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The concept is hardly original. The response is refreshing.
When Brigham Young University's basketball team visited Gonzaga University in late February, several GU students dressed as Mormon missionaries with white shirts, ties and bicycle helmets. That has been done before, at Gonzaga and elsewhere in the West Coast Conference. The difference this time is the way some members of the GU community reacted, writing letters to the editor of The Gonzaga Bulletin, the school's newspaper.
Those letters criticizing Gonzaga's own students served to illustrate how well LDS Church-owned BYU has been accepted into the WCC, consisting of nine other private schools with faith-based foundations (seven, including GU, were founded in the Catholic tradition; Pepperdine is affiliated with the Churches of Christ, and Pacific, now nondenominational, originally was Methodist).
The merits of BYU's football independence after leaving the Mountain West Conference, and the resulting need to find a home for the Provo school's other athletic programs, are still subject to debate six years later. Yet what's clear is that the WCC has embraced BYU in basketball, and the Cougars have further elevated a conference that features two strong programs, Gonzaga and Saint Mary's College.
In the small gyms of the WCC, with programs overshadowed by Pac-12 schools and professional teams in major markets such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, BYU's built-in following among alumni and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has considerably boosted attendance. And the Cougars are treated much better than they were in Mountain West arenas, notably San Diego State, Wyoming and New Mexico.
SDSU students began the missionary dress-up tradition, which Gonzaga followed. This year's BYU visit triggered strong responses from a student and a faculty member of the school in Spokane, Wash. In his letter to the editor, senior Joseph Harshbarger said the costumes "showed an ugly, hidden side of the Gonzaga student body that includes using religion as a means of criticism."
Laura Brunell, a political science professor, wrote that "GU is not a community that condones the ridicule of religious belief and practices."
Just as interesting to me were the responses of BYU fans to those letters. Having observed the LDS Church from the outside as a Utahn for nearly 50 years, I have tremendous respect for the missionary program. The dressing up seems to have bothered me more than it affected Mormons, judging by the good-natured comments that accompanied The Bulletin's online publication of the letters.
Eric Mika, a BYU player who served a mission in Italy, took the mocking especially well — with the perspective of having played in the Cougars' third straight victory in Spokane, a remarkable achievement. "I love [Gonzaga's] crowd," Mika told The Salt Lake Tribune's Jay Drew. "We were talking with them a little bit, right before the game. I was just getting to know those guys; they are good dudes, funny dudes. If we were wearing their uniform, they would be cheering for us. It is not like it is anything personal. … It is just funny."
GU students likely won't dress up in the future. That's partly because Davis High School graduate Jesse Wade will join the Bulldog basketball program next season after returning from his Mormon mission in France. His presence will give fellow students more appreciation of missionary work — besides having been admonished in The Bulletin.
The WCC and BYU will remain a good match. In 2010, when the Cougars looked into WCC membership, I wrote that it could become the best collaboration of Catholics with Mormons since the 1980 Holiday Bowl, when Jim McMahon's touchdown pass to Clay Brown completed BYU's historic rally to beat Southern Methodist. It has worked well. Although the Mountain West has greater depth, the WCC has provided BYU healthy competition with Gonzaga and Saint Mary's, each seeded into the top half of the 2017 NCAA Tournament field. Coincidentally, those schools were assigned to Salt Lake City, headquarters of the LDS Church, to open the tournament.
The WCC has accommodated BYU's policy against Sunday play by restructuring the men's and women's conference basketball tournaments in Las Vegas. The schedule skips Sunday, between the quarterfinals and semifinals, resulting in an extra day's hotel expenses for traveling parties. The trade-off is ESPN coverage of the Monday men's semifinals and Tuesday's championship game.
That final matchup has featured Gonzaga and Saint Mary's each of the past two seasons. BYU's challenge now is to rise to those programs' level of consistency.
Twitter: @tribkurt