Debunking the mystery of BYU: School isn't weird or cultish, just into clean living

Next weekend, fans of Oklahoma and Brigham Young will congregate outside Cowboys Stadium for tailgate parties, with one discernible difference.

One side will be imbibing beer by the gallons; the other, sipping orange juice.

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.”

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