‘Living Up To That Standard:’ AD Tom Holmoe Lays Out Year Two Of BYU’s Big 12 Era
Aug 25, 2024, 3:30 PM
BYU athletics director Tom Holmoe spoke at Education Week at Brigham Young University. (Isaac Hale, Deseret News)
(Isaac Hale, Deseret News)
PROVO, Utah — BYU athletics director Tom Holmoe spoke at Education Week in front of a capacity crowd at the Kimball Tower.
The presentation has taken on a different look than his early years as BYU’s AD. Holmoe, entering his 20th year overseeing BYU’s athletic department, used to spend 30 to 45 minutes fielding questions from an Education Week crowd filled with fans and boosters.
Post-pandemic, Holmoe’s presentations have centered around Canva-created slideshows and 10-15 minutes of Q&A.
Still, during the slideshow portion of his presentation, Holmoe discussed various topics in his athletic department. Among the notables was Holmoe’s discussion of BYU entering year two in its “Big 12 era.”
BYU athletics wants to live up to its standards
“Last season was all about making a good first impression. If you were in here last year, I said, ‘I think we’re going to be good with a lot of our teams. … But we’re not going to sit and wait. We’re not going to take a year off.’ I think our team came into it hard and fighting,” Holmoe said. “Now, we’ve learned a lot, and it’s time to go. This season is about living up to that standard.”
Regarding BYU football, the standard for the program has been winning. During Holmoe’s presentation, he mentioned that BYU is ninth nationally in wins over the last 50 years. Missing bowl games isn’t common for the Cougars.
Entering the 2024 season, they have a stacked schedule that features two road games in nonconference against teams who combined for 20 wins a season ago (SMU, Wyoming) to go along with one of the most demanding Big 12 schedules in the league.
During year one in the Big 12, BYU athletics claimed one conference title. That was courtesy of the women’s cross-country program last October.
Holmoe believes BYU athletics “met the challenge” of their Big 12 competition in year one
The first team Holmoe led his presentation with, women’s soccer, reached the College Cup. Aside from that, it was a light year in the trophy case for BYU sports. It was a far different look than what they were used to in the non-power leagues they resided in for decades.
“Some people actually, believe it or not, when we went into the Big 12, some Cougar fans said, ‘I wish you would just stay in the WCC because we win all the time.’ That’s not what we’re built for, folks. We only pursued a power conference because I felt that it was in the best interest of our student-athletes to compete against the best players in the country, week after week after week.”
Despite only one league championship in their first year in the Big 12, Holmoe believes BYU’s teams “met the challenge” of their competition.
He pointed to the BYU Softball team as an example when they defeated No. 2 Oklahoma. The Cougars were the only Big 12 team to win in Norman this past season.
Here are some other highlights from Holmoe’s BYU Athletics Education Week presentation.
16-team Big 12
One of the slides in Holmoe’s presentation featured a graphic of the 16 team logos of the Big 12 members with the caption, “Conference stability.” Upon seeing that slide, an attendee in the Education Week crowd immediately muttered, “There’s no such thing as conference stability.”
It’s hard to argue with that when outposts such as Provo and Morgantown, West Virginia, are in the same league. Still, the 2024-25 athletic year ushers in a brand new look for the Big 12, with the “Four Corners” Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah officially joining.
A national 16-team Big 12 is a far better situation for BYU athletics compared to football Independence and the WCC.
“So these are our new friends in the neighborhood, folks. Some of them, you might not really know what some of these are. Some of them, you know EXACTLY what they are,” Holmoe said.
“I’m super excited about the opportunity to compete against these teams. They are storied programs that have been around for a long time.”
Another slide featured an image of Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark. Holmoe said Yormark has “done a masterful job of taking a conference that was on the verge of breaking up, bringing it together and strengthening it to the point now where the future looks so bright.”
Season Ticket prices
Holmoe was asked why football season ticket prices continue to go up. In 2024, endzone ticket prices remained the same as the 2023 season. However, everywhere else inside LaVell Edwards Stadium experienced price increases.
“I just think that we’re progressing,” Holmoe said. “I’ve had a lot of conversations with people face to face. Some people feel it’s not progress if you go away from loyalty. There is a loyal part of that. We’ve had people that have been here for 40, 50 years. If you look at it, the season ticket prices that people have and the amount of money that give to our department for the future compared to what we can get with the elevated tickets. It’s not just the pricing of tickets, but it’s your donations.
“So make no mistake about it. We are looking for ways to increase our revenue. People say, ‘Well, we just went into the Big 12, and you’re getting all of that money.’ There’s not one team in the Big 12, and I know that for a fact, that is making money year after year after year. You’re not making any. The best that you can do is to break even. So, if you’re breaking even every year, you’re not able to grow and make the salaries and, now, the revenue share. It changes.
“I’ve had some conversations where we’ve tried to take and change some loyal questions individually, and we’ve done some things on this side. I’m not going to say the ticket prices will continue to go up, but they’re not going to go down unless, for some reason, our programs slipped.”
How BYU Athletics is approaching revenue sharing
Beginning in 2025, revenue sharing is coming to college athletics. Power conference schools can pay up to $22 million annually from their media rights, ticket sales, and other revenue streams back to athletes.
Holmoe brought up revenue sharing in his slideshow presentation.
“These are court cases that were determined legally. And the revenue share, which will be coming into place in 2025 is part of the future of college athletics. There’s part of it that I don’t really like. I’m not going to go into the details of all that. But what I will say is where we were before, we were running to a cliff –everyone– and there was nowhere to get off. We were gonna run off the cliff.
“So the ability to somehow share in the revenue. A lot of revenue comes from college athletes. The ability to share that with student-athletes was the right thing to do.
“BYU Athletics has been sharing our revenue, not in the form of payments to student-athletes, but in mental health, our academic center, our nutrition, so many other areas, that we felt like we were giving a degree of our revenue sharing that with them. But on a national basis, it had to be standardized and everyone in the country be able to do so on the same level.”
“We are BYU”
“…BYU will be going at this, looking at it on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, adapting, transitioning, and the word of the decade, pivoting to be able to see where we fit. We’re not other schools. We’re not going to be Notre Dame. We’re not going to be Texas Tech. We’re not going to the University of Utah and Utah State. We are BYU. We got to a position of strength by doing things the way we do it on this campus under the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And that’s not going to change.”
Mitch Harper is a BYU Insider for KSLsports.com and hosts the Cougar Tracks Podcast (SUBSCRIBE) and Cougar Sports Saturday (12–3 p.m.) on KSL Newsradio. Follow Mitch’s coverage of BYU in the Big 12 Conference on X: @Mitch_Harper.
