The college football landscape is really starting to shift dramatically, with the Ed O’Bannon ruling coming out recently about NCAA schools licensing student likeness to companies, and the NCAA’s autonomy proposal for the Power 5 conferences. That’s a lot of football talk, I know, but the bigger question the Deseret News Gregory Welch asks revolves around BYU (Brigham Young University) their football team, tithing, and whether the church could be offsetting it. According to Welch, “While some fans love to raise conspiracy theories of BYU’s athletics funding, we’re told that the Cougars are self-funding. Donors, endowments, ticket sales, TV revenue and the church permission are what allow the program to operate. Yes, BYU recently shut down BYU-Hawaii athletics. Last year, their entire athletics revenue was a shade over $2.5 million, according to the Department of Education. The church shut down Ricks College athletics rather than operate a second athletics program close to the one it already had. Do we really want to talk about those decisions in the same sentence as the idea of shutting down a $50-million-a-year program like what the church has at BYU? As long as my tithing money isn’t paying for it, I think the church can do whatever it pleases with the football team. I’d just like to see the nation’s taxpayers care as much about all those other schools’ moral and financial obligations.” deseretnews/article/865609044/Guest-commentary-It7s-OK-if-BYU-fans-want-to-pay-for-a-church-football-team.html?pg=all
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 20:00:01 +0000
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