March Madness Daily: BYU is riding those 'Silicon Slopes'
It's not just the Tater Tots. BYU has found the money tree in its tech-laden backyard.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today we take a quick trip to Salt Lake City.
Eben: There’s no city in the country quite like Salt Lake City, and there’s no team left in the men’s tournament quite like BYU 🐈.
Amid a Sweet Sixteen made up mostly of college football blue-bloods, BYU stands out as a relative newcomer to the “Power Four” elite1. Perhaps more notably, the school has parlayed its unique position at the nexus of both a booming tech scene and a civic-minded LDS community to carve out an advantage in this new era of college sports financing.
As every athletic department turns more desperately to local donors and wealthy alumni, BYU has hid a goldmine. The ‘Silicone Slopes,’ a nickname derived from preponderance of Salt Lake start-ups, are full of wealthy founders and executives. Many of them are BYU graduates, and many of them are part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. BYU, of course, was founded and funded by the LDS community.
This year’s Sweet Sixteen berth is just part of the evidence. The team’s leading scorer is Richie Saunders, who recently signed an NIL deal with Ore Ida, the frozen food company that was founded by his great-grandfather. The team’s second leading scorer is led by freshman Egor Demin, who was lured to Provo from a famed Russian basketball academy. Next year, the Cougars will add AJ Dybantsa, the No. 1 basketball recruit in his class. Various reports put his NIL haul at around $7 million.
My colleague Eric Jackson wrote about BYU’s new-found wealth at Sportico this week. Here’s what BYU coach Kevin Young told him:
“If you drive south on I-15 from Salt Lake, you just see startup after startup, tech company after tech company, successful person after successful person. Most of them went to BYU, so this place is set up to succeed. I’m definitely riding the wave of all of that.”
Personally, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live there. I mean, look how awful this view is 👇
Programming note: We’ll be sending daily business nuggets throughout the NCAA tournaments. If that’s not your thing, you can opt out of daily March Madness posts by updating your settings here or with the button below. We’ll return to normal programming in April.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
BYU joined the Big 12, along with Houston, in 2023.