On Monday, after Fernando Mendoza led the Indiana Hoosiers to their first-ever National Championship victory, the quarterback said, “I want to give all the glory and thanks to God.” Mendoza’s impressive season and incredible personal story of faith and overcoming long odds have been an inspiration for many fans during the 2025-26 college football season. For the athlete, however, this public recognition of God was not only an act of gratitude for the win but also a moment of thanksgiving to the Creator for having blessed him and his teammates with the healthy bodies and minds required to achieve something difficult—something that required much natural virtue and physical excellence.

It’s also a refreshing reminder for fans.

These days, it seems that all of our institutions have been stripped of their true essence and, thus, untethered, become mired in chaos. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the realm of sports. The furthest question from the minds of most modern sports fans is, “What is the purpose of sports?” though it ought to be their first. For in ignoring this key question while simultaneously investing vast resources into the industry of athletics, we quite literally follow the example of the “foolish man who built his house upon the sand” (Matthew 7:26). Before the edifice crumbles, coaches, athletes, and all who love athletic pursuits need to pause and examine the nature of these games around which so many have ordered their lives.

In the mid-1800s, John Henry Newman began one of his sermons by saying, “A great number of men live and die without reflecting at all upon the state of things in which they find themselves.” We are in that position today when it comes to sports. America is at a pivotal point in the history of sport, and it is time to rethink the way we approach it.

When players thank God after big wins, they draw the minds of millions of people—even if only for a split-second—to the ultimate reality of life, and when we see an inspiring and uplifting athletic victory, such as the one Mendoza led this week, we are reminded anew of what we can learn from this kind of achievement. In other words, we are in the position of the spectators the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne described:

Our life, Pythagoras used to say, is like the great and populous assembly at the Olympic games. Some exercise their bodies to win glory in the games; others bring merchandise to sell for gain. There are some, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to see how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the life of other men in order to judge and regulate their own.

Fr. George Bernard, in his book The Morality of Prizefighting, builds on this point by stating that athletes work “to overcome elemental forces, to contend against self-imposed difficulties and against each other.” Here, we can see that athletic excellence is not just a performance for an audience’s entertainment. For the athlete, competition is a training ground for the vicissitudes of life. And for the spectator who strives to understand what he’s seeing, a good game resembles the war that is life by giving us a chance to work out our thoughts about such struggles. Fr. Bernard posits that this “competitive instinct,” which is what drives the athlete and the spectator, “is admitted as a wholesome factor among the forces which tend to develop human life and character.”

Put simply, the realm of athletics has everything to do with the cultivation of the human spirit and the bringing about of an orderly, peaceful world. Generations ago, there would be no need to make such an argument, as it would have been obvious to most observers that sports were intended for this purpose. But today, because materialism and relativism are the norm, it is more necessary than ever to state the obvious.

Achille Ratti, later Pope Pius XI, spoke of the soul-deepening benefits that are obtained through self-imposed difficulty in his book Climbs on Alpine Peaks:

Of all the activities in which men seek wholesome enjoyment, none may be said to be healthier, for the strength of body and soul alike, than a mountain ascent, provided all recklessness be avoided. For while one’s strength is renewed and increased through hard labor and the struggle to reach the purer and more rarified regions of the air, it also happens that the soul, by wrestling with every type of difficulty, becomes more persistent in its handling of the burdens and duties of life. And the mind, through the contemplation of the immense and beautiful view … from the summits, more easily rises toward God, the Author and Lord of nature.

The purpose of this kind of challenge and exertion—in short, the purpose of sport—is the purpose of man. Put another way, the purpose of sport is to make man more fully alive. This is why, for Plato and Aristotle, physical and athletic training were never separated from the activity of strengthening the soul. Just as music, writing, and architecture do not serve themselves and are not ends in themselves, sport is but another means to the good of mankind. These elements combine to make Western civilization what it is, and they have been developed to enhance and elevate our culture.

The American educator, Mortimer J. Adler, in his essay on “Labor, Leisure and Liberal Education,” put it this way: “All bodily skills are arts; all moral habits involve prudence; so the mind is not left out of the picture even when one is talking about moral and physical training.” Unfortunately, the way sports are presented today is consistent with the way the West has presented all other arts over the last 60 years. Western society, in buying the lie of the Enlightenment, has stripped the supernatural out of essentially every aspect of human life.

The answer to this problem is to infuse everything we do with the divine. In sports, the way to do this is to present coaches and athletes with a more holistic model—one that draws on basic human sciences such as anthropology, ethics, and moral theology—to make men and women more virtuous through the self-imposed difficulties inherent to athletics.

Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his book Test Everything, offers calls on Christians to direct humanity as it is mired in today’s materialistic culture: “I suppose one can try to build islands of humanity, and in this project Christians could and should be leading.” For von Balthasar, Christians are called to be more human, and what it means to be a Christian is to be a fully alive human being. As Mendoza underscored, the world of athletics can be an island of humanity, which is why athletes and coaches like him should be interested in this mission. For the future of sports, the hope is simple: “From islands like this, true culture, Christian culture, may spread across the earth.”