O.K. let’s start with full disclosure… I am not a BYU “insider”. Not at all. I don’t have special information about the program, special relationships with the players or the coaches, and I don’t even know the recipe for the “special sauce” at J-dawgs. Indeed, my actual status as a BYU expert is far from that. I don’t live in Utah, I rarely attend BYU games or events in-person, and I don’t even really like J-dawgs all that much (I mean they’re good as far as hot dogs go, but they’re still hot dogs). I do, however, love BYU sports, especially football, basketball, and rugby. The real insiders for this website are its readers, so keep the good news coming (via comment section, twitter, etc.).
So, if I’m not an insider and have no inside information, why this site?
Insider websites provide premium content for a premium price (usually a monthly subscription). I love my Cougs but I don’t spend money on these kinds of sites. Fortunately, Cougarnation often provides all/most of the most important information elsewhere on the web, so it’s simply a matter of finding and making sense of it. I don’t think real Cougarfans should have to pay an insider price in order to access insider information. Translation: it’s stupid to pay for things that should be free. So this site will gather that kind of information from the far reaches of the internet and make it available to you (for free) here on this site.
So this is really an “anti-membership site” dedicated to BYU football and basketball. The niche that it now focuses on is recruiting, with profiles for most of the new recruits (those who have received scholarship offers) in football and basketball. There’s also some good stuff about alumni in the pros and beyond (after pros), and few statistics articles, and a few other things.
Who is BYU insider?
I’m just a normal BYU fan. I have a wife, four kids, and a day job that I love. I never played college sports but now that I’m in my glory years as a fat 30 something I do play (and coach) sports. I’m a school teacher, a DIYer, and I like to do research, so I created this site so I could do a little of all of that. Through this blog I’ve become a little bit of a recruiting expert, and some of my stuff has been featured at the Deseret News, the Baltimore Ravens website, and across a few other blogs.
What to expect in and of this site
BYU sports is a hobby and I plan to keep it that way. I limit my time on Cougarboard and in the Deseret News comments section (I’m Wiscougarfan in both). In my time reading and commenting about BYU I find that I’m often doing research on the team and I’ve started keeping records of all my findings. Those notes won’t always translate into actual articles, but they do give me a starting point. So, while I watch BYU games on the weekend I will take my notes and try to put together an article. No guarantee on the frequency but I hope to do one/week for the time being. I’m mostly interested in players before and after their time at BYU (i.e. recruiting, BYU players in the Pros, etc), so that’s probably what I’ll write about most often. My hope is to provide statistics and other obscure facts that are a pain to track down from the far reaches of the internet and provide them to you here in an easy to access, easy to read way.
How you can help/contribute
If there is a topic you’d like to read about, simply make a suggestion in the comments section for that sport. Eventually I hope to incorporate some kind of forum into the site to support user feedback. If you are an actual insider or are willing to do the work needed to compile useful information suitable for this site, please consider becoming a guest contributor (you can to click on that link to learn more). And you can always sign up for the newsletter if you want more free stuff.
