Commentary: LDS faith may come first, but money still matters in BYU sports

Why would Kalani Sitake stay at Brigham Young University?

There’s a trend in college football this year: stealing coaches during the season. It has happened already. To the disbelief of many, Lane Kiffin left a powerhouse program at Mississippi for Louisiana State University for a new seven-year, $91 million contract. Penn State, a legendary program, tried to do the same with BYU’s Sitake, a rising coaching star in his own right.

And then, unexpectedly to many in the media, the BYU coach decided to stay put.

The reasons why are rooted in the complicated dance between money and faith that has governed BYU athletics for more than a century. The university is, of course, owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and there is much talk on campus about how sports should serve the mission of the church.

Deseret News reporter Tad Walch notes that there’s a statement printed on the wall of BYU’s athletics building:

“We follow the example of the toughest man to ever walk the earth, our Savior Jesus Christ.”

The line is attributed to Kalani Sitake.

As we write in our new book “Game Changers,” which focuses on the history of Cougar basketball, for decades BYU administrators and coaches have told their athletes that sports has more to do with morality and faith than with money.

Certainly Sitake thinks so.

“I know that my job is to win football games but, man, I feel like my job is much more than that,” he told reporters after rejecting Penn State’s offer. He believes that working at a school operated by the church means that he can coach football in a way that “allows us to be connected to the Savior,” he said. For Sitake, that means teaching selflessness, service and humility.

That is surely music to the ears of BYU administrators and church leaders, who have long insisted that sports at the university should operate in service of building character.

Ernest Wilkinson, the legendary president who turned BYU into a major American university during his two decades at the helm of the school from 1951 to 1971, fought to prevent his coaches from offering scholarships and other perks to recruit athletes because he feared recruitment would turn sports into a profit machine focused on winning rather than on developing character.

And yet, it would be naive to insist that money doesn’t matter. Money has taken over the sports landscape in ways that fans probably could not have imagined just a decade or two ago. Court decisions in the past 10 years have meant that universities can now pay athletes, and that those athletes can sign “name, imagine and likeness” deals that pay them to endorse anything from national soft drinks to local restaurants. This has resulted in a frantic scrum of boosters of major university sports programs putting together what are called “NIL collectives” — groups of wealthy fans pooling money to offer athletes at their schools deals rich enough to keep them in uniform.

All this means that coaching salaries are creeping higher and higher, and the amount of money pouring through university athletic programs is as well. It’s been reported that major BYU boosters — including Jason McGowan, the CEO of the cookie company Crumbl — have put together a new pot of NIL money in the $10 million to $15 million range that Sitake can use to tempt football players seeking NIL endorsement deals.

If this sounds more like the sweaty world of free agency in professional sports, where backroom deals and seemingly unreal amounts of cash drive the news cycle, that’s because the transformations in collegiate sports mean that the NCAA now looks more like professional sports than the vigorous moral competitions that Wilkinson had hoped.

That’s a conundrum for BYU. People like Sitake and the school’s president, C. Shane Reese, genuinely believe that sports can serve the moral work of the university.

“We have students who come because they resonate with our mission,” Reese said. “We can’t be a pay-for-play culture.” University officials have consistently insisted that the Provo school doesn’t want to be known for being awash in cash but for the character it hopes to build.

And yet, in February 2025, Paul Liljenquist, one of the most active of BYU’s boosters, flatly told an ESPN reporter that “you’re not going to outbid us.” And both Sitake and Kevin Young, the head basketball coach, have been recruiting player after player — some, like basketball stars AJ Dybantsa and Rob Wright, not Latter-day Saints — with big NIL deals.

Of course, BYU’s fans are thrilled. But sometimes the tensions rise to the surface. Sitake loves BYU. But it’s also reported that the deal keeping him in Provo is going to triple his salary to the range of $9 million a year.

Note to readers • Matthew Bowman and Wayne LeCheminant are co-authors of “Game Changers: AJ Dybantsa, BYU, and the Struggle for the Soul of Basketball.”