The latest out-of-the-box idea to keep the Cougars competitive

BYU’s recent gains on the field, the track, the course and the court — and in recruiting — reflect an unprecedented era in athletics. In an effort to keep the Cougars in the game, a group of alums are thinking outside the box.

This new era of college sports, that includes sharing revenue with student-athletes, is demanding new ideas to keep up with it.

Waypoint and its co-founder and CEO Matt Sanders partnered with BYU in July. He believes the path to greener pastures for athletics is connected to the way Cougar fans travel. Waypoint gathers wholesale rates from hotels and theme parks, including Disneyland and provides them on its site.

Each time a BYU fan books a trip through www.gocougs.travel, the BYU athletic department receives 50% of the net revenue.

“If you just look at what BYU alumni, some 600,000 of them, spend on their global travel, it’s about $3.5 billion a year on lodging and theme park tickets,” Sanders told the “Y’s Guys” livestream show recently. “What we looked at was how we can take advantage of the loyalty people feel toward their university and get them to shift their behavior.”

If Waypoint can attract even 2% of those travel dollars through their site, BYU athletics would stand to receive millions of dollars annually. Currently, the NCAA requires its member institutions to distribute $20.5 million each year to their student-athletes.

“BYU fans now have an opportunity to become a micro donor,” said Sanders, a 1995 BYU grad. “We are super grateful for our big donors. Be micro donors. Just change your behavior. Take a trip a year (through gocougs.travel) and it will make a difference.”

BYU has a history of outside-the-box thinkers who turned micro ideas into major game changers.

Using unconventional thought is how Philo T. Farnsworth became the Father of Television. It’s how Ryan Smith created Qualtrics and transformed the way people do surveys. Thinking differently is also what led LaVell Edwards to hire Doug Scovil in the 1970s, invest in the forward pass and change football forever.

The Hall of Fame coach put BYU on the map with a playing style that won a national title, a Heisman Trophy and sent a handful of quarterbacks into the NFL. Today’s Cougars, in all sports, are enjoying the fruits of Edwards’ pioneering efforts as a member of the Big 12.

Coming up with the cash to help keep them contenders is up to the athletic department and its alums — like Sanders and his team of former Cougars.

“People have watched BYU be this unique, novel, very different university for years. We stand out and all eyes are on (us),” Sanders said. “There are four schools in the Big 12, an ACC, an SEC and a new Pac-12 school coming on to the Waypoint platform to fund their student-athletes through fan loyalty, passion and shifting their behaviors. BYU is the pioneer. They get to be out ahead of everybody else.”

Dave McCann is a sportswriter and columnist for the Deseret News and is a play-by-play announcer and show host for BYUtv/ESPN+. He co-hosts “Y’s Guys” at ysguys.com and is the author of the children’s book “C is for Cougar,” available at deseretbook.com.