The argument since the final whistle in Conway is whether this game was even watchable. It was, just not for the reasons Coastal Carolina would want. It was comically, spectacularly bad, the kind of game where the broadcast crew's incredulity became more entertaining than anything happening on the teal turf at Brooks Stadium.
Liberty walked out of South Carolina with a 34-17 win, and the scoreboard alone undersells how lopsided the football was. Coastal Carolina's problems were structural. The offensive line couldn't create push, the execution around it fell apart in real time, and by the second half Liberty had scored 24 unanswered points against a team that had stopped trying to solve the problem and just hoped it would fix itself. That's on the coaching staff for putting a plan on the field that didn't survive contact, and it's on players who couldn't execute even the parts of the plan that should have worked.
You could argue the game was entertaining precisely because it was a mess. The broadcast booth sounded genuinely stunned by what it was watching, and the whole thing dragged on long enough, padded by timeouts that felt more petty than tactical, that watching it became its own dark comedy. That's fair. A trainwreck is still worth rubbernecking. But being entertaining because it's bad is a different thing from being good, and pretending otherwise lets Coastal Carolina off easy for a performance that had no business being this uncompetitive against a team that isn't a blue blood itself.
Any officiating complaints deserve their own line, but they shouldn't overshadow a game Coastal Carolina was already losing on merit. Bad calls are real and worth being angry about. They're also the crutch losing fan bases reach for first, and this one's a footnote to a much bigger collapse in execution up front.
There's a storyline underneath all this that got buried by the scoreline: Jamey Chadwell walked back into the building he used to run, on the other sideline now, and left with a comfortable win. That's a story for another day. The main event was a Coastal Carolina team that couldn't block and couldn't sustain drives, and once the bleeding started, it never stopped, on a night when the funniest thing in the building was the crew in the booth trying to describe what they were seeing.
Call it comically bad if it makes you feel better about the three hours you spent on it. But comically bad and badly coached are the same thing here, and Coastal Carolina should be furious about which one happened on their own turf.
