Kinda funny when Brigham Young himself wore a beard!
Posted on 08/30/2009 12:45:09 PM PDT by greyfoxx39
Next weekend, fans of Oklahoma and Brigham Young will congregate outside Cowboys Stadium for tailgate parties, with one discernible difference.
Sooner and Cougar fans both share a fervor for their historically successful football teams. But BYU and its football program are worlds apart from any other.
"Obviously BYU’s affiliation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” said Roy Brinkerhoff, BYU’s assistant manager of alumni activities, "that alone creates huge differences.”
BYU, located in pristine Provo, Utah, is the largest private and largest religiously-affiliated school in the country. More than 98 percent of its student body is Mormon, and almost half its students have completed 2-year church missions.
"There’s an honor code,” said Brent Babcock, an Oklahoma City chiropractor who graduated from BYU in 1980. "No alcohol consumption, no tobacco, no premarital sex. Even wild man Jim McMahon honored the code.”
So did Pat Brule. Mostly.
Brule, a tobacco-chewing Southern Baptist from Del City, ended up at BYU via a wrestling scholarship in the early 1980s. Brule followed most of BYU’s rules, though he did dip Copenhagen in the dorm with permission from his roommate.
But early on, Brule gained an appreciation of such a strict honor code.
"I’ll never forget, I lost my wallet in the theater. I had like 20-30 bucks in it; I figured that was that,” Brule recalled. "But the next week, I get a call from the theater saying someone had turned in my wallet.
"That’s when I realized, this is a good place.”
While drinking is not part of the culture, Brule said there are plenty of fun things for BYU students to do.
"They do regular stuff I hope my daughter will do in college,” he said. "They go to the movies. There are places in the mountains to go hiking or go skiing. There are open waterfalls in the winter. People get in these natural hot tubs in the mountains and hang out and talk.
"They know how to have a good time without alcohol.”
But like anything else that’s different from the norm, BYU fights negative stereotypes.
"I hear it all the time, that if you go there, you must be weird, must be part of a cult,” Brule said. "When I tell people I went to BYU, they ask me if I have three wives. That’s been gone for years. It’s a misconception of BYU and the Mormon culture.”
Ken Hunt, chair of the BYU alumni chapter in Tulsa, said his Oklahoma friends are always surprised when he first takes them to visit Provo.
"They go there expecting to see a very small university with students dressed bizarrely, because they think of BYU being ultra-conservative in a Mennonite way,” Hunt said. "It’s a dated concept. The students look similar to ones you’d seen in Norman or Stillwater. It’s not what they expected.”
Like the school, BYU’s football program is also unique.
Friday night before the game, while OU’s players eat together and go back to relax at the hotel, BYU’s players will be holding a spiritual fireside chat with members of a local LDS congregation.
"It’s part of their preparation for the game,” Brinkerhoff said. "Going to church and being spiritually fed.”
While it’s rare for college football players to be married, roughly one-third of BYU’s players are. And about four of five Cougar players leave the team for their missions, creating a turnover of about 40 players a year due to graduation and missions.
"Where it hurts the program is that it takes a lot of skill guys a year, year-and-a-half to get back where they were,” said Deseret News (Salt Lake City) sports writer Dick Harmon, who has covered BYU football for the last 35 years. "Sometimes it helps the linemen because they come back more mature.
"But if it was a great advantage, coaches at other schools would be encouraging their LDS kids to take missions.”
BYU faces another distinct challenge in recruiting. Because of its strict honor code, which extends to forbidding mixed gender overnight camping trips and men’s facial hair beyond mustaches, BYU’s recruiting base is largely LDS prospects in Utah and along the west coast.
"Their primary approach is to identify the very best LDS players, who have talent and who can abide the rules that they have,” Harmon said. "But they’ll go after anybody from any background as long as they can come in and live by the honor code.”
None of that, however, has prevented BYU from being one of the most successful programs over the last three decades. Not only are the Cougars the last school from a non-BCS conference (excluding Notre Dame) to win the national championship (1984), only Florida, Boise State, OU, USC and Ohio State have accumulated more victories over the last three years.
That sustained success has created a fervent fan base spanning the world. Even though Provo is 1,200 miles away from Arlington, Texas, at least 15,000 BYU fans are expected to attend the OU game.
"BYU football has like a spiritual following,” Brule said. "We’re as passionate as any other fans.”
Orange Juice ???
Control freaks...
No Apple Juice, Pineapple Juice, Tomato, Grapefruit ???
No Coke, Sprite ???
No Kool Ade ???
No coffee ...guess not...
Ok, what’s the deal with facial hair beyond mustaches? Just the way the story is written makes ldsers sound robotic and cultish.
Kinda funny when Brigham Young himself wore a beard!
And all wearing the same kind of special undies.
They are permitted everything you mentioned except the coffee. Even Coke if they so choose.
The "special undies" are a very meaningful reminder of obligations to one's God and one's spouse. Removal of the "special undies" is one last high barrier on the road to sin, a very serious act that should give pause to anyone thinking of committing adultery.
I'm not Mormon, by the way, but I think making fun of their "special undies" is not much different from making fun of a Jew's yarmulke, or a Sikh's turban, or a Catholic's rosary. It's not funny and does not honor God.
BYU’s fans will probably have graduated from the university as well.
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Obama Says A Baby Is A Punishment
Obama: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
“permitted” ???
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Man made religion...cultish behavior..
For Christians there are Bible verses to protect them from such unGodly control..
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ....therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, Colossians 2:8, 16
Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. One man’s faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. Romans 14:1-3
My teenagers would respond to that with "Oooooh! BURN!"
-ccm
Faith without works is like a dead body without a spirit. Says so in the Bible, so it must be true.
>>I’m not Mormon, by the way, but I think making fun of their “special undies” is not much different from making fun of a Jew’s yarmulke, or a Sikh’s turban, or a Catholic’s rosary. It’s not funny and does not honor God. <<
Catholics have scapulars that never come off. I am Catholic.
I agree with you. Making fun of an item of devotion is crass. Let someone make fun of a yarmulke and see how long they last on FR.
I think calling someone’s religious observance “cultish” is in violation of the injunction you yourself quoted, i.e. not to pass judgment or look down on one whose religious practices differ from your own.
Removal of the “special undies” is one last high barrier on the road to sin, a very serious act that should give pause to anyone thinking of committing adultery.
_____________________________________________
The “special magic undies” have nothinbg to do with refrianing from sin...
A mormon guy can just as easily commit adultery with the undies on as he can taking them completely off...
As far as virtue goes...
a girl in and lacy bra and thong panties can be more virginal and virtuous and walking in obedience to God than the mormon girl with her unnecessary and silly long johns...
No the main reason they wear those silly things is because they believe that bullets cant get through and they protect them from physical harm and death...
Joey Smith didnt like to wear them and he wasnt wearing them the day he shot his way out during that jail break...
However he did have his magic talisman...the Jupiter stone with the pagan good luck charm writing on it...Things like power from the gods etc...
But oh dear that didnt work either...
Just think... my Dad never wore them silly magic undies and he lived twice as long as Joey Smith...
But then he didnt do the evil Joey Smith did,
Joey was the one who did the sex sins, the adultery, the death threats against his wife, the murders, thievery, bank scams, and boasting that he was greater than the Jesus of the Bible...
My Dad was the one who just loved Jesus and obeyed God in his life and has Proverb 22:1 on his tombstone, as he lies next to the only woman he was ever married to...
Dad wasnt a jail bird or dabbler in witchcraft like Joey either...
You wouldnt be passing judgement on me would you ???
I was referring to the self-righteous statements about drinking only orange juice...
Some of the beer drinkers know God...
The orange juice drinkers not so much...
but you were going to get righteously indignant against the author for his judging of the Sooner fans werent you...
Of course you were...
CRICKETS
You’re so right! I also have problems with their attitude towards the Book of Mormon. “If any one adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book” (Rev. 22:18) and “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed” (Gal 1:8).
Especially the "Porcelain God."
except the coffee. Even Coke if they so choose.
Coffee - caffeine..no sugar...
Coke - caffeine ...lots of sugar for the addicts in Utah...
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