I really shouldn't post anything serious on this board...but here you go. I am an RM, active, recommend-carrying, recommend-signing, 2x bishopric member. I attended 40-50 BYU football games growing up and always assumed I would follow several siblings to BYU. As a HS senior, I received a full tuition, 4-year academic scholarship offer to BYU and turned it down for a similar scholarship at USU that included some stipends, etc. It was a hard decision at the time, and during the year of school before my mission I was torn about whether to cheer for USU or BYU.

The cause of my 180 was the aggregate of all my pro-BYU family and friends' seemingly constant jabs and comments about how inferior USU was to BYU; how crappy Logan/Cache Valley is relative to Provo; how much harder BYU is academically than USU; how much better my career/grad school opportunities would have been had I had gone to BYU; and on and on and on. Some of the comments are overt and/or teasing, and some are subtle and the person saying it wouldn't even necessarily realize it was derogatory (for example, when a cousin chose to go to USU, my sister asked, unaware I was listening, "Why USU? Couldn't he get in to BYU?"). It just started to really wear me down. At first it was funny, and finally I got really sick of it and found myself wanting BYU sports (and BYU in general, really) to fail so that all the self-righteous comments and commenters would just stop. Those things don't bug me as much anymore, especially in years when we beat you guys, but I'll admit it still rubs me wrong to hear active LDS folks talk smack over tithing, Cache Valley vs. Provo (Cache Valley is my celestial kingdom), etc.

My wife asks me why I ever spend time on this board, and the answer is that I enjoy hearing other Mormon perspectives on a variety of things in the world. I typically ignore all sports topics. But I really do hope you guys go 0-fer every year, because your sense of superiority can be terribly obnoxious to those of us who attended and cheer for a different school.