And so, the brilliance and the backfiring at BYU begins anew.

Only this time, the intensity of the bright lights is hotter than ever before.

Those lights turn on when the school hires a high-profile coach straight out of the NBA , pays him a bazillion dollars to lead its basketball program away from the realm of the also-rans and into national prominence. And that coach, swimming in NIL money, then recruits players who are unlike most of the talent the Cougars have settled for in the past, players who ordinarily never would have considered a church school like BYU, with its quirks, its religion classes, its location out in the mountains somewhere, its good-but-not-great hoops legacy, and its Honor Code, which prohibits a lot of the things so many college students at other places enjoy

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