When Liberty announced it was joining Conference USA in all sports, including football, beginning with the 2023-24 athletic season, a monumental task was assigned to the athletic department in pairing down future football schedules.

After joining the FBS as an Independent entering the 2018 season, the Flames began to put together full, 12-game schedules for the future. Full schedules were announced through the 2024 season and multiple games were scheduled out as far as 2031. With the CUSA move, this meant that as many as eight games in each season had to be moved.

“It’s been a lot of work, primarily on (Associate Athletic Director) Mickey (Guridy) and then Dave Brown from Gridiron has been really helpful with that,” said Liberty Athletic Director Ian McCaw in an exclusive interview with ASOR. “We’ve had to make a lot of changes. In 2023, with Conference USA, we will play 12 Group of Five games for the first time so that will be a different schedule. A lot of work to do to get from 12 down to four non-conference games, that has gone well.”

Liberty’s 2023 non-conference schedule was announced late last week with the Flames playing seven home games and a full FBS schedule for the first time in school history. The 2024-2026 football schedules are also very close to being finalized with just a couple of moves left for those seasons, McCaw states.

“All those schedules were challenging to get to just because short notice, some schools wanted to cancel on us, you didn’t necessarily get to control which games you played and which games you didn’t,” said McCaw. “I think we navigated that as well as we could.”

News has trickled out over the past several months from other schools that have led to us learning about some of these changes to the future football schedules. Some of these moves include games being canceled or moved against UCF,  North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia Southern, Miami (OH), and Virginia, some of which included home dates for Liberty. Some of the games on the future schedules have been kept, some have been canceled, and some have been moved to later dates.

“There’s a lot that goes into it,” McCaw said of the reasons for canceling or moving some games as opposed to keeping them. “Both parties need to agree. There were some schools that had games we probably would have preferred to keep that wanted to cancel us, and we needed to downsize, so we were willing to do that. But, we’ve also been able to keep some really important games for us, and we are excited about that. I think, in light of all the dynamics and it’s very complicated, I think we’ve done as well as we possibly could.”

McCaw has previously stated that his preferred model for Liberty’s non-conference schedule in Conference USA is to play one regional Power Five, two regional Group of Five, and an FCS school. That still remains his plan, but it may take a few years to get to that level.

“Once we get to about ’27, I think we are able to accomplish that,” he said. “We have locked some games with Virginia Tech, Coastal, and ODU. Some good regional games that will be attractive for our fans. I like our schedules, kind of ’27 and beyond, I think we are in really good shape.”