We demand that the Big 12 Conference and NCAA university executives move past empty post-game apologies and implement severe, structural penalties, including season-long student section lockdowns whenever crowd-wide religious bigotry occurs.

During the September 19, 2026 football game at Colorado State University, members of the home crowd engaged in coordinated, vulgar anti-Mormon chants targeting Brigham Young University’s student-athletes. This is not an isolated sports rivalry; it is a highly repetitive, multi-year pattern seen across venues like the University of Colorado Boulder, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Cincinnati.

The current system of flat financial fines and public relations apologies does absolutely nothing to deter this behavior. These minor penalties are treated by multi-million dollar athletic departments as a predictable line-item expense, while the student groups responsible face zero accountability.

We must recognize that these chants do not exist in a vacuum. Normalizing targeted religious hatred in packed sports stadiums acts as a dangerous cultural permission slip. This unchecked hostility directly feeds radicalized elements, ultimately manifesting as real-world violence against innocent people.

We saw the tragic endpoint of this exact hatred on September 28, 2025, when an armed assailant motivated by intense anti-religious bias rammed his truck into a Church Stake Center in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan. He opened fire with an assault rifle and set the building ablaze, killing four innocent worshippers and injuring eight others. When thousands of college students are permitted to mass-chant religious slurs with near-impunity, it validates the very bias that drives such horrific violence.

Mocking anyone's faith has no place in higher education or collegiate sports. If a university cannot effectively police its own venue or manage its student body, it must lose its home-field privilege.

We call on Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark and university executives to immediately enforce a strict, zero-tolerance framework:

• Immediate Section Closures: Any crowd-wide religious or identity-based harassment must result in the immediate emptying of that stadium section for the remainder of the active game.  
• Season-Long Seating Lockdowns: Offending universities must be banned from ticketing or filling those student sections for all subsequent home matchups for the remainder of the athletic season. The seats must remain entirely vacant as a visible sign of institutional failure.
• Compounding Financial Penalties: Fines for repeat offenses must double sequentially (scaling from $50,000 to $100,000, $200,000, etc.), with funds routed directly to the victimized institution to support student safety and security initiatives.
• Mandatory Event Surveillance: Conferences must mandate that host schools deploy high-definition surveillance assets focused directly on student sections to identify, eject, and permanently ban individual instigators.

Standard public relations scripts are no longer acceptable. Protect our student-athletes and demand real, structural consequences to stop this hatred.