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BYU AD reiterates school's desire to join Power 5 conference
If it wasn’t already common knowledge, Tom Holmoe said it plainly on Thursday: BYU wants to join a Power Five conference.
However, Holmoe, who has been BYU’s athletic director since 2005, said the school is not willing to change its policy of not competing on Sundays. The Big 12 has been openly weighing expansion and BYU is one of the schools in the discussion.
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“I really would love to see our football play at that level, be playing in a P5 conference,” Holmoe said per the Associated Press. “I want our players … in all of our sports to be able to play at the highest level. I don’t know [if the policy is a deal-breaker]. That’s up to the P5 conferences. But I do know that it’s something that we hold very sacred. We have never played on a Sunday and we’re not going to play on a Sunday.”
BYU is a Mormon school and views Sunday as a day of worship. The school has a written policy forbidding its athletic teams from competing on Sundays. In most sports, BYU competes in the West Coast Conference. In football, the Cougars have been competing as an FBS Independent team since the 2011 season after leaving the Mountain West.
According to Holmoe, not playing on Sundays wasn’t an issue with the school’s prior conference affiliations.
With respect to BYU’s potential Big 12 candidacy, Holmoe does not feel the need to campaign for a spot.
“They’re well aware of what we’ve done. The stats and the records speak for themselves,” Holmoe said. “We’re a very, very good football program for over 40 years. We have an excellent athletic tradition outside of football and educationally this is one of the best schools ever.”
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Even though he says he won’t canvass for BYU’s inclusion, he has spoken about the school’s desires in the past.
“We’re an independent team playing an independent schedule,” Holmoe said in February 2015 per the Deseret News “That’s what we’ve got and that’s where we are. We’re not really looking back, we’re looking forward because there are possibilities, and I have to do my due diligence on that.
“It’s our intention that we would be playing in what they commonly call a ‘Power 5’ conference sometime in the near future.”
When announcing the reintroduction of a conference title game, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby told reporters that a vote about expansion could come by the end of the summer.
For more BYU news, visit CougarNation.com.
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Sam Cooper is a writer for the Yahoo Sports blogs. Have a tip? Email him or follow him on Twitter!
