Latest Stories

And so it is time to confess: I have crossed a journalistic boundary and cannot possibly write about Saturday's Arizona-BYU game with full neutrality. I more than sorta hate BYU. The spector of watching the Cougars play in my town is making me sick with worry.

On every Saturday of the football season, I have one simple wish: Please, football gods, let BYU lose. This is the school that has beaten my alma mater, Utah State, so thoroughly (scores: 70-46, 65-6, 44-0, 52-0) that I have never been able to follow football like a grown-up and grasp how insignificant a college football game can be.

BYU must lose.

I never have been able to identify where these anti-BYU feelings originated. Osmosis, perhaps. My mom would be watching the TV sports news on a Salt Lake City channel when BYU's longtime play-by-play man appeared.

"I can't listen to Partial Paul James," she would say, quickly changing channels.

Once, removing a snow tire from a truck, watching it bounce harmlessly toward a cinder block wall, it veered right, hit a hose and bounced through a window.

"BYU bounce," a co-worker said with a laugh.

In the state of Utah, you cannot watch a basketball game without someone from the wrong team banking in a brick off the backboard.

"BYU bounce," someone in that state will say.

I have asked many fellow BYU haters (97.3 percent of those from my hometown) why we cannot reach a peace with the Cougars.

"I don't know," they respond. "I enjoy hating them."

BYU is not quite as arrogant as USC, nowhere near as full of itself as Notre Dame, and exhibits only a trace of the entitlement you get from the Texas Longhorns. But in a combination of all three, a smugness factor, the Cougars spin the dial on the hate-o-meter of college football.

BYU cannot ever be considered a Cinderella story, because it never puts a tear in your eye. Too many times the Cougars have been passing into the end zone, leading 54-14, two minutes on the clock. They are as cuddly as a porcupine.

In a final attempt to reach sports maturity and forgive BYU its many football sins, I spent an extended time reading the Cougars' 2006 media guide, a 208-page tribute whose theme is "Band of Brothers."

It should've been "Band of Boy Scouts."

BYU lists on its football roster 28 eagle scouts. One guy speaks French. One guy communicates fluently in Chinese. One guy won a blue ribbon at the county fair for woodworking. A player from Mesa grew up on a reservation and is said to speak Italian, Tongan, Samoan and Hualapai.

These are not the Miami Hurricanes.

Nineteen Cougars are married. Some of them already have two kids. Some have three. Sixty-two on the roster spent two years serving LDS missions, a humbling period in which a 19-year-old moves to rural Venezuela or seedy downtown Tokyo in an attempt to share the word of the Lord.

I put BYU's football guide on the desk and felt I had done my best to overcome years of loathing. I am sure they are not the villains I grew up fearing. I am certain they didn't purposely run up the score and pass for a needless touchdown in the final moments of a 70-point outburst against my alma mater.

After days of thought, I now find it possible to write something nice about BYU.

Enjoy the heat, guys, and good luck next week against Tulsa.

Taxing Times

Paying taxes unites us. It also divides us. People can pay five and even six times more in state and local taxes than other folks in similar circumstances making similar incomes.

Taxes unify Americans, but rates vary by state

Identity Theft

Who's got your number?

In one of the fastest-growing forms of identity theft, crooks are stealing tax refunds by swiping personal information and using it to trick the Internal Revenue Service.

Lawmaker offers anti-ID theft law to foil crooks who profit off dead children