At Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr. bets on big-time football, with a disgraced coach

LYNCHBURG, Va. — On occasion Liberty University will invite members of out-of-state churches to speak at its convocation, and in January 2018, a man from Mississippi stood and stepped forward. 

“I’m humbled,” he said early in remarks to a packed arena that held more than 8,000 students, staffers and administrators, “and certainly unworthy.”

The new semester’s first convocation, a twice-a-week mandatory gathering at the Vines Center, had a theme: perseverance, though it might as well have been about pride. Hugh Freeze had, maybe without realizing it, just let it envelop and overtake him.

Freeze was as damaged as he was accomplished, perfect for a place expanding as rapidly as Liberty, where resources outpace need. The Flames didn’t need a football coach at the time, but the controversial university president increasingly saw opportunity in flawed but dynamic personalities — especially when they helped advance his expansive vision for the school.

Freeze had spent five seasons as head football coach at the University of Mississippi, and using his Christian faith and the spread offense as the program’s bedrocks, his Rebels had gone to four bowl games, upset Alabama twice, entered the national rankings’ top five in consecutive seasons. This went on for years, along with a few other things, and he said that it was pride that eventually destroyed him: numerous NCAA violations, paying no mind to boosters who broke rules, Freeze using his university-issued cellphone to call an escort service.

“My world crumbled,” he said in a presentation featured on the school’s YouTube site, one he had given many times but never to a crowd so large, and on the stage behind him was Jerry Falwell Jr., the school’s president and the son of its founder. “I had to say to the people that I love, ‘I am sorry. Please forgive me.’”