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Earlier this week, I wrote about spending time in Provo, Utah, talking to BYU fans who aren’t members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

I was in Utah for four days, talking to folks in the BYU athletic department, players, and dozens of fans, so my recorder and notebook filled up in a hurry. When you’re in the newsletter business, you’re sort of capped at around 2,600 words, but I felt like there was more I wanted to say that I couldn’t cram into one dispatch.

So here are a few Director’s Cut type thoughts from the trip. If you’re into that, awesome. If you’ve had enough talk about God and Identity for one sports business newsletter, that’s totally cool too. I’ve got realignment stuff, TV contract stuff and other reporting coming over the next few days.

My biggest immediate takeaway from last week is a deep feeling of gratitude.

I’m grateful for the cooperation, hospitality and trust of multiple folks in the BYU athletic department, allowing me to have some big (and occasionally difficult) conversations. But most importantly, I’m grateful for so many people that were willing to crack open their heart to a complete stranger for a little while.

Not every fan I spoke to used to be a Latter-Day Saint, but the overwhelming majority were…and the process of leaving that church was often described as very difficult. It’s a process that is hard on families, hard on individuals, and sometimes involves a complete reconfiguration of one’s personal identity. If you’ve defined yourself as one thing for 30+ years, and suddenly you’re not that thing anymore…what do you keep? What do you get rid of? What are the things you simply can’t get rid of, even if you wanted to?

I know a thing or two about what that’s like.

I do not have the vocabulary or academic background to properly discourse on the definition of a personal identity, so I’m just going to make one up. For the purposes of this newsletter, when I’m talking about personal identity, I’m talking about the framework we use to define ourselves. I’m a father, husband, Midwesterner, aspirational woodworker, etc etc.

For almost all of my life that also included, I’m a Mormon. My dad, Gary Blue Brown, was a Mormon from Southern California. So were his parents, and their parents, and so on. As best as I can tell, that ancestry goes all the way back to a feller named Samuel Brown, who was an usher in the Kirtland Temple. My mom, Maria Regina Figueiredo, was also a Mormon, converting with her family after they immigrated to Cleveland from Brazil. They met in New York City…at church.

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