Some thoughts on the Cookie Man and college football’s funniest coaching search so far

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

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The trouble with trying to plan an editorial calendar in advance is stuff just keeps happening. I had a different story planned for today, but recent events have caused me to want to speak from the heart about something else.

As most of you know, BYU is owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, colloquially known as the Mormons. Devout Mormons do not drink alcohol, do not smoke, do not consume THC beverages or edibles, do not view pornography, do not gamble and generally do not participate in many of American society’s socially acceptable vices. Shoot, they don’t even drink coffee.

So what do you do when you need to temporarily dull the pain of being alive but are theologically prohibited from doing what everybody else does? You eat junk food. Utah County loves it some fancy soda pop and 1,500-calorie cookies.

Which is why it’s so funny that perhaps the most visible booster during the Kalani Sitake will-he-or-won’t-he-go-to-Penn-State storyline was Jason McGowan, the CEO of Crumbl Cookies. According to the Extra Points style guide, McGowan will henceforth be referred to as either “Big Cookie” or “the Cookie Man” in this publication.

It’s not every day that the public-facing booster of a fan base produces something so deeply aligned with that market. It’d be like if the biggest Wisconsin bag man were a cheese magnate, the biggest Idaho donor were the CEO of All the Potatoes, or the biggest Rutgers booster working in, uh, waste management.

As poet laureate and sports economist Lil Wayne once remarked, “real G’s move in silence like lasagna.” The boosters you hear about on Twitter — the people who are constantly talking to message-board owners — aren’t usually the ones throwing the biggest checks around. Those deep-pocketed boosters also typically don’t come from fun industries. There are exceptions, but across most schools, the biggest athletic boosters are folks involved in law, tech, high finance and, occasionally, agriculture.

I’ve talked to a few folks connected to BYU over the past few days, and I’m quite confident that was also the case here. It’s very funny to write “BIG COOKIE DEFEATS PENN STATE” or “COOKIE MAN OUTBIDS BIG TEN BLUEBLOOD” or something, but that isn’t actually what happened. The Cookie Man helped BYU keep Sitake, but if we’re interested in being Accurate Serious Professionals, it’s worth noting that Penn State’s contract offer was still more money than what BYU ultimately paid the coach, and that money didn’t all come from the Cookie Man.

It would be very funny if that money came from other LDS-adjacent industries (BIG MINIVAN! BIG UNFASHIONABLY MODEST FORMAL DRESSES! BIG FOLDING CHAIR!), but I imagine its sources were boring stuff like “executives at Goldman” or “various Silicon Slopes tech companies.” That’s more common, but it doesn’t make a good tweet.

Part of what makes this storyline so interesting to me, specifically, as a national college sports writer and also a guy who was a Mormon for a really long time, is how unlikely it would have seemed even just a few years ago.

BYU — and, for that matter, LDS institutions generally — has a reputation for not really paying top dollar anywhere. If you’re a professor, a baseball coach, a computer programmer or a construction manager, chances are, you can make more money doing what you do somewhere else. Part of that is a reflection of Utah’s labor market, but part of it is also ideological. BYU doesn’t want people attached to the institution by golden handcuffs. They want folks who want to be there. Do I always agree with that thinking? No, but I understand it.

By paying a football coach in the neighborhood of $9 million (as reported here and here), coupled with the investment in the men’s basketball program, it’s clear that BYU is prepared to spend competitively in the market. Whether that attitude changes elsewhere within church employment is interesting to me, but likely outside the scope of this newsletter.

I do think it’s worth noting where that money is coming from. BYU is a private school, and as such isn’t obligated to share contracts, MFRS reports or financial info at all, no matter how many times I ask very nicely. So I don’t have specific receipts.

But I do know that LDS church officials are very sensitive to the idea that specific church funds would be used for athletic payrolls, coach or athlete. Devout Latter-day Saints also pay a 10 percent tithe on their income to the church, money that is used to pay for educational, charitable and ecclesiastical operations around the globe. The idea that some widow’s mite in northern Brazil was used to pay LJ Martin would be a scandal … if not to the world, then certainly to most of the church community.

I’ve been told increased athletic investments are driven primarily by donors, rather than existing operational funds. And while I’d love to actually look at the books myself, I legitimately do believe that.

I’ll be curious, as senior church leadership becomes more global, or as public frustration with the status quo of college sports grows, whether there will be internal pushback on the optics of paying this kind of money. But maybe not! As the last 100-plus years have shown us, fans and the academy might get upset about rising expenses or ideological shifts … but they hate losing even more.

FWIW, I think Sitake is a very good football coach and worth locking up for BYU, especially given the paucity of other experienced LDS football coaching candidates. Will Penn State’s hire work out? Or any of these other hires? I have no idea. Can’t-miss hires fail all the time, and fourth choice candidates sometimes turn out to be the right ones.

We want to finish the year strong, and we have some original reporting, special projects and plenty of FOIAing in the hopper the rest of the month. You can read everything we write by making sure you’ve upgraded to a premium subscription. These subscriptions pay our bills, from FOIA fees to bowl game sponsorships to travel and more.

And hey, as a parting gift, we finished a big update to Who’s That Football Team. We now have a daily Puzzle challenge. The game is totally free! Today’s clue comes from the FCS ranks, but who knows who will by our mystery program tomorrow….