It is the eve of Liberty’s 2016 football season. If the excitement is not bubbling within you by now, you should get checked out. There’s several notes, thoughts, and quotes that I have accumulated about the Virginia Tech game, but I haven’t had the opportunity to discuss these ideas elsewhere on the site this week. So, I’ve created this post for them. It may become a weekly post during the season, we’ll see.
The Flames were 5-0 at home and 1-5 on the road in 2015.
That’s obviously not a good road mark, but look at who some of those losses on the road were against – Monmouth, Gardner-Webb, the poor performance at Southern Illinois. Gross. This has been a problem during Gill’s career at Liberty. Under Gill, the Flames are 19-5 at home and just 10-14 on the road. I asked Gill about how he addressed this during the off-season in Tuesday’s press conference, and he kind of brushed the question off. He went on this disputation about paying attention to details and improving in every aspect of the game.
The road slate this season: Virginia Tech, SMU, Kennesaw State, Presbyterian, Coastal Carolina. With two top 10 FCS teams making a visit to Williams Stadium this season, can the Flames expect to go 6-0 at home? If not, they have to find a way to win at least 2 road games this year if they have any chance of making the playoffs. And, before you mark down the game at KSU as a win, it concerns me. Alas, we’ll worry about that in a few weeks.
We might not find out much about the road version of the 2016 team against Virginia Tech, but this is something we will definitely be keeping an eye on this season.
Liberty is 6-0 against the spread when facing FBS opponents under Gill.
This includes the games against Wake Forest, Kent State, North Carolina, Appalachian State, West Virginia, and Georgia State. To be honest, Liberty did much more than just cover in most of these games.
Wake Forest – line was WFU -25.5, Flames lost by 3
Kent State – line was KSU -20, Flames lost by 3
North Carolina – line was UNC -31, Flames lost by 27
Appalachian State – line was ASU -3.5, Flames won by 7
West Virginia – line was WVU -32.5, Flames lost by 24
Georgia State – line was GSU -2.5, Flames won by 8
So, LU has covered the spread by at least 10 points in 4 of the 6 games, and, if you remember, the Flames had a lead late in the 3rd quarter against UNC before the wheels fell off. The only game that wasn’t even competitive was last year’s West Virginia game. The line for the Tech game is currently 31.5. I’m not a betting man, but I think the Flames are a safe cover.
Saturday could be the highest attended game in Liberty’s history.
Saturday could be the largest attended game Liberty football has ever played in front of. Currently, the top all-time attended game in school history was on September 5, 2009 against West Virginia where 57,950 fans attended the game. Lane Stadium has a seating capacity of 66,233. In 2015, Tech’s average home attendance was 60,823, and 5 of their 6 home games had attendance of more than 60,000.
The new offense is still a bit of a mystery.
We’re still trying to find out exactly what this new look offense will be. Coach Gill, and the entire coaching staff, has been extremely vague all summer. All we know is we’re to expect a more up-tempo, no huddle, spread look. At the same time, Gill has spoken highly of fullback Thomas Kennedy, even saying he will be paramount to the offense’s success this year. I asked Kennedy what the role of the fullback will be. He said the fullback will be used in short yardage and goal line packages, and he compared the fullback to the tight end in this new offense. “They’ve kind of taken the fullback and the tight end position, and while they’re not really the same thing, you can compare them. So, (you could see the fullback) out in the slot a little bit, on the wing, in the backfield blocking. Schemes are pretty much the same, the tight ends and fullbacks can all kind of do the same thing now.”
Some other notable quotes.
Juwan Wells on playing at Virginia Tech – “It’s a dream. You want to play in front of a huge crowd. For me, it’s just motivation. For the rest of my team, it’s motivation. Just knowing so people won’t think Liberty is a small school, that we won’t compete with the bigger conferences in college football. I think we’ll be ready, prepared to play.”
Juwan Wells
Jaron Greene on playing at Virginia Tech – “It’s just football. At the end of the day, the crowd won’t win the game. Its going to be our 11 versus their 11. So, you really got to be able to tune that (crowd) out. It’s hard for a lot of guys to do it because they haven’t experienced anything like that. Growing up in Texas, I was used to having 10,000 at my high school games. Keep it simple, we’re still playing football at the end of the day. (The FBS games) are some of the wildest crowds, but you still got to go down there and play football. You can’t let the crowd distract you.”
Scott Downing on kicker Alex Probert playing his first collegiate game at Lane Stadium – “(In practice) we’ve had people yelling at him and trying to distract him. You have to give him a go. There’s nothing like him going in and kicking in the stadium itself. We’ve got the music going, the noise going out here forces him to concentrate. He’s displayed a mature approach to kicking, much more mature than most freshman.”
My prediction:
Virginia Tech 41, Liberty 17
See you guys in Blacksburg!
