Old-school BYU wins with honor code and without sex

This one's on me, because I had no idea. Brigham Young University has been around for more than 100 years, and it has been competing at the highest levels of college athletics for decades, and I simply had no idea that BYU was competing and even winning with an honor code straight out of the 16th century.

Leading rusher Harvey Unga ran afoul of BYU's honor code. (Getty Images)

And I don't mean that as a slap at BYU. Really, I do not. The BYU honor code is based on the Mormon faith, obviously, but it strikes me as Puritan, complete with expulsion on the grounds of the scarlet letter. Which would be "A". For adultery. That's the term for sex outside marriage, including sex before marriage, and it's forbidden for BYU students.

You heard me right.

BYU students can't have sex. Nor can they smoke a cigarette. Sex and then a cigarette? Forget it. It's against the BYU honor code.

I know this now, today, because of Harvey Unga. He's the all-time leading rusher in BYU football history, and he has one more season to play at BYU after deciding not to enter this week's NFL Draft, but he won't be back. He's gone. He voluntarily removed himself from the team, and from school, late last week after failing to live up to the BYU honor code.

That was the news that broke late Friday night, and it left me confused, scrambling for more information. Honor code? BYU has an honor code? I had no idea, and I pay attention to college sports for a living. More precisely, I was with the BYU men's basketball team last month in Oklahoma City, where the Cougars beat Florida in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. And I had no idea I was watching a team with an honor code beating a team without one. Florida is one of the biggest party schools in the country, you know. Tanned teenagers and young adults drinking and smoking and, I bet, sexing. That's the rumor. Plus, I went to Florida. I never did any of those things, mind you, but I heard about it. Most kids are dying to go to a school like Florida, because that sort of fun stuff happens. It's even allowed.

Not at BYU. It's not allowed. None of that is allowed. Not drinking, not smoking, and not sexing. What, specifically, did Harvey Unga do to remove himself from school? Nobody's saying, but on the same day that he removed himself from BYU, so did a starting forward on the BYU women's basketball team. Her name is Keilani Moeaki. She has been dating Unga for three years. They were engaged for a while last year. What did they do, in tandem, to warrant removing themselves from school? Nobody knows, but those are the dots, and you are left to connect them.

Me, I'll ask a question:

How does BYU do it? How does BYU attract enough recruits to field a competitive football team, one good enough to go 43-9 over the last four years?

The heck with a football team. How does BYU attract enough recruits to field an offensive line?

Truth is, I understand how BYU does it. The Mormon faith is enormous in Utah, and it extends around the world, to more than 13 million at last count. The BYU student body isn't completely Mormon, but close. Roughly 98 percent of the undergrads are said to be Mormon, and that's a huge school with an enrollment of more than 35,000. In fact, according to a story in U.S. News and World Report last month, BYU is the most popular school in the country based on one enrollment figure: More than 78 percent of the applicants accepted by BYU choose to attend the school, beating out Harvard's 76 percent success rate.

In other words, people really, truly want to go to BYU. Tens of thousands of them. And they know ahead of time what awaits them -- or rather, what doesn't await them. No sex. No beer, even for students of legal age. No cigarettes. No cursing, either.

But Unga chose BYU in 2005, when he could have gone to Utah. He had offers from schools in the Pac-10 as well, but he chose BYU and its honor code. After three seasons he has run for 3,455 yards, putting himself on the NFL's radar, but after the 2009 season he chose BYU again by letting the deadline for entering the NFL draft come and go.

BYU is a private school, and as such it can tell its students to live any way it wants. In addition to its strict rules against sex, coffee and herbal tea, if BYU wanted to forbid male students from growing a beard, it could do that. If BYU wanted to forbid female students from piercing their ear a second time, it could do that. In fact, BYU did do that. The honor code says no beards, no second piercings.

And hair must be trimmed above the ears.

I'm serious.

Who plays quarterback for BYU, the dude from Leave it to Beaver?

And still, more than 35,000 students are enrolled there -- willing to attend a school that has an honor code that addresses the way an adult can use the bathroom. This comes straight from the honor code on the school website as it relates to an off-campus home visit: "The use of the bathroom areas by members of the opposite sex is not appropriate unless emergency or civility dictates otherwise."

You'd think this sort of thing -- that honor code, the story about Unga's withdrawal from school -- would hurt BYU on the recruiting trail, but it hasn't yet and I bet it won't now. You or I might not want to live that way, but that isn't the point. Thousands of kids do.

I used to think an Ivy League team winning a game in the NCAA Tournament, as Cornell did this season, was one of the most amazing feats in college sports. Now I know better. Cornell does it with kids willing to attend school without a scholarship, true -- but BYU does it with kids willing to not have sex.