History hasn’t been kind to Lloyd Eaton.
In nine seasons as head football coach of the University of Wyoming, Eaton led the Cowboys to eight consecutive winning seasons and three conference championships. But when Eaton is recalled these days — if he’s thought of at all — it’s not for his record as a gridiron innovator who knew how to make teams win.
Rather, he is remembered for his complicity in prejudice.
On October 17, 1969, 14 of Eaton’s African American players came to his office with a concern. The all-white team they were scheduled to play the next day, Brigham Young University (BYU), represented a school that is owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which actively and openly discriminated against blacks, barring them from equal participation in church rites, relegating them to second-class status at BYU.
The Black 14, as they came to be known, asked their coach for permission to speak out against BYU’s policies. Eaton didn’t even entertain the conversation. Protests were against team rules. He summarily kicked the players off the team.
News of Eaton’s action ignited a national conversation about whether upstanding universities should engage in sports competitions against discriminatory schools. In the following months, university sports programs across the nation were pushed to boycott BYU. Some did so publicly. Others did so tacitly. Many simply ignored the criticism, reasoning that the football field wasn’t the right place to take a stand against racism.
As the 2019 college football season begins, University of South Florida (USF) players, coaches, athletic officials and fans have the opportunity to take a stand against prejudice once again. And at the center of the issue, just as it was 40 years ago, is BYU.
The Latter-day Saints Church — often called the “Mormon” church, although its leaders have recently abandoned that nickname — officially ended its racist policy in 1978, but the church and its flagship university weren’t done with discrimination. At BYU today, a so-called “honor code” specifically bans from the university students who engage in acts of physical intimacy with people of the same sex, even when those acts are completely non-sexual. Gay students worry they can be kicked out of school for things that heterosexual students don’t have to think twice about, like holding hands in the quad, cuddling in the student center, or sharing a kiss at the campus duck pond.
Recently, the church has allowed children of LGBTQ couples to be baptized and has even said that gay couples would no longer be viewed as “apostates” — but church teaching on gay marriage has not changed. In spiritual terms, the church downgraded gay marriage from a capital offense to a first-degree felony. And although gay marriage has been legal in Utah since 2013, two years before it was federally legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court, even students in legally sanctioned same-sex marriages are banned from studying at BYU. Such marriages, the school argues, are “sinful and undermine the divinely created institution of the family.” Straight students, meanwhile, can marry at will, and they do so in droves. By some estimates, about 25 percent of BYU students are married, about four times the national average.
Under current U.S. law, private institutions that receive federal funding can claim a “religious faith” exemption to Title IX, which famously provides women with equal access to educational services but has been expanded in recent years to protect LGBTQ students. BYU has a legal right to discriminate.
Some LGBTQ rights advocates believe other universities should be grappling with the same questions that faced their predecessors after the Black 14 story put the Latter-day Saints church’s racial prejudice into the national spotlight, 40 years ago.
Instead of answering those questions — or even asking them — universities across the nation are lining up to do business with BYU. A review of dozens of contracts between BYU and the schools it has contracted to compete against on the gridion — including USF which will square off against BYU at Raymond James Stadium on October 12 — shows millions of dollars changing hands between institutions with strict non-discrimination rules and a university that openly and actively discriminates against LGBTQ individuals.
READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL
When the USF football team hosts BYU in Tampa, it will be the first time the two schools meet on the gridiron.
On paper, it’s a decent match-up. Both teams finished the last season with seven wins. Both are expected to finish somewhere around .500 this season. South Florida was among the best programs in the nation, last season, in total offense. BYU was one of the country’s best defensive teams.
But there’s one way the two schools don’t match up: South Florida’s non-discrimination policy would seem to bar the school from doing business with an institution that openly and actively discriminates against LGBTQ individuals.
South Florida’s “Diversity and Equal Opportunity: Discrimination and Harassment” policy, updated last week, commits the school to providing an environment “free from discrimination.” And, going beyond state law — which doesn’t specifically protect LGBTQ individuals — the policy includes “sexual orientation, as well as gender identity and expression” as attributes for which discrimination is banned.
No school can make rules for other schools, of course. But institutions of higher education can choose the conditions under which they will do business with others. Indeed, South Florida’s policy also bans discrimination by “any vendor or individual external to the USF System… during any program or activity coordinated through the USF System, and/or while on USF System premises.” Under that policy, USF could not hire a janitorial company to clean its 160,000 square-foot football center if that company refused to employ people who are in gay relationships.
USF has nonetheless entered into a contract with a university that does that very thing. That contract — which doesn't include a non-discrimination clause — was signed in 2014 by then-athletics director Mark Harlan, who has since moved to BYU's traditional rival, the University of Utah (where he will preside over the 100th playing of that school’s “Holy War” rivalry game against BYU on August 29). That would seem to give room to South Florida to do business with a school that encourages students, faculty and staff to report on members of the college community who are suspected of homosexual behavior and other honor code violations. (There’s even a convenient web form to make things easy for snitches.)
“I’ve had friends kicked out of BYU for being queer,” said Christa Cannell, a board member at Logan Pride, which advocates for LGBTQ students in northern Utah, where one of BYU’s historic rivals, Utah State University, is located. “That’s a very real and very harmful practice.”
De Palazzo, the safe schools coordinator for the LGBTQ advocacy organization Equality Florida, thinks South Florida’s football deal with BYU sends a bad message.
“The message that our young people get is that they are less, and they are not valued,” Palazzo said. “They can’t be their full selves, out and proud.”
Palazzo stopped short of calling for USF to reconsider its contracts with BYU. Others have not been nearly so forgiving. For while being gay isn’t a choice, playing football against BYU most certainly is.
“There are a lot of schools that are supportive of their LGBTQ athletes and fans, but that isn’t necessarily evident through their actions, such as who they play.”
A COMPLICITY OF CHOICE
BYU isn’t in the American Athletic Conference, like USF. In fact, BYU’s football program isn’t in any athletic conference. It has been independent since the 2011-12 season. And although it has openly sought to join a conference since then, the university’s record on gay rights is one of the factors that seems to have prevented the major conferences from asking BYU to join. In 2016, when the Big 12 appeared to be entertaining the idea of inviting BYU into its ranks, 25 LGBTQ advocacy organizations signed onto a joint letter urging the conference to think twice.
“As organizations committed to ending homophobia, biphobia and transphobia both on and off the field of play, we are deeply troubled by this possibility,” the letter read. “We feel it would be extremely problematic to include BYU in your conference expansion.”
The invite from the Big 12 never came, and no other major conference has shown any public interest in BYU. That means that BYU can’t rely on a conference to set its schedule. So, when USF officials decided to compete against BYU in football, they did so as the result of a voluntary and independent negotiation for revenue sharing.
That decision would seem to be an outlier for a school that has been working toward becoming a more inclusive institution, with several student organizations focused on supporting queer students and an administrative committee — The President’s Committee on Issues of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity — dedicated to advising USF President Steven Currall on the concerns of LGBTQ students.
Why would a school that works so hard to be inclusive sign a contract to play football with a school that consistently appears on lists of the most anti-gay campuses in the nation — ranking fourth, for instance, in The Advocate’s 2017 list of the “20 colleges most hostile to LGBT students”?
Hudson Taylor, the executive director of Athlete Ally, an LGBTQ advocacy organization that helped push the Big 12 to reject BYU, isn’t surprised by the disconnect between the stated principles of individual institutions and their practices.
“There are a lot of schools within the NCAA that are supportive of their LGBTQ athletes and fans, but that isn’t necessarily evident through their actions, such as who they play,” Taylor said. “There is still a culture of looking the other way.”
MONEYBALL
While South Florida is one of the most recent schools to sign on to play football against BYU, it isn’t the only institution that has roundly ignored that university’s anti-gay policies. It takes a lot of schools to fill out a football schedule, after all.
And it takes a lot of dough to make that happen. For coming to Provo to play football at BYU, other schools usually get a check for $250,000. BYU generally gets a similar part of the take when it goes on the road, according to the contracts. That quarter-million-buck home-and-home is the same deal BYU has with South Florida.
Such contracts are typical between schools of similar sporting merit. But, like many large sports programs scheduling non-conference opponents, BYU pays larger “body bag” fees to schools that agree to come to Provo for a likely whooping. It has agreed, for instance, to pay Utah’s Dixie State University, another public university, $425,000 for a game scheduled for 2022.
Such arrangements work the other way, too. The University of Oregon will put $1.1 million into a BYU account to get the Cougars to come play football in Eugene, Oregon, in 2022. That’s despite the fact that Oregon typically requires both contractors and subcontractors to not only commit to non-discrimination but also “to take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment individuals without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.”
That doesn’t sit well with Liz Sauer, the communication manager at the LGBTQ advocacy organization Basic Rights Oregon.
“It’s really curious and, frankly, disappointing that the University of Oregon, which has generally done quite a good job of supporting LGBT equality, has gone out of its way to support and play BYU when it has such discriminatory policies,” Sauer said. “I would hope the university is open to criticism and open to discussion with the community on its policies.”
She hopes Oregon students, faculty and staff consider how to respond.
When people “come together as a community and say, ‘No. No more. Not on my watch,’ it’s one of the most powerful actions you can take,” she said.
If that were to happen, maybe athletic directors would think twice before signing contracts like the one Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens put his signature on in 2015, committing to a game seven years in the future against a school with a long history of discrimination.
Mullen’s top spokesman, Jimmy Stanton, declined to address the seeming hypocrisy that exists when a school refuses to sign contracts with institutions that aren’t actively committed to non-discrimination, but ignores that policy when it comes to football. He noted that BYU has scheduled games with other Pac-12 opponents, too, “as they are a strong non-conference opponent within the region.”
Oregon, Stanton noted, has “a strong culture of inclusivity and diversity,” including the BEOREGON campaign, which “encourages all Ducks to be their most authentic selves.” He declined, however, to address the fact that his university has agreed to pay more than a million dollars to a school where gay student-athletes can’t be their authentic selves.
The just-ignore-the-issue approach was same tack taken by Brian Siegrist, South Florida’s associate athletics director for communications.
“I don’t think we are going to participate in that type of interview or the direction you are headed with that story,” he told a reporter who asked why South Florida would do business with an institution that openly and actively discriminates against LGBTQ students. “Thanks for calling, have a good day.”
And with that, he hung up the phone.
PLAYING DUMB
With a devoted national following of members from the Latter-day Saints church and a long-term television contract with cable sports giant ESPN, BYU is an enticing opponent for athletic directors looking for a chance to raise their program’s profile.
“When we compete against BYU, it’s not an everyday matchup so I think it’s going to help with our brand,” said Tom Kleinlein, the athletic director at Georgia Southern University, which will trade payments of $100,000 with BYU for games in 2021 and 2024. “People are going to pay attention to us.”
As for BYU’s discriminatory practices?
“I’ve never really had an issue with it,” Kleinlein said. “I don’t live in a world where I am very judgemental of other people’s policies.”
The University of Toledo’s athletics director, Mike O’Brien, called BYU “a great name.”
Does a “great” school treat straight and gay students differently?
“I am not going to go down that route,” O’Brien said. “We signed a contract… That has several parameters. We are abiding by what is in the contract, as is BYU.”
O’Brien argued the contract “was done many years ago.” It was, in fact, signed in 2015 — and he was the person who signed it. Pressed to explain why he would sign a contract with a school that openly and actively discriminates, O’Brien did what the rep from South Florida did — he hung up the phone.
Taylor, the Athlete Ally executive director, said “football, not politics” is a recurrent excuse for not standing up to prejudice.
“I think one of the first things you hear is ‘stick to sports,’” he said. “There is a common response to diminish or ignore how culpable an individual or institution is when it comes to LGBTQ bias, bullying and discrimination.”
Not every official is resistant to introspection, however.
Ryan Bamford, the athletic director at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which ends a four-year, $250,000-per-game contract with BYU this season, said such a deal “is about trying to fill a schedule. We try to get two what we call ‘power five’ teams, so those are usually on the road, one for ones, basically to make money.”
(Although BYU isn’t in one of the Power Five conferences, universities from several conferences count the Provo school as a Power Five opponent for the purposes of scheduling.)
Bamford compared the decision to play against BYU with a long-term contract UMass had for football games against Liberty University. That school’s founder, Jerry Falwell Sr., and its current president, Jerry Falwell Jr., share a history of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric.
“The values of a school don’t really weigh in,” Bamford said. “Unfortunately, we don’t take those things into account when we are building our football schedule.”
Bamford said he would explore the legal ramifications of the contract.
“It could be an issue going forward,” he said, “if it flies in the face of Massachusetts state policy.”
But what if it’s not a legal issue? What if it’s just a moral one?
“It is certainly food for thought,” Bamford said. “That’s something we have not yet considered, but something we should consider in the future.”
That may be easy for UMass; its four-game contract with BYU ends this season. For other schools, getting out of a game could be more complicated, and more costly.
When the University of Missouri entered into a contract with BYU in 2014, it agreed to not only exchange payments for a home-and-home series of games, but to underwrite the costs for a hapless football program from Wagner College, in New York, to travel to Provo for a body bag game in 2015. That essentially guaranteed that BYU would have an extra win on its schedule when it faced off against Missouri a few weeks later — a bit of system gaming that is increasingly common in college football schedule making. (Indeed, Wagner lost 70-6 in its mismatch against BYU.)
Since BYU played in Kansas City in 2015, “we owe them a game,” said Nicholas Joos, Missouri’s deputy athletics director for communications. “It would cost us a lot to get out of that game.”
How much is a lot? The cost of breaking up with BYU, as dictated in the terms of most of the contracts, including the contract with South Florida, is a million bucks per scheduled game.
BYU’s schedule this season includes South Florida, Utah, Utah State, Toledo, UMass, Liberty, the University of Tennessee, the University of Southern California, the University of Washington, Boise State University, Idaho State University, and San Diego State University.
USF — which is contracted to visit Provo, Utah, in 2021 — is among several schools with multiple-game contracts with BYU. Arizona State University and Stanford University, which are scheduled to start squaring off against BYU in 2020, and Baylor University, which has a home-and-home agreement with BYU that starts in 2021, also have multi-game contracts with the school.
The Washington, Arizona State, and Stanford games are particularly ironic. Those universities were part of the coalition of institutions where students and faculty protested against their schools’ decisions to enter into contracts to play against BYU in the 1960s and 1970s. In response, several schools officially banned their teams from playing football against BYU, and held out until the Latter-day Saints church’s racist policies were revoked in the late ‘70s. Even then, some schools continued to ignore BYU. Despite the fact that both universities are private schools in the western United States with storied football programs, Stanford didn’t play BYU in football until 2003.
BIG COVER
The National Collegiate Athletic Association scored a significant public relations victory in 2016, when it threatened to pull its championship events from North Carolina over that state’s infamous anti-trans “bathroom bill.” And yet, as Cyd Zeigler of OutSports pointed out at the time, the NCAA continued to turn a blind eye to the “far more sinister and discriminatory” policies affecting LGBTQ athletes and other students at BYU.
NCAA officials can’t argue, as many athletic directors did, that they simply didn’t know about BYU’s discriminatory policies. In 2017, the director of the NCAA’s inclusion office, Amy Wilson, visited BYU “to discuss ways to create more inclusive and respectful environments and experiences for NCAA student-athletes and staff of all sexual orientations, gender identities and religious beliefs.” Even then, Wilson avoided direct criticism. And since then, the NCAA has remained silent about BYU’s treatment of LGBTQ students and faculty.
But if the NCAA is looking for cover for its habitual turning of blind eyes, it doesn’t have to look far.
When Nike’s new corporate code of conduct was released in May, the company’s chief ethics and compliance officer, Ann MIller, wrote that all Nike employees should be “guided by both the letter and the spirit” of a code that expressly prohibits discrimination, not just among Nike employees, but also “colleagues, visitors and partners.” A slide presentation created to publicize the code proclaimed “we choose who we do business with carefully.”
A few months later, Nike won widespread praise for its pro-equality “Be True” campaign, including a commercial with a voiceover from triathlete Chris Mosier. “None of us can truly win,” Mosier said in the video, “until the rules are the same for everyone.”
Yet when Nike signed its latest licensing agreement with BYU, the company was silent about the fact that, at BYU, the rules are absolutely not the same for everyone.
Rather than speaking out against discrimination, the company’s famous founder, Phil Knight, slathered praise on BYU.
“We don’t have a better relationship in the country than the one we have with BYU,” Knight said in a statement. “We are very proud of it. We love the relationship and the program.”
"We’ve had a relationship with BYU for nearly 40 years now. We don’t have a better relationship in the country, than the one we have with BYU. We are very proud of it." – Phil Knight, Nike co-founder
— BYU (@BYU) March 8, 2019
BYU Announces New Nike Partnership
⬇⬇️https://t.co/cN3ET1d8hv pic.twitter.com/rjqM60kmDT
Nike spokesman Josh Benedek repeatedly declined to explain how a company that markets itself as a supporter of LGBTQ athletes could be proud of a relationship with a university that openly and actively discriminates against gay athletes.
But Nike isn’t alone in that sort of duality.
ESPN makes it clear to advertisers that it won’t permit discriminatory messages to be broadcast on its networks. The Walt Disney Company-owned sports network has also taken action to punish discriminatory language on its channels; in 2016, it fired commentator Curt Schilling over transphobic comments. But in 2010, the powerful cable network inked a muti-year contract to broadcast BYU football games—not only putting that school in the national spotlight but giving other teams a powerful incentve to ignore BYU’s discrimination in exchange for a piece of the exposure.
In a statement during his school’s annual football media day, athletic director Tom Holmoe credited the ESPN contract for BYU’s ability to line up a strong home schedule, according to a report in The Salt Lake Tribune. ESPN has also played a hand in getting BYU into bowl games that the school would otherwise have been passed over for — making arrangements, for instance, for 6-win-and-6-loss BYU to play in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in 2018, even as other teams with similar records were left out of postseason play.
Holmoe said an extension to the school’s contract with the network, originally set to run from 2010 to 2018, is being negotiated.
“We plan to be with ESPN for a long time,” he said.
Derek Volner, the manager for communications for ESPN’s college sports division, wouldn’t dispute that. He referred to a quote from the network’s senior director for programming and acquisitions, Kurt Dargis, who affirmed in June that “ESPN has a great relationship with BYU and its athletics department,” and that “we expect that affiliation to continue.”
ESPN officials declined to address their network’s role in providing exposure to a school where a gay football player would risk expulsion for celebrating a win with a kiss from his boyfriend.
BAD ACTORS
BYU associate athletic director for communications Duff Tittle said that, at his school, “we strive to treat all members of our campus community and those who visit the school with respect, dignity and love.”
That’s all he would offer in response to the notion that his school — which openly and actively discriminates against LGBTQ students — has been signing a lot of contracts with institutions that ordinarily maintain strict non-discrimination policies.
Why would he say anything more? BYU has a right to discriminate, under federal law, and it hasn’t been having trouble finding other schools that are willing to ignore its prejudice toward LGBTQ students.
And BYU certainly isn’t the only institution of higher education with discriminatory policies that target LGBTQ students and faculty. LeTourneau University in Texas has banned gay student athletes from dating. Azusa Pacific University in California pushed out its former chair of theology and philosophy after he came out as transgender. And Liberty, which is by far the lowest-profile of any school BYU will play this year, has a long and well-documented history of anti-LGBTQ discrimination, including pushing gay students toward so-called “conversion therapy” and denying equal treatment to the same-sex and trans spouses of military personel, according to the non-profit advocacy organization Campus Pride.
But BYU is unquestionably the highest profile school in that group when it comes to college sports, and the only one competing in Division 1 athletics.
At least one BYU student athlete believes that makes her school a legitimate target for protest.
Like other LGBTQ students at BYU, Emma Gee, an openly bisexual cross country and track runner, is bound by the school’s honor code to avoid engaging in “all forms of physical intimacy that give expression to homosexual feelings.”
Gee loves her team. Fellow student-athletes, she says, have been nothing but supportive. But she pulls no punches about her school’s anti-gay policy: It is homophobic and contributes to an atmosphere of paranoia for LGBTQ students, and especially student-athletes, she said.
“Many student athletes here are very prominent in BYU’s culture, so there’s a lot of eyes on them,” she noted. What should other schools do to stand up to such discrimination?
“I think any school that recognizes the homophobia that it is, has every right to protest against that,” Gee said. “If schools were to choose to do that, it would make sense to me. Any time there are things that are unfair and not right, people need to speak up.”
That pressure can come from within the school, as it has with Gee. But, she stressed, “in some people’s situations, it’s not safe to come out.”
“As someone who is here and I see a lot of the pain, I wish things would be better,” she said. “If that is what it took — people breaking contracts with BYU, or not signing at all — that would be great.”
Rob Moolman, the executive director of the Utah Pride Center, said all peaceful options should be on the table.
“Maybe we’re on path to look at protests at BYU, or boycotts on games for universities with discriminatory practices,” he said. “I hope we’re beginning to see some of that mentality emerge… I hope we’re moving to a time where people will start to reassess why they continue to foster these relationships.”
Could that really make a difference? Not if you take Latter-day Saint leaders at their word. BYU’s policies stem from church dogma, and “central to God’s plan,” the church’s website proclaims, “the doctrine of marriage between a man and woman is an integral teaching of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and will not change.”
Those words might sound familiar to those who were struggling to understand the same church’s doctrine, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the Black 14 incident brought its racist policies to national attention.
The priesthood ban is “not my policy or the church’s policy,” church president Spencer Kimball said in 1973. “It is the policy of the Lord who has established it.”
Five years later, Kimball — who, like all Latter-day Saint presidents before and since, was considered a “prophet, seer and revelator” by church members — declared that he had been told by God that the ban on full rights for black members should end.
Regardless of whether BYU and Latter-day Saints officials ever hear from heaven on the issue of equality for LGBTQ individuals, it’s clear to Taylor that they need to hear from their fellow humans.
“It is incredibly frustrating,” he said. “There is still a very reactive state of mind. Institutions will do the right thing when there is enough public pressure, but to actually invest in that proactive solution, I think there are far fewer institutions actually leading the way.”
Carter Moore and Kat Webb are students at Utah State University, where Matthew D. LaPlante is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication. Versions of this article are scheduled to appear this week in Oregon and Utah.
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This article appears in Aug 29 – Sep 5, 2019.