Beecher, Brown beat the blitz

BOILING SPRINGS, N.C. — Friday night at the team hotel, Liberty coach Danny Rocco pulled Mike Brown aside and told him to get a good night’s sleep, because as Rocco put it to his sophomore captain, “I’m going to work you like a dog.”

After Brown scored the first of his three touchdowns Saturday in the Flames’ 51-28 win at Gardner-Webb, Rocco asked Brown, “do you have anything left in you?”

Brown just smiled.

“To me, it’s like the more the better,” Brown said after setting a school record with 198 receiving yards. He caught 10 passes, including a game-breaking 80-yard touchdown in the third quarter, and ran 11 times for 52 yards and scored on two short runs.

And the 16th-ranked Flames needed every bit of that offense just to keep up with a surprisingly spunky Gardner-Webb club, which exploded for more than 200 yards and 21 points in the second quarter alone and went into halftime with a 28-27 lead.

“As an offense, our mentality was if they score 50, we’ve got to score 51,” Brown said.

That wasn’t really necessary. A defense that looked a step slow and spent much of the first half trying to take down Bulldog players with arm tackles came out explosive in the second half, holding Gardner-Webb (5-5, 2-3 Big South) scoreless after the break.

Still, the Flames’ hopes for a 16th straight Big South victory looked precarious at best as late as the final minute of the third quarter. Then Brown and quarterback Tommy Beecher made the play of the game.

Offensive coordinator Brandon Streeter noticed that Gardner-Webb was playing Cover Zero defense and called for a slant pattern in hopes that Brown would be matched up in man-on-man coverage. Even better, the Bulldogs sent weakside linebacker Mario Brown on a blitz, leaving Brown in man coverage with safety Lyndrez Leslie. Once Brown caught the timing pass, Leslie had no chance.

Brown caught the ball, turned and found nothing but green grass. With the defense cheating on the blitz, Brown got behind the coverage and easily won the footrace to the end zone, giving the Flames a 37-28 lead with 0:23 left in the third.

“When we’re both on the same page, I think we can be really dangerous,” said Beecher, who completed 23 of 32 passes for 337 yards and three touchdowns.

That score forced Gardner-Webb into scramble mode, and the Flames — who had been gashed for a 66-yard Patrick Hall touchdown run and a 43-yard David Montgomery TD reception in the first half — sat back in coverage and kept the Bulldogs from making any more big plays.

The defense, which forced eight turnovers last week against VMI and leads the nation in turnover margin, forced two more in the fourth quarter, none bigger than KaJuan Lee’s jarring hit on GWU tight end Josh Miller. On 3rd-and-13 from the GWU 7, Miller caught a pass from quarterback Stan Doolittle and tried to extend the ball near the 20 to gain the first down. But Lee hit him, knocking the ball loose, and freshman Demetrius Ward grabbed the ball at the 18 and returned it for his first collegiate touchdown.

“I saw the ball come loose and my eyes got big,” Ward said. “Scoop and score.”

That put Liberty up 44-28, giving the Flames plenty of cushion against the fading Bulldogs.

Liberty’s offense was dominant from the start Saturday. The Flames rolled up 510 yards, had 27 first downs, went 7-for-13 on third downs and scored all five times they hit the Bulldogs’ red zone.

Once the defense followed suit, the Flames ran away with the victory.

“In the first half, we gave up big chunks of yardage,” Rocco said. “It wasn’t necessarily sustained drives. But we did look flat on defense. We certainly didn’t look flat on offense at all today.”

About 20 minutes after the game, word filtered to the Flames’ locker room that Charleston Southern had defeated Stony Brook in overtime, giving Liberty at least a share of the Big South championship for the third year in a row. If Stony Brook were to beat the Flames next week on Long Island, the conference would recognize co-champions, much like it did in 2005 when Charleston Southern and Coastal Carolina shared the title despite CSU’s head-to-head victory.

The Flames (8-2, 5-0) want no part of that.

Said tight end Tommy Shaver: “I don’t like sharing.”