My rambling thoughts:

BYU fans are not that different from fans of most other schools at our core as humans. We feel anger, hostility, jealousy, rage and even delight at others misfortunes. But I think as a fan base in general, we give voice to those emotions less than many others and our behavior has been developed to respond in less confrontational ways. Why? I see a few reasons.

1. Most of us don't drink. Alcohol lowers inhibitions and allows people to do things after a few drinks they would probably not do normally. By not drinking, we're less likely to say and do things we would later regret.

2. The community standards around us DO work to help us conform our behavior to what is deemed acceptable. While I find myself swearing to myself sometimes when working in my garage or driving in traffic, I'm less likely to yell out profanities in a sports stadium because I have adopted the standards of my LDS community that I'm around much of the time (I don't live in Utah, so I'm talking about when I associate with others from the church) — certain behaviors are not acceptable in that church community and my behaviors are influenced by it. I don't think that means I'm fake and disingenuous — I try to live that standard at all times, even if I'm a bit less diligent in some less public circumstances. I think most people are influenced by their community standards and try a bit harder at times because of them.

3. Many of us DO feel an obligation to act in a way that people will associate positively with the Church. When we are involved in BYU sports and people know we are from BYU, we don't want to do something that will reflect poorly on the university and the Church. And I think we HAVE been socialized (through a lifetime of hearing faith-promoting stories about how someone made a decision to investigate the Church because of the positive example of friends from high school, etc.) to try to leave people with a positive impression of the LDS Church. So when we read the tweets by visiting fans saying things like "That was the most welcomed we had ever been made to feel as visiting fans" we value that and want to perpetuate it because it feels good to us to be featuring a positive element of our faith. I think we have to acknowledge this dynamic. While this may be what critics say is "performative," I think that this criticism unfairly makes it sound like we are doing something false or misleading, rather than just trying to highlight something we believe is real and good.

4. And, ultimately, I believe that LDS community standards not only help us avoid certain negative behaviors (see #2 above) but help inculcate and develop positive traits like kindness and friendliness. When you grow up attending Primary classes where the music and lessons are focused on this, have family lessons (FHE and CFM) about the same topics, attend early morning seminary classes as a teen where you study the life of Jesus and talk about his traits, serve a mission focused on serving other people (and are HYPERFOCUSED on being a good representative for the faith), attend college where you have religious education classes in addition to regular church attendance, raise a family with church input that focuses on teaching all of these things to the next generation, some of it truly helps you to develop into the person that you are. In other words, its not performative, its just you being the person you have become. You still feel human emotions of anger, selfishness, and a desire for retribution, but you have trained yourself to try to not be a slave to those things. Claiming that this is all "fake" is just ill informed and, frankly, not fair.

I get it that some find the niceness to be strange and not the type of engagement they are used to surrounding college football. So be it. I've also seen that, when we as fans DO give voice to some of our more base emotions, other critics like to claim that we're hypocrites who don't live our religion. I think I'd rather deal with the first criticism than the second, but in any event I'm not that worried about it. I like that we are courteous as fans and hope that our gameplay is far less hospitable to visiting teams.