HB Pony Dad wrote:smupony94 wrote:Best of the Methodists league
USC
SMU
Northwestern
Duke
Vanderbilt
This is the kind of thing that nobody knows. I've said it before and I'll say it again having Methodist in our name hurts recruiting - and I mean beyond student athletes, just students. It wouldn't matter what religion was mentioned. Southern Methodist just sounds too much like Southern "you can't dance" Baptist.
I was raised Catholic... and as I understand there are now more Catholics at SMU than Methodists. Even if it were Southern Catholic there would be issues.
I have no problem with religion I just know that most 17/18 year olds leaving for college are looking for there own identity and rightly looking to decide what they believe. I know for a fact that most people have no idea that we (SMU) have as much to do with the Methodist church as these other schools. When you think about these other schools you don't think religion at all.
I went to a Jesuit high school. I know that that might turn some of you off, but religion being involved academics is not a bad thing. Bettering one's self is huge. I just feel strongly that there were friends in high school even who had to go through years of being at Jesuit before figuring out that being at a religiously affiliated school wasn't a bad thing.
And SMU is not even really religiously affiliated! We had to go to prayer service every week at Jesuit. We had to go to Mass on or before all of the big holidays...
When you say Northwestern, Duke, or USC you don't imagine church, you think "great education". The goal of any university is to broaden minds... and if a school at one point had religious affiliation that goal should be to teach searching for the answer, "we might not be right, but..."
This is why I think SMU needs a great sports program. Then the name is just a name. I have come to not like the fact, in theory, that major athletics and major academics are so tied to each other... in practice, though, I know there is and will never be a team I follow with more passion than SMU. (The US and the World Cup is the only equal.)