an NAIA team. The Flames reached the FCS level in 1988, finally finding a home in the Big South Conference in 2002. In 2018, they made the jump to FBS as an independent, and they will join the Conference USA next athletic year.
Former Arkansas State and Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze has coached the Flames since 2019 with a 33-12 record. His second team – during the COVID-impacted 2020 season – went 10-1 and finished in the AP top 25. Quarterback Malik Willis became the best player in school history before being drafted in the third round by the Titans.
2022 Season
Liberty is 7-1 this season. Their lone loss was a wild, back-and-forth 37-36 decision against Wake Forest. Their 41-14 domination of BYU two weeks ago has been the height of their season. All of their other wins were pretty close games against pretty bad teams: Southern Miss (in four overtimes), UAB, Akron (21-12), Old Dominion, UMass, and Gardner-Webb (21-20).
Facing a massive roster overhaul following the 2021 season, Freeze hit the transfer portal hard. He focused on SEC castoffs, who now fill spots all over the Flames’ depth chart. This makes Liberty a bit more intimidating than BYU, as the Flames actually have some SEC talent, especially on their defense.
Offense
At the quarterback spot, Freeze lured Charlie Brewer to Lynchburg. Brewer has played a lot of football. He was the quarterback for the Matt Rhule rebuild, and was Baylor’s version of Brandon Allen: he was the starter when they went 1-11 in 2017, and was still the starter three years later when they went 11-3. In four seasons as the starting quarterback, he threw for 10,000 yards and 65 touchdowns. After a rough 2020 under new coach Dave Aranda, he lost the starting job to Arkansas native Gerry Bohanon and transferred to Utah. He was off to a rough start in 2021 when he was injured, so he preserved his redshirt and transferred to Liberty.
But things haven’t gone as planned for Brewer. He was injured in the first half of the opener against Southern Miss and has not started since. He finally got some game snaps two weeks ago in a backup role during the BYU game, but did not throw a pass. He appears to be healthy enough to start, but it’s unclear how effective he would be. Original backup Kaidon Salter took over when Brewer was hurt, but he was injured a few weeks later and is out for the year. So Liberty’s passing leader this season is Johnathan Bennett, a former two-star recruit who has started three games and appeared in five this year. He’s a bit of a run threat, but as a passer, he has struggled.
Liberty’s offense succeeds with its run game, led by the explosive Dae Dae Hunter (821 yards, 6.8 per carry). Outside of the occasional big play on the ground, Liberty doesn’t do anything particularly well on offense.
Defense
The defense is Liberty’s calling card, as it ranks 9th nationally in EPA/play. As mentioned above, the Flames have some legitimate SEC-caliber defenders on their roster.
Run defense is the weakness, as we’ve seen with so many of Arkansas’ opponents this season (Auburn, Texas A&M, BYU, Cincinnati, South Carolina). The Flames are just 51st in EPA/rush allowed. They are somewhat vulnerable to explosive runs in particular.
Through the air, Liberty possesses one of the nation’s best pass defenses. Our numbers are adjusted for quality of opponent, but it’s hard to adjust for just how bad the pass offenses Liberty has faced this year really are. The Flames have faced two good decent quarterbacks this season: they played very well against Jaren Hall and BYU (187 passing yards, 2 TD), but allowed 326 yards and three scores (with two picks) against Wake’s Sam Hartman. Still, the numbers say what they say: Liberty gets a lot of sacks, picks off a lot of passes, and does not allow very many easy completions.
Random Facts
Liberty was founded in 1971 as Lynchburg Bible College by televangelist Jerry Falwell. The name was changed to Liberty in 1976. The campus in Lynchburg, Virginia has about 15,000 students enrolled, but the school enrolls more than 80,000 students online in both undergrad and graduate programs, making it the largest private university in the nation. The Rawlings School of Divinity is the largest seminary in the world by enrollment.
Falwell’s son, Jerry Falwell Jr., served as president of Liberty from 2007 to 2020. The impact of his time in the position is mixed: his resignation in August 2020 followed a long series of both personal and professional allegations of wrongdoing, including financial mismanagement, control by fear, an affair, and repeated violations of the school’s strict Baptist honor code. However, there is no doubt that he was very successful in expanding the school’s footprint nationally, including in the realm of sports, where Liberty has made significant investments and will move into the Conference USA next year.
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