Hey BYU football fans! Long time, no see. That’s about to change in a big way. July is BYU football recruiting month at BYU Insider, and I’ve recently interviewed most of the new commits to the BYU football program. I’ll be publishing a new BYU recruiting profile every day this month–starting with the new 2022 commits and wrapping up with the 2021 signees. By kickoff in August you will be much more familiar with the all new and up-and-coming faces of BYU football.
Updating, Simplifying and Improving BYU Insider
But first things first. BYU Insider is getting a facelift. If you’re reading this online right now you can probably see that the site looks a little different. I’ve updated the look and feel of the site while eliminating a whole heep of what used to be here. Gone is BYU basketball. Gone are general BYU sports articles. Gone is everything not related to BYU football recruiting. Yep, that’s right. BYU Insider is now exclusively dedicated to BYU football recruiting.
For those of you who follow BYU football recruiting, you have probably noticed that very little content has been posted on BYU Insider over the last 2-3 years. There’s an easy explanation for that, and if you’re interested you can read the footnote at the bottom of this article. But the short answer is that I’ve been busy, sorry.
While I have a lot of great excuses, the reality is that I’ve missed digging into BYU football, and especially the recruiting side of things. So we’re back, baby! Let me walk you through what you can expect on this site this month and moving forward.
What is BYU Insider?
This is now a BYU football recruiting site. But it is not meant to replace or even compete with recruiting services like 247 Sports, Rivals, and ESPN. The “big boys” do in-depth analysis and rank and rate student-athletes. They can do that because they make money and have a budget. As a business they report recruiting information about ALL potential recruits to BYU and everywhere else. I’m not interested in doing that. What I am interested in is reporting the data that all those services share that is relevant to BYU prospects and commits.
There are also many local media outlets that report on BYU football. There are some great newspapers, like the Deseret News and the Daily Herald, as well as some horrible papers, like that one that rhymes with “fib” in SLC. There are radio shows, podcasts, and a few other fan sites. But all of those platforms report on several different aspects of BYU football and/or BYU sports.
So BYU Insider is different because it is focuses exclusively on BYU football recruiting and it aggregates all of the BYU recruiting news and statistics from all of the other sites to make the most comprehensive recruiting profiles available. I’ve also done more than 100 interviews with BYU football commits over the last five years so in addition to all the stats, scholarship offers, and measurables, you’ll also hear from the student-athletes themselves.
Football recruiting is a fluid and ever-evolving process. So BYU Insider will continue to grow and evolve. Part of the simplification and rebranding of the site is an effort to transition from more of a news site to an information site. For the rest of July I will be posting a new updated profile for the commits and signees for the football classes of 2021 and 2022. You can already see who each of those student-athletes are by going to the “Recruiting Classes” tab on this site and selecting the year you are interested in. Each recruiting class directory will link to the individual profiles as well as some of the other sites that rank and rate them.
Once all the profiles are uploaded I will shift my attention to uploading additional information about BYU football that the recruits (and fans) are most interested in. I’ll continue to build out the “Cougs in the Pros” section and add additional sections to the site that focus on relevant statistics and information about BYU football.
How you can help
I’ve heard from a number of players that they love seeing their own profiles and also reading about what former players are doing in the pros. So I’ll keep creating those profiles to support the athletes.
But I’d also really love for this website to be useful to fans too.
So, what does this site need? What do you want to know about the BYU football recruits? What kind of information about the recruiting process would you like to know? Is there anything else about BYU football that you wish you could find online? Let me know in the comment section and I’ll see what I can do.
And if you have any information about a recruit or commit feel free to message me on social media (@byu_insider). I’ll do what I can. Sorry for the long break, but it’s good to be back and I’m excited to start posting all the new profiles.
Go Cougs!
—————————————————————————————-
P.S. Here’s the footnote about my long absence from BYU Insider.
*Who is “BYU Insider” and why hasn’t he been posting much over the last 2-3 years? I’m just a BYU fan. I attended BYU twenty years ago and loved watching the football games (I’m not a former athlete but I love BYU football). Since then I’ve written about the Cougs here, for the Deseret News, and as a guest contributor on a few other sites. I love BYU football, but it’s just a hobby. My day job is as a school teacher.
A couple years ago I started posting less on this site. That is partly due to shifting focus to my own mental and physical health (trust me, I needed to refocus). In 2018-19 I lost 100 pounds and created a new platform–After the Run–to talk about what I was learning in my health improvement process. I also wrote and published my first book and started speaking to schools and at conferences about how exercise impacts productivity and learning.
And then the pandemic hit. With a daughter with severe respiratory issues we were overly cautious. Then my father-in-law died from COVID and we stayed cautious. It was a wonderful time as we grew closer as a family, but being a teacher was crazy hard and stressful. I created Virtual School Assembly to help my students deal with the stresses of COVID and then gave a few TEDx talks about my work on VSA. I’m close to finishing my second book and hoping to get back out speaking. It’s been a wild ride these last few years. If any of this is of interest to you, you can learn more at www.tylerchristensen.com.
Through everything that’s happened I find that I still love BYU football and I’ve missed doing research and writing about the recruits. So I’ll be pumping out profiles for at least a few weeks. Cheers and Go Cougs!
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]
