CCU’s contentious rivalry with Liberty will conclude on national television

With just two games remaining in its final season with a Football Championship Subdivision schedule, Coastal Carolina can deliver a parting shot Thursday to what has become the most disliked rival in the Chanticleers’ 14-year existence.

Liberty is the only current Big South Conference school that CCU has a losing record against, going 6-7 against the Flames with losses in each of the past two seasons.

But the animosity goes deeper than the unfavorable record.

Coastal Carolina head coach Joe Moglia said that while he respects Liberty head coach Turner Gill, athletic director Jeff Barber and the university as a whole, he has less respect for the way the Flames conduct themselves against CCU.

“There is a good degree of intensity that winds up going along with [Liberty games],” Moglia said. “One of the things that a lot of people are not crazy about is their players … spend a lot of time mouthing off at you. They’re doing that at the beginning of the game, they’re doing it at halftime, they’re doing it during the game, they’re doing it during warmups. I don’t find that particularly classy, so I won’t miss that part.”

The game is being played at 7 p.m. and provides a rare national showcase for the Chants with a live television broadcast on ESPNews.

“Liberty is a big rivalry, so I’d like to think if we weren’t on television, I’d like to think if it was Saturday morning at 8 a.m., I’d like to think if we were playing in a school parking lot and nobody was there, we’d be ready to play this game,” Moglia said.

The past three games in the series have been decided by three points or less. The Chants won at Liberty 55-52 in double overtime in 2013, Liberty won at CCU 15-14 in 2014 when it blocked a 24-yard field goal attempt as time expired, and Liberty won at home 24-21 last year on a Thursday night on ESPNews with a late 40-yard touchdown pass to upset then No. 4 CCU.

The past two losses were damaging to Chants teams that had national championship aspirations, particularly in 2014, when the Chants lost to now five-time defending FCS champion North Dakota State 39-32 in the quarterfinals at the Fargodome.

“Two years ago, had it not been for that [Liberty] game we would have finished up undefeated and No. 1 in the nation,” Moglia said. “Who knows what would have happened in the playoffs, but No. 1 we would have not gone to Fargo to play North Dakota at Fargo, we would have played somebody not as good as them here at home. And I think there was a pretty good chance we would have played North Dakota in Frisco (Texas) for the national championship. The game against [Liberty], the last game of the season, cost us that.”

The Chants (8-2), who are ranked 16th in the STATS FCS Top 25 poll, are not eligible for postseason play this season as they transition to the FBS level, but Liberty (6-4) still has playoff hopes with a 4-1 record in the Big South Conference coming off last weekend’s 48-26 loss to No. 14 Charleston Southern.

Liberty will win the Big South Conference’s automatic playoff bid if Kennesaw State beats Charleston Southern this week based on the Flames’ win earlier this season over the Owls (8-2), who entered the FCS Coaches Poll this week at No. 22.

Liberty began the season 1-3 with two of its losses to FBS programs Virginia Tech and Southern Methodist, then won five straight over Robert Morris, Kennesaw State, Monmouth, Gardner-Webb and Presbyterian prior to last week’s loss.

A loss to CCU will surely eliminate any chance Liberty has of receiving an at-large berth into the FCS playoffs, and the Chants would like nothing more. Liberty has handed CCU two of its most lopsided losses, 58-13 in 2009 and 63-27 in 2011, the final season of inaugural CCU coach David Bennett.

“My freshman year I didn’t really understand the rivalry, but as the years have gone on I’ve seen the intensity of the game, how much trash they’re talking, how intense the game is and how close it’s been the past few years,” CCU senior safety C.J. Thompson said. “Even that game [in 2014] when they came here and beat us on the last-minute play, how they ran to our sideline and how passionate they were. It just made more drive for me to come back at them stronger the next year. Now that we’re playing a Thursday night game on ESPN … we’re not going to come out soft. We’re going to play four straight quarters.”

Smack talk could play a role in the outcome of the game. “I think everybody handles it a little bit differently, but for the most part it’s important for us to kind of lay low and try not to get any penalties talking back,” CCU senior safety Richie Sampson said. “Those have hurt us in the past. I’m sure some guys thrown in little jabs themselves, but as long as it doesn’t result in penalties, it’s fair game.”

Victories over ranked CCU teams over the past decade that have helped propel the Liberty program.

“It’s given us national exposure for the football program but really for the university,” Gill said. “… When you have teams that are nationally ranked more eyes and more people are looking, and they may sometimes look into different schools, maybe people who aren’t even into athletics may want to go look at whether it’s Coastal Carolina or Liberty University. It definitely has helped us in that aspect.”

Liberty will be without Gill, who is in his fifth season at Liberty and is serving a one-game suspension for a self-reported violation within his program earlier this year.

The team will be coached in his absence by defensive coordinator and safeties coach Robert Wimberly, who was an assistant to Gill at Buffalo before Gill took the job at Liberty in 2012.

The suspension stems from associate head coach and receivers coach Ron Brown offering a scholarship to a prospective student-athlete through a text message before the permitted period beginning Aug. 1. Brown also received a one-game suspension, which he served on Oct. 21 vs. Monmouth.

“[Wimberly] has done a very, very good job on our defensive side of the ball,” Gill said. “He’s well organized, he understands the university, understands the way we go about doing things, understands how I coach and how we lead the team, so I thought he was the best person to give us the best chance to win this football game and lead our football team.”

Both Moglia and Gill said this week that they don’t believe the rivalry will continue beyond this season, at least for the foreseeable future.

“That rivalry winds up going away,” Moglia said. “Pragmatically we’ll be allowed to play one FCS team a year and we already have those teams scheduled, and Liberty is not part of that. Liberty has been dying to get to the FBS level anyway … and I would guess one of these days they’ll probably get that done.”

This story was originally published November 16, 2016 at 7:26 PM with the headline "CCU’s contentious rivalry with Liberty will conclude on national television."