40 years ago, BYU won a national title. Can underdogs still win in college football today?

Relive BYU’s most epic season: Get an exclusive look inside BYU Football’s 1984 National Championship win with a special edition commemorative magazine. Learn more at Deseret.com/1984 .

Santa Claus parachuted onto the field before the 1984 Holiday Bowl kicked off, with more than 60,000 fans — then a record at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium — roaring and chanting. “This game has been billed as the national championship game,” an ESPN announcer bellowed, “primarily because of this man: Robbie Bosco.” The camera panned to No. 6 in a royal blue jersey, tossing a ball back and forth with someone outside the frame. Bosco had waited his turn. He’d sat behind legends Jim McMahon and Steve Young, and now, in his first year as BYU’s starting quarterback, he’d positioned himself to become the most immortal of them all.

BYU entered the season unranked but had defeated No. 3 Pittsburgh on the road, on national TV, in its season opener. That rocketed the Cougars to No. 13 in the polls and, far from the view of national cameras, they just kept winning. Sometimes barely. They needed linebacker Kyle Morrell to dive over Hawaii’s entire offensive line for an acrobatic tackle in Week 4 to keep the Rainbow Warriors out of the end zone and claim an 18-13 victory. They sweated through a fourth-quarter homecoming comeback to beat Wyoming by 3. But they found a way. They always found a way. Entering their season finale, the Cougars stood alone as the sport’s only unbeaten team, reaching No. 1 in the polls and staying there until their Holiday Bowl matchup against the unusually unimpressive Michigan Wolverines and their paltry 6-5 record.

Now, in December, in front of a national audience, BYU didn’t do much to quell accusations that they’d had an easy path to the nation’s only unblemished record, with five turnovers leading to a 17-10 deficit early in the fourth quarter. “People are watching this game and saying, ‘Look at what a 6-and-5 team is doing to them,’” one announcer noted. Bosco, who’d briefly left the game with an injury in the first quarter, hobbled around the field with tape swallowing his ankle. Trainers told announcers he had a sprain. And strained knee ligaments. And a cracked rib. Luckily, he was used to it. Bosco estimates he played at least three games that year with a concussion. “The knee wasn’t too bad, but my ankle is just throbbing with pain,” he’d say. “I could hardly move. But this is for the national championship, and I just had to hang in there.”

Bosco fired a completion to Davis Mills. Then another to Adam Haysbert. Star wideout Glen Kozlowski sealed the drive — and the tie — by snatching a Bosco lob from over a defender’s outstretched arm. Chants of “B-Y-U!” echoed. Bosco, still hopping around nearly one-legged, felt something close to divine energy when looking out at his teammates. “Being in that huddle, I could just see it, and sense it in their eyes,” he remembers now. “And in their feeling that we were on the same page. And we can do this.”

That feeling took many years to develop. Norm Chow, the team’s offense play-caller and later the head coach at Hawaii, always believed that “players coach players better than coaches coach players,” and such coaching works best with years of familiarity and maturity. Look at Bosco, waiting his turn behind McMahon and Young. Look at linebacker Marv Allen, who played his first season in Provo in 1978 and was still there, seven years later. Look, most of all, at the team’s brutalizing offensive line: three seniors, one redshirt junior, and center Trevor Matich. Thanks to his church service mission halfway through his football career, he’d snapped to Bosco, Young, McMahon and fellow All-American Marc Wilson — a breathing, sweating, helmet-clashing bridge between Cougars past and present. None of them ever played college football anywhere but BYU. “That’s what made that team,” Chow says. “That camaraderie. The willingness to sacrifice for each other. All the things,” he added, “that I think nowadays are not there.”

Call him old-fashioned. Fine. But he’s right that between 1984 and now, 40 years later, college football has changed — for players and coaches alike. Chow did, after all, stay at BYU for 27 years, and while Georgia’s Kirby Smart makes $13 million per year today, even legendary BYU head coach LaVell Edwards only made $250,000 as late as 1999 — less than $500,000 in today’s dollars. Back then, money didn’t rule yet. But in the grand scheme of college football’s evolution, 1984 is memorable not just because of BYU’s shocking title run, but because of something else that happened — a long way from the field — earlier that same year.

It marked the beginning of the moment we find ourselves in today: one where schools like Georgia and Alabama and Clemson have it all and seem poised to extend their dominance, even in a new era of playoffs beginning this season. The new system promises opportunity for underdogs, with a guarantee that at least one smaller conference school will play in the 12-team format. But given how the college football landscape has changed in the last 40 years, it’s a hard guarantee to believe. As a result, the hope and promise of BYU’s fairy-tale 1984 season — of the upstart underdog beating the big boys — feels almost impossible. Dreamlike. Hazy — like visions of a royal blue No. 6 hobbling, stumbling his way onto the field, with 4:36 left in the game. “They said all year long when Robbie Bosco gets into situations where he has to perform, he has done that,” the announcer told hundreds of thousands of viewers watching at home. “And here it is.”

Those who don’t have money fall behind, and those who fall behind can’t compete for championships, and those who can’t compete for championships are irrelevant.

In March 1984, nine months before BYU’s Holiday Bowl, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments from a group of schools that had sued over television rights. Until then, the NCAA regulated everything from the top down, deciding which games would be on national TV and how the revenue would be distributed. The schools argued the practice violated antitrust law, and the Supreme Court agreed. As a result, future media rights negotiations fell to conferences and independent schools not part of conferences. This decision fundamentally reshaped the direction of college football.

Before 1984, the NCAA tried to distribute TV revenue somewhat evenly among member schools. But after the Supreme Court ruling, the new landscape made it possible — inevitable, even — for conferences to compete for the best time slots and, most importantly, how much they could get for exclusive broadcasting rights. Today, TV deals are the lifeblood of major college football, and the best ones belong to the biggest conferences.

As originally conceived, college football was not supposed to be this way. The influence of commercialism was supposed to be limited by real amateurism — degree-seeking students competing against each other. The idea still had immense appeal; colleges have very personal relationships with students and alumni, so watching your school succeed felt more meaningful than watching your local pro team. And incorporating other original elements, like mascots and student cheerleaders and marching bands and on-campus stadiums, distinguished the college game that much more. But over time, the spirit of real amateurism gave way to the allure of money.

Even before 1984, schools recognized college football could be a cash cow, and they worked to turn it into one. Walter Byers, the godfather of the NCAA, admitted as much in his 1995 memoir. The modern game, he wrote, has been constructed to benefit the institutions, coaches, administrators and other professionals — a farcical, artificial thing that was “amateur” only in that it kept players from being paid. “If their gluttony is to be curbed,” Byers wrote, “and the players justly treated, dramatic changes in the rules are required.” Around that time, we saw the rise of committees charged with combating the influence of runaway commercialism in college sports. But they failed to such a degree that nowadays, few seem to complain about the loss of the amateur ideal.

It was never easy for underdogs to succeed in the old landscape. Alabama and Ohio State always had more money to spend on football than BYU. “But the gap wasn’t, like, 100 times, an order of magnitude, that it is now,” says Matt Brown, a national college football reporter who writes the Extra Points newsletter. It started with lucrative TV deals (the SEC’s deal with Disney is worth $3 billion), and also includes a deluge of sponsorships and partnerships. Big Ten schools like Ohio State and Michigan, or Southeastern Conference programs such as Georgia and Alabama, court attention and viewers in prime-time Saturday time slots, giving TV networks and other brands a powerful, valuable advertising base, which schools and conferences have leveraged for the enrichment of their coaches, support staffs and facilities. Name, image and likeness deals, or NILs, allow boosters to pay students directly. The transfer portal allows players to move between schools with few limitations, making it harder to build the sort of camaraderie the 1984 BYU team had. And as the gap grows, it zaps the hope that fueled BYU’s run to the title.

In theory, everyone has a chance under the new playoff system. Any underdog can earn the opportunity to prove themselves on the field. But can they? In July, I visited Las Vegas to find out. With the Big 12 and Mountain West conferences both hosting meetings at the same time, I wanted to see whether they’re moving into the future with genuine hope — or fake enthusiasm. I wanted to understand how the underdogs of today are approaching the expanded playoffs and all the other money-fueled changes gripping college football. Most importantly, I wanted to understand what these changes mean for the future of teams like 1984 BYU.

I wanted to know whether college football today, dominated by wealthy conferences and wealthy boosters and wealthy coaches and administrators and yes, as of recently, a few wealthy student players, is still open to that unexpected magic. Have we reached a point where the riches of college football are good for everyone — or has something essential been lost along the way?

The influence of commercialism was supposed to be limited by real amateurism — degree-seeking students competing against each other.

The Circa Resort and Casino sprouts from the heart of Fremont Street, a new icon in old Las Vegas. It includes the “largest sportsbook in the world” — three stories of betting lines and TV screens and reclining chairs. An escalator away, still within hearing distance of fans cheering their gains and cussing their losses, Mountain West Commissioner Gloria Nevarez steps to a microphone placed in front of an ad for Old Trapper Beef Jerky before a hundred or so reporters. “We’ve increased revenue and increased our national media exposure,” she says. She touts growth in viewership and attendance. But her remarks are unmistakably tinged with something she touches on only later: The Mountain West Conference, former home of BYU and these days home to Colorado State, Wyoming, Hawaii and nine other Western schools, exists at a crossroads.

Nevarez’s speech, as a result, is peppered with near-apocalyptic language dressed up by optimistic spin. One of the signature achievements of the last year, she notes, was hiring an expert in “threat casting.” Basically, his job is to model potential changes in college sports to ensure the conference is prepared to endure. “He’s providing the signals and wayfinders so that we have early detection for the more dire outcomes,” she explains. “This is how we plan to survive and thrive in the myriad of potential outcomes that are coming our way.” Dire. Survive. That’s serious language. It’s also not surprising. The Mountain West (home to Utah State and Boise State) and the other four smaller conferences within Division I-FBS college football are all in the same league as the major conferences, and they compete for the same playoff spots, but financially speaking, they’re way behind. And that puts their existence at risk.

One reporter asks Nevarez whether she has looked into selling the conference’s naming rights — meaning whether the Mountain West Conference could soon be called the “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Conference,” or the “Dr. Pepper Mountain West Conference.” The answer is almost certainly yes. “That’s a huge priority,” Nevarez says. Such a change could provide a substantial revenue boost to a league in desperate need of one — a fact that Nevarez notes hasn’t always been the case. “When I started in this business about 30 years ago, governance and championships were the tasks of the leagues,” she says during the Q&A. “Today, it’s media rights and sponsorships.” Or, put more bluntly, finding new ways to make more money. Those that don’t have money fall behind, and those that fall behind can’t compete for championships and those that can’t compete for championships are irrelevant. So unless the Mountain West Conference wishes to become irrelevant, money must be pursued relentlessly.

The conference does, however, offer one refutation to this paradigm, in the form of one particular school. Boise State is known for its thrilling, come-from-behind, Statue-of-Liberty handoff to win the 2007 Fiesta Bowl over Oklahoma. Back then, the Broncos were part of the Western Athletic Conference — the same conference that produced 1984 BYU. That team would have been in a 12-team playoff had such a thing existed back then, and the Broncos remain a true underdog today. “I think there’s a lot of times that our football team is looked down upon,” says senior kicker Jonah Dalmas, “and we use that to motivate us.” Senior defensive end Ahmed Hassanein explains it in a somewhat contradictory way that perfectly illustrates Boise State’s place in modern college football: The Broncos are both overlooked and have a constant target on their backs. Because of their history, every team in the Mountain West wants to beat them. But because they’re in the Mountain West, many national powers don’t take them seriously. “We’re looked on as underdogs to a certain point,” Dalmas says, “but we’re also looked at as a college football team that wins a lot of games.”

For that reason, Dalmas and Hassanein believe the Broncos could find success in the 12-team playoff. Not just making it in, but going all the way. “I think every team, arguably, could say that they’re excited,” Dalmas says. “But I think Boise State University definitely has a big opportunity. … I think we could definitely make it to that 12-team playoff — and be successful.”

The top conferences are still going to win almost every year, without question. But that “almost” is important, because now the Broncos, or others like them, are guaranteed to be in it. If they win, they’ll get their shot to prove themselves. Could they squeak through once every 20, 30, 40 years? “Why not?” Hassanein says. “Why not just make it happen and see where it goes?” Nevarez concurs in her remarks. “I think we’re positioned to do that now,” she says. Never mind that the best Mountain West team last year (UNLV) finished 9-5 and unranked. Or that the Southeastern Conference made 11 times more in revenue. Still, the new playoff, they say, means hope for underdogs.

And they’re not the only ones who think so.

Across town at Allegiant Stadium, home of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, the Big 12 has also partnered with Old Trapper beef jerky. But here, instead of a logo no larger than a dinner plate, Old Trapper’s mountaineer mascot stares down at the 500 reporters in attendance from a 6,000-foot video board. This isn’t so much a meeting as a production; there’s a woman in a headset pacing constantly around the stage, making tweaks to lighting and volume. Between press conferences, musical interludes blare from speakers two stories tall. BYU mascot Cosmo accompanies coach Kalani Sitake to the podium, along with a pair of cheerleaders, backed by the Cougar Song of BYU, aka “Rise and Shout.” All the coaches get similar treatment. The Big 12 obviously has more money than the Mountain West — very visibly so. But, less obviously, it also has a lot less than its peers in the Big Ten and the SEC.

Certainly the teams here are not overlooked like Boise State and other smaller programs. But the Big Ten and the SEC both made well over $800 million in revenue last year (a figure that will go up substantially this year when the SEC’s new media rights deal begins), while the Big 12 barely broke $500 million. It’s still way more than the Mountain West, which didn’t sniff $100 million — but is it enough?

Sonny Dykes brings an interesting perspective to the question. Two years ago, in his first season as head coach of Texas Christian University, he led his team to the College Football Playoff and upset Michigan in the first round. Then, in the national championship game, his team lost to Georgia — by 58 points. So what does it take to succeed not just once, but three or four times? He isn’t entirely sure. “It’s a grinder,” he says. Before, he’d scoff at schools like Georgia and Michigan, with their absurd number of assistant coaches and support staff. But after experiencing the playoffs firsthand, he understood. “In those settings,” he explains, “there’s just so much that needs to be done.” And more money means more resources to do it.

He’s still bullish on the conference’s overall chances. “I think the winner of the Big 12, year in and year out, is gonna have a chance to make a run” at a national championship, he explains. “Just look at two years ago — it happened. And I think the league is better positioned now to make it happen than it was then.” A Big 12 team had won a game against the Big Ten — then got stomped by the SEC. Why would the result be any different now?

Commissioner Brett Yormark chose his words very carefully when answering that question. The Big 12, he explained, will have the “deepest conference in America.” Meaning not the best, but the conference with the most parity. In the last two seasons, it’s added BYU, UCF, Cincinnati, Houston, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and Arizona State — a hefty infusion for a conference in need of one. But given that flagship programs in Texas and Oklahoma just fled the Big 12 for the SEC, does the conference have enough contenders to unseat its top-heavy rivals? Or at least some way to create them?

Yormark, like his counterpart in the Mountain West, believes the answer is yes — if he can only find enough money to make it so. He began his yearly address by touting recent partnerships with MGM, Totino’s pizza, ESPN, Fox, EA Sports and Microsoft. Later, he added Sports Illustrated and Allstate. And he’s hoping to place sponsorship patches on Big 12 referees soon. “We are exploring all options,” he emphasized, including a naming rights deal and a new stream of funding through private equity.

Private equity is a touchy subject in college sports given its tendency to maximize returns at any cost, but in Yormark’s view, its emergence is inevitable. “Given where we are as an industry, having a capital resource as a partner makes a ton of sense,” he explained. “That’s really how you conduct good business.” Exploring how it would work, therefore, is paramount, because eventually they’ll have no choice. “It’s going to be critically important,” he said about partnering with private equity. “So … we’re not compromising the long-term future of the conference.”

The animating tension at the Big 12 meeting was less existential than the Mountain West’s, but still plenty pressing. At stake was relevance, and how to achieve it without sacrificing everything important along the way. The Big 12 championship game, for example, had traditionally showcased school marching bands, but that wasn’t going to cut it in the new world of college football. So, the conference compromised: It hired hip-hop superstar Nelly to headline the show, but also incorporated the bands in the choreography. This is the sort of future Yormark envisions. “We can’t do away with the legacy and the heritage of where we’ve come from,” he said. “But we have to modernize. We have to contemporize.” And as long as it keeps doing that, the thinking goes, the conference should be able to compete in the 12-team playoff, at least occasionally.

Not everyone was on board. Matthew Sign, chief operating officer of the National Football Foundation, made a brief presentation focused, mainly, on subjects having little to do with any of this. But at one point, he mentioned that he wanted to promote athletes getting their college degrees, with a little barb about how that may surprise some of the folks in attendance. “We’re not anti-portal. We are not anti-NIL,” he told me later. “But we are for getting your college degree, especially if someone else is paying for it.” And in his opinion, the changes sweeping college football have obscured that mission — that singular thing that is supposed to differentiate it from the NFL. Sign longed for simpler times. Times that, these days, feel like a bygone from a previous century.

Over time, the spirit of real amateurism gave way to the allure of untapped business potential.

Bosco scrambles for 10 yards to open BYU’s final drive of the 1984 Holiday Bowl. He limps forward and, a few plays later, he hobbles up in the pocket and drops a looping pass to his halfback. “The guts of this young man (are) just unbelievable,” one announcer says. “One of the most courageous young men I have seen,” says the other. He needs help getting up after taking yet another hit, but with about a minute left, he steps up, evades defenders one last time, and hits Kelly Smith to claim the lead. An interception from Allen seals the victory, and the Cougars carry coach Edwards off the field. Twelve days later, The Associated Press, UPI Coaches Poll, and others declare BYU the 1984 national champion.

Today’s BYU is a long way from recapturing that glory; a championship for the Cougars would still be a seismic upset. “Traditionally, we are kind of an underdog,” says senior defensive end Tyler Batty. “And we’re OK with that.” It gives them identity. It gives them hope. And in their view, there’s never been a more hopeful time for BYU football. “I love it,” says coach Sitake. “The map of the road to the playoffs is pretty simple. And it’s never been simple for us.” Today’s BYU is arguably much better situated to win it all than 1984′s team, although that team was a culmination of many years’ worth of success and innovation. “I think we need to put it together a little more consistently, like they did,” says offensive lineman Connor Pay. “But I have no doubt.”

That’s one optimistic way to look at the new playoffs. Chow, the 1984 play-caller, offers a different view. “It’s too hard,” he says. “I don’t think the Boise States will ever happen again.” The budget discrepancies; the TV money; the transfer portal and NIL — all of it is just too much for smaller schools to overcome. “I don’t think anybody,” he says of 1984 BYU, “will ever be able to do what that team did.” Brown, the longtime college football reporter, believes it would take a very special set of circumstances: an unusually high concentration of older players with extensive experience in one system; a few NFL-caliber players on defense and at skill positions on offense; and a quarterback who is good enough to get Heisman votes.

Bosco, who works in BYU’s athletic department, still clings to that possibility. The team got lucky in 1984; BYU and today’s underdogs could still get lucky today. He knows it’s unlikely. “You’ve got to kind of find that niche that makes your team go each year,” he says. “With all these things” — the whirlwind of cash that has remade the sport since his game-winning touchdown pass — “I think it gets more and more difficult. (But) we’re just a team that’s not gonna give up.”

Bronco Mendenhall, who spent 11 years as the head coach at BYU and is now entering his first season at New Mexico, a Mountain West program, is even more hopeful. Underdogs could flourish in the era ahead. Or, at least, he believes they can — and that matters more than whether it’s true. “Is it possible? It has to be possible,” he says. “I have to believe it’s possible. I do believe it’s possible. And I think it’d be great for college football for it to be demonstrated that it is possible.”

This story appears in the September 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine . Learn more about how to subscribe .