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Among other, more severe impacts, Hurricane Helene has canceled tomorrow’s game between Liberty and Appalachian State. So far, it’s the only FBS game canceled this week, but it’s quietly a big one. Liberty is among the Group of Five favorites to make the College Football Playoff, and this trip to Boone was probably the most difficult contest on Liberty’s schedule.
For most teams, the loss of one nonconference game wouldn’t be a dealbreaker. We wrote just yesterday about how it’s likely an advantage for Army to play Navy after the College Football Playoff field has been decided. One fewer game means one fewer chance to lose.
Is this true for Liberty? We don’t know. We haven’t run our model yet since the schedule was updated, but even if we had, I don’t think we would have received a conclusive answer. For almost every team in the country, we would say yes, that eleven games is better than ten. The issue is that Liberty, by virtue of playing what might be the weakest schedule in the whole FBS, is an even more unusual case for the playoff committee than an 11–1 service academy would be.
Liberty’s schedule was already extraordinarily weak, even before this cancelation. The Flames play in Conference USA, the worst FBS conference, and they don’t play its best team, because they are Conference USA’s best team. In nonconference play, East Carolina and App State aren’t bad, but neither is in the better half of the FBS, while UMass might be as bad as Kent State. Campbell is not only an FCS school, but one of the FCS’s worst teams, not far removed from time as a non-scholarship program. Liberty’s schedule is rough, and not in the way Oklahoma’s schedule is rough.
When unique circumstances present themselves, selection committees are prone to get subjective. We see this in college basketball, where the selection committee will forgive a team three games over .500 without a passing thought but will examine a team two games over .500 as though they’re checking its résumé for ticks. In college football, we’ve seen it with Liberty itself each of the last two years, the Flames consistently ranked far below other mid-majors with similar team sheets. The punishment Liberty’s received for its weak schedule has gone beyond what objective models like ours and ESPN’s Strength of Record would project. Now, there’s a big unusual number accompanying them, either in the form of a missing regular season game or a second FCS opponent. The scrutiny will only get larger for the Flames. Their résumé will probably receive some subjective discount.
To an extent, Liberty made the choices which led them to this position. Everybody has a price, and Liberty failed to find a rate at which they could play a power conference foe. Similarly, had Liberty not already played one FCS opponent, playing a second wouldn’t be so damaging. The odds of a hurricane-driven cancelation were very low, but nobody forced Liberty to schedule Campbell.
Thankfully for us, we’ll get a very good idea of Liberty’s lot within the next five or six weeks. If Liberty loses an upcoming game, we’ll get an answer that way, but even if they don’t, the first College Football Playoff rankings will start to demonstrate how far the Flames are from the respect they need. How badly does this hurt Liberty? Wait for November 5th.
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We’ll run the promised post tomorrow morning on how much undefeated records matter. There was a change of plan today. If you’re looking for our full Week 5 preview, you can find that here.
Bark.
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