So, most everyone here has taken the MSF Basic Rider Course. Here in Illinois, the state subsidizes the cost of our course, and this year they are trying an experiment where some of the classes are learning based on the Team Oregon Basic Rider Training, a competitor to the MSF course. I happen to be in one of the experimental classes at the moment, and it made me start thinking, "why switch from the BRC?"

So, I started looking around and ran into a Motorcycle Consumer News article by David Hough (author of Proficient Motorcycling) which was rather critical of the MSF. That article is on these two pages-
http://www.mcnews.com/mcn/proficient_motor/FussAboutridertr1.pdf
http://www.mcnews.com/mcn/proficient_motor/FussAboutridertr2.pdf

I also found a blog with 3 pages about it.
http://www.oldguy.us/blog/team-oregon-vs-msf.html

All of this comes as a bit of a surprise to me- thinking of the MSF as the bad guy goes against everything people have told me. I'd like to compare the two, my instructors seem very competent so I'll ask them about it tomorrow. Has anyone else heard about this?

WOW.  You're right.  Thinking of the MSF as the bad guy is really weird

So at the end today I asked my instructor about it. He's a fairly old guy who has been riding and teaching for a long time. In his words "The MSF is trying to take over all of motorcycling", which is basically what David Hough was saying in his articles. According to him, the MSF had been screwing with Illinois motorcycle funding and the people at the DOT had finally gotten pissed enough to try out the Team Oregon program. He said that most of the Illinois instructors were opposed to what the MSF was doing, and expected the BRT to become the standard in Illinois. He said they also preferred it because the program gave the state more latitude in what it teaches. Since I haven't taken an MSF course I can't compare the two, but I'll try to find someone's writeup of one online. I was pretty happy with the curriculum though.