BYU athletes can’t endorse these products


LDSGator
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6 minutes ago, Vort said:

I don't want to agree with this...but I do, at least in part. I am no longer convinced that the positives outweigh the negatives.

As Glenn Reynolds says about the US-China cultural exchange:  “We’re no longer exporting our values; we’ve begun importing theirs.”

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18 hours ago, Vort said:

Good for BYU for doing what they very obviously should have done.

No argument there-this is more about the NCAA allowing athletes to be paid. 
 

 

16 hours ago, Just_A_Guy said:

Oh, how I wish BYU would just drop NCAA athletics completely . . . 

Why?

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43 minutes ago, LDSGator said:

Why?

1). It’s a repeated point of embarrassment as player after player fails to live up to the Honor Code in very public ways;

2).  It sets up a caste system within the University where athletes get tuition and dining perks and often skate through with sub-par academic performance and minimal Honor Code compliance—and (in my experience) the athletes know it, which makes them even more insufferable;

3). It’s a point of leverage for leftist institutions to being pressure to bear against the University and the Church for taking unpopular stances;

4).  I’ve seen conflicting statements about whether BYU athletics, taken as a whole, are even financially self-sustaining; which leads me to suspect that even if it isn’t an outright money-loser—it’s no great financial boon, either.

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3 minutes ago, Just_A_Guy said:

1). It’s a repeated point of embarrassment as player after player fails to live up to the Honor Code in very public ways;

2).  It sets up a caste system within the University where athletes get tuition and dining perks and often skate through with sub-par academic performance and minimal Honor Code compliance—and (in my experience) the athletes know it, which makes them even more insufferable;

3). It’s a point of leverage for leftist institutions to being pressure to bear against the University and the Church for taking unpopular stances;

4).  I’ve seen conflicting statements about whether BYU athletics, taken as a whole, are even financially self-sustaining; which leads me to suspect that even if it isn’t an outright money-loser—it’s no great financial boon, either.

5) they aren’t good enough to compete with SEC teams, where we play real football. 
 

😉

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42 minutes ago, Just_A_Guy said:

1). It’s a repeated point of embarrassment as player after player fails to live up to the Honor Code in very public ways;

2).  It sets up a caste system within the University where athletes get tuition and dining perks and often skate through with sub-par academic performance and minimal Honor Code compliance—and (in my experience) the athletes know it, which makes them even more insufferable;

3). It’s a point of leverage for leftist institutions to being pressure to bear against the University and the Church for taking unpopular stances;

4).  I’ve seen conflicting statements about whether BYU athletics, taken as a whole, are even financially self-sustaining; which leads me to suspect that even if it isn’t an outright money-loser—it’s no great financial boon, either.

5. Public exclusion does BYU no good. The media do not portray BYU as the victim of overt and hateful discrimination; rather, BYU is portrayed as a purveyor of hateful discrimination, and thus anathema to any right-thinking (meaning left-thinking) conference. So BYU's exclusion from e.g. the PAC-12 simply makes BYU a laughingstock. This is true no matter how well BYU plays. Sports columnists now openly speculate that BYU's "homophobic" policies and the offensive, benighted beliefs of its sponsoring institution are the clear reason that no major conference will take BYU.

But who cares how the sports world portrays BYU? Well...exactly. We should not care. BYU as an institution should care only in doing the Lord's will. But college football is an immense, extended beauty pageant. If we truly do not care how we are perceived by the ignorant and the willfully wicked, then why are we playing FBS football? Why play intermural sports at all? Is there some hidden benefit inherent in playing sports? Heaven knows we find out year by year how dangerous and destructive football is to the human brain and body. BYU sports is certainly not immune from such ills, as Jim McMahon and other BYU luminaries of past years illustrate.

As with ancient Rome and modern Europe, sports have become a pagan idol to us. Stadiums and arenas stand as monuments to our appetite for watching the games, immense temples for our Sunday worship. BYU itself—the Lord's university, both literally and ostensibly in spirit—has two such major temples on its campus, huge meetinghouses dedicated to our veneration, and with the players themselves too often serving as the unholy sacrifice. We dedicate our consecrated time, money, and means to our devotions, congratulating ourselves that we keep ourselves holy and unspotted by insuring that our Saturday games conclude before midnight.

Look, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool BYU sports fan, still avid if no longer rabid. I have followed BYU's football program for decades, and have paid no small amount of attention to BYU's other sports programs, and not just basketball. I cursed BYU's long-ago decision to disband its wrestling program (one of the best in the western US) to mollify the gods of Title IX. I mourned BYU's decision to quit sponsoring their top-notch, championship rugby squad. I thought it too bad when Ricks College, upon becoming BYU-Idaho, disbanded its sports programs. But today, I wonder if perhaps BYU-I didn't get it right.

I really don't know. At this point I'm just ranting. But in this last year or so, I've really begun questioning the value of BYU's sports programs to its raison d'être. In many ways, it seems that my beloved alma mater has lost her way. I see the sports programs as offering no assistance to the very real and all-too-public evils taking place regularly on BYU's campus, as thoughtless and entitled students demand, in effect, that God change his mind and do things their way.

Honestly, if BYU cannot be reformed, it should be repealed, and the spirit and promise of BYU should be restored. I suspect more strongly every year that sports programs don't have much to do with BYU's mission, assuming BYU holds to its stated purposes.

This is just about the time I would normally voice my confidence in BYU's leadership and encourage us to get behind them, even when they make the occasional inevitable misstep. But some of the social and political faux pas that BYU has blundered into in the past several years have me questioning my confidence in BYU's leadership. I wonder if the Board of Trustees should not put Jeff Holland back in charge and do a very, very, VERY thorough housecleaning from top to bottom—starting with the faculty (and especially the faculty in the colleges of Humanities, Religion, Education, and Family-Home-Social Sciences) and staff, and continuing on through the entire student body. Having students at BYU who live their covenants imperfectly and even violate important and sacred covenants is pretty much inevitable. Keeping students who openly defy the principles of BYU and the beliefs of its sponsoring institution is incomprehensible to me. Such students can have place at so many other institutions in the US that their presence at BYU is mystifying. They do not need BYU, and BYU most certainly does not need them.

BYU's problems run much deeper than their sports programs. But that is one highly visible element that may, at best, be serving as a distraction from the central business that must be conducted.

So there's my BYU rant. My four oldest children have all matriculated at a BYU school for some time period, and three of those have graduated or will graduate from BYU in Provo. I'm heavily invested in BYU, both emotionally and in spirit. It is of importance to me and to my family that BYU succeed in its God-given mission. If sports does not further that end, and especially if it proves a drag, I'm all for jettisoning the sports programs. I'll rise and shout and keep singing the fight song as long as BYU has such sports teams,. But if and when the time comes that they go away, I will probably say that it's for the best.

Edited by Vort
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  • 1 year later...
  • 1 year later...
On 11/11/2022 at 1:47 PM, Moorco said:

Does anyone really have a NIL deal that involves porn? Lol that would be something.

I can’t imagine any school being okay with that. If a Gator did that, I’m 100% confident he’d be off the team on ten seconds.  

Edited by LDSGator
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