The unlikeliest of champions

Editor’s note: First in an occasional series exploring BYU’s 1984 national football championship.

In the beginning, there was no more of a grand scheme to become the top-ranked team in America than there was to light a match to the way national champions had been decided for more than a century.

Truth was, legendary and revolutionary weren’t among the adjectives used to describe expectations for the 1984 BYU football team. The Cougars would probably win the Western Athletic Conference, like they always did, and play some semi-good team in the Holiday Bowl, also like they always did. But national contenders? Maybe they were riding an 11-game winning streak from the previous season, but gone from that team were quarterback Steve Young, tight end Gordon Hudson and linebacker Todd Shell, each one a first-round draft choice, as well as Young’s top two wide receivers. Robbie Bosco, BYU’s new starting quarterback — the heir apparent — had thrown a grand total of 28 passes in a career that so far amounted to watching Steve Young become Steve Young. When the AP released its preseason top 20, BYU was nowhere to be found.

Then, in the first live broadcast of a regular-season college football game ever aired on ESPN, the Cougars opened the season by defeating No. 3-ranked Pitt, 20-14, at Pitt Stadium.

It was only then, in the afterglow of an improbable win with the entire country watching, that players started remembering something one of their captains had said in a preseason team meeting.

Starting offensive guard Craig Garrick was a thinker, a plotter, an observer of what today would be called analytics. He’d looked at the schedule after the Pittsburgh game: Baylor and Tulsa at Cougar Stadium in Provo, then the usual WAC suspects, followed by the annual battle for the Old Wagon Wheel against Utah State to close out the season. Run the table and we could be national champions, he told his teammates, and the table could be run.

Vai Sikahema, one of many who would rise up to star for that anointed team, remembers the scene vividly.

“It was a Friday night cheeseburger session just before the Pitt game,” says Sikahema. “After the coaches left it was a players-only meeting, led by the captains. Anybody could get up and say something — like ‘I love you guys,’ ‘I’m going to give everything I can tomorrow,’ that kind of thing — and Craig Garrick, one of the captains, gets up and says, ‘Men, I don’t know how many of you have thought about this, but if we win tomorrow our path is clear for the national championship. I’ve looked at our schedule and we can win all our games, and if we do that they’ll have to consider us for national champions.’

“It sent chills up and down my spine. Craig wasn’t someone prone to hubris and popping off. Craig was very measured, very methodical. Everyone respected him. I went home and jotted it down in my journal: ‘Craig Garrick uttered two words tonight that have never been mentioned at BYU: national champions.’”

The next week, BYU dismantled Baylor 47-13, followed the next Saturday by a 38-15 win over Tulsa (aided by Sikahema’s 89-yard punt return touchdown). Then came a scary 18-13 road win at Hawaii preserved when safety Kyle Morrell executed a perfectly timed front flip over the line of scrimmage, hurdling the nose guard and center to pull the quarterback backward by his jersey and stop what appeared to be a sure Hawaii touchdown from the half-inch line.

“One of the greatest individual football plays I have ever seen, especially in the importance of it in the trajectory of the season,” said Trevor Matich, the future NFL lineman and ESPN commentator who was BYU’s starting center that day.

Sikahema calls Morrell’s vault ( it’s preserved forever on YouTube ) “the most significant play in BYU history — in any sport.”

The wins, some of them landslides, some not, continued to pile up, as did the Cougars’ national ranking: No. 8 in the AP poll after Hawaii, No. 7 after Wyoming, No. 5 after Air Force, No. 4 after UTEP, No. 3 after San Diego State. None of the league foes rolled over. “They circled the game against us every year,” said Bosco. “Now (with BYU’s increasingly high national ranking) they were super pumped.”

Then came a 24-14 win in Salt Lake City against a University of Utah team that would have sold its birthright to halt the Cougars’ surge, and on Nov. 24, for the first time in its history, with an 11-0 record and the nation’s longest unbeaten streak at 22 games through two seasons, BYU was ranked No. 1 in the country. A 38-13 Cougar Stadium win the following week over 1-10 Utah State ensured that the top spot would reside in Provo through the end of the regular season.

It helped immensely that no one else stayed unbeaten. If BYU was a team of destiny, it was also one of good fortune. Auburn, Miami, Nebraska, Texas and Washington all held down the top spot in the polls at various times that season before losing and ceding ground. Going into BYU’s game at Utah, Nebraska and South Carolina were ranked one-two. When both lost — Nebraska to Oklahoma and South Carolina to an unranked Navy team — the way to the summit was cleared for undefeated BYU.

This is what Garrick was talking about. In the system that existed, early placement in the national polls was key; after that, the way to consistently rise in the polls was to keep winning. It was a way — really the only way — for a less-heralded Division I program to climb to the top. Other schools, the Notre Dames, the Nebraskas, the Alabamas, could lose a game and not be out of the running. Not so for the Brigham Youngs. Stay perfect and the Cougars had a chance. That was the formula. It was the loophole less traveled.

Win the poll, win the title

For 114 years, ever since Rutgers and Princeton played the first college football game in 1869, the national champion had been decided by somebody’s opinion. For the first 67 years, the “We’re No. 1″ question was often answered by newspapers taking it upon themselves to declare the “mythical” national champion — and usually one within its circulation area.

That changed in 1936 when The Associated Press wire service started its weekly national poll, as voted on by 60 sportswriters from around the country. In 1950, the AP’s main competitor, United Press International, began its own weekly poll, as voted on by a board of college coaches. The AP writers poll and the UPI coaches poll didn’t always agree. Crowning separate champions was not unusual. But at the end of the 1984 regular season, the coaches and writers were on the same page. BYU, the only major college program in America without a loss, was No. 1 in both polls.

Within the college football establishment, it was not a popular decision. The polls, despite their subjective nature that guaranteed controversy and debate, had nevertheless long been a bastion of the establishment. Programs without pedigrees did not come out on top. Ever. In 47 years of the AP poll, only 23 schools had won the mythical title, and just seven of those — Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio State, USC, Texas and Nebraska — accounted for 27 of them. The national championship club was a small club.

In 1983, there had been a slight chink in the armor when Miami of Florida, never a blue blood but at least a program on the rise in the South where football was king, was voted No. 1. But now, a university from the Rocky Mountains that played in something called the Western Athletic Conference and had this unconventional habit of passing the football two-thirds of the time had somehow climbed into the top perch. In all its history, BYU had made its way into a regular season top-10 ranking only a dozen times (four times in 1979, twice in 1981 and six times in 1983) and only once had it finished inside the top 10 in the final poll (in 1983 at No. 7).

The purists were apoplectic. How could this be? Teams out West not named USC didn’t win national championships. No one articulated this sentiment better, or more loudly, than Bryant Gumbel, a former sportscaster NBC paid $4 million to become host of the “Today” show. Asked Gumbel from his platform on national TV: “How can you rank BYU No. 1? Who’d they play, Bo Diddley Tech?”

ABC followed up with a viewers poll the network conducted during its national telecast of the Florida-Florida State game at the end of the regular season. The poll had a single question: Should BYU be No. 1? Out of nearly 400,000 votes cast, there were 24,746 more “no” votes than “yes” votes. “We ask (BYU fans) to greet the result with humor,” studio host Jim Lampley said in announcing the results. But no one was laughing in Provo.

The delay between the regular season and the bowl season only heated up the debate.

And that was the other thing. The bowl system. It was just as convoluted as the polling system — bound to generate controversy and discord. Teams didn’t go to bowl games according to their ranking; they went because of either conference affiliations or a program’s pedigree. Entrance into the big four New Year’s Day bowls — Rose, Orange, Cotton and Sugar — was as restrictive as getting a seat in the royal box at Wimbledon. What that meant in 1984 is that neither of the teams behind BYU in the polls, 9-1-1 Oklahoma and 10-1 Washington, were about to play for $500,000 in the Holiday Bowl, which was BYU’s only option. Instead of choosing to take a shot at No. 1 on the playing field, the Sooners and Huskies chose instead to play each other in the Orange Bowl for a $2 million payout.

During the lull between the regular season and bowl season, much was made about BYU’s lackluster regular-season schedule (their “Bo Diddley” opponents went a combined 55-79-3 and none finished in the top 20), about the Cougars playing a so-so 6-5 Michigan team in the Holiday Bowl, and about the looming Oklahoma-Washington showdown between two collegiate heavyweights.

No one joined the chorus more enthusiastically than Barry Switzer, coach of the No. 2-ranked Oklahoma Sooners. Of the Cougars he said, “BYU beat its schedule, but it didn’t beat the world.” Then he added, “They play in the worst conference in the country” — managing to insult not only BYU but the entire Intermountain West.

Looking back 40 years later, the 86-year-old Switzer says he only did what needed to be done.

“I really beat that drum hard about BYU’s weak league and the fact they were playing a team (in the Holiday Bowl) that won six games,” he says. “I had to be as derogatory as I could be because it was in our best interest.”

On the other hand, there were those who latched onto the BYU Cinderella angle.

Wrote Tony Kornheiser in The Washington Post. “People such as Switzer keep asking, ‘Who did BYU beat?’ Hey, who beat BYU?”

Larry Guest in the Orlando Sentinel wrote: “It’s not BYU’s fault that all the bigwig teams took the money and ran to bigger bowls, where they called press conferences to brag about how they’d bloody BYU’s noses if only they could get at ‘em.”

The stage thus set, BYU made it interesting by struggling in the Holiday Bowl, held in San Diego four days before Christmas, against the Bo Schembechler-coached Michigan team (the Wolverines were ranked as high as No. 3 early in the season but lost their quarterback, a promising sophomore named Jim Harbaugh, to a broken arm in the fourth game). On a foggy night in San Diego, the BYU defense overcame an avalanche of Cougar turnovers until, in the final minutes of the final quarter, quarterback Robbie Bosco engineered the game-winning touchdown on a badly injured leg in what coach LaVell Edwards, not one for hyperbole, called “one of the gutsiest performances in the history of anything.”

The door was open for a close final vote if No. 2 Oklahoma defeated Washington 11 days later in the Orange Bowl. But it did not. In a seeming final indicator that serendipity was riding shotgun all season long with the Cougars, Oklahoma shot itself in the foot with turnovers, highlighted, or lowlighted, by an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty against the Sooner Schooner, OU’s horse-drawn wagon that came on the field too early to celebrate a third-quarter field goal and got stuck in the mud. The Sooners lost 28-17. After the game, Switzer won the sour grapes trophy when he said Washington should be No. 1, but anyone could see his heart wasn’t in it. “After we screwed it all up by not playing worth a darn I didn’t care anymore,” he says. The national championship drama was over.

In the final polls released on Jan. 2, 1985, teletype machines raced the news to media outlets across the land: BYU was No. 1.

The lightning that won’t strike again

College football didn’t immediately begin to change its way of crowning a national champion after the 1984 season, but there’s no question BYU’s coming from nowhere to take advantage of the undefeated loophole helped push the wave forward.

“The bowls had such power back then. It took a long time to turn that battleship around,” says Bill Hancock, the recently retired executive director of the College Football Playoff. “BYU was an outlier, certainly, but it was also a really good program in ‘84, so there wasn’t an immediate ‘We gotta fix this’ kind of reaction. What BYU did added another straw on the camel’s back against voting rather than deciding on the field.”

Six years later, arguing over back-to-back split national champions in 1990 and 1991 (Colorado and Miami prevailed in the AP poll, respectively, while Georgia Tech and Washington topped the UPI poll) managed to get enough people mad that the tide began to turn. For the 1992 season, a hybrid poll-bowl approach that tried to please everyone and pleased almost no one called the Bowl Coalition was implemented. That was refined in 1998 into the Bowl Championship Series, which wasn’t much better, until finally, in 2014, the College Football Playoff was formed, using a ranking system to stage four-team national championship tournaments. The format expanded to 12 teams beginning with the 2024 season.

It means the field is level, or at least as level as it will probably ever be in college football, meaning there will be no repeat of 1984 for the BYU Cougars, or anyone else. Lightning like that will never strike again. BYU helped make certain of that.

But it struck once, and ask anyone who was there when Craig Garrick gave his speech, when No. 3 Pitt fell, when Kyle Morrell hurdled the line at Hawaii, when every team in the WAC circled the BYU game and played like it was their national championship game, when Robbie Bosco played on one leg in the Holiday Bowl, when an entire team found the loophole in the system and ran right through it, and you’ll find no one who will argue that it wasn’t some ride. Or that it was easy. Or that there was any room for error. Who did BYU beat in ‘84? Everybody.