All that's standing between BYU and a WAC championship, a trip to the 1989 Holiday Bowl and a 10-2 regular season is a Saturday night in San Diego. This Saturday night, to be specific.
If the Cougars beat San Diego State tonight in Jack Murphy Stadium, they could just stay put if they wanted to and run laps for a month until the Dec. 29 Holiday Bowl in Jack Murphy Stadium, where, as the WAC champion, they would meet, in all probability, Penn State. In their spare time they could find out what a Nittany Lion is.If, on the other hand, the Cougars don't beat San Diego State tonight in Jack Murphy Stadium, they will not be the outright 1989 WAC champion, they will most likely lose their national top 20 ranking, and, in the illogical underworld of the bowls, it appears they will not only be left out of the Holiday Bowl, but out of any bowl whatsoever.
Other than that, it's just another football game tonight.
But do you think for one minute that any of this has BYU Coach LaVell Edwards worried? Do you think he's concerned that everything is at stake for his Cougars, and nothing particularly heavy is on the line for the San Diego State Aztecs, who are 6-4-1 to this point in the season and aren't in the running for any titles, bowl games or ulcers? Do you think it's of any concern to him that as soon as this one is over, the opposing team can eat donuts? Do you think for one minute that the coach who once won 10 straight WAC titles is losing sleep over the precariousness of this situation?
Of course he is.
"If I had my choice, I'd rather be in a game where the other team has as much to lose as we do," Edwards said Friday after checking into the team hotel here near the waterfront. "It puts a whole different perspective on it when everything's on the line.
"They've got good personnel," he added. "They've always had good personnel down here. This game scares me."
As he headed for his room, looking worried, Roger French, the Cougars' offensive coordinator, walked by. He also looked worried.
"I'd rather be in their shoes," he said. Not meaning that he'd rather be out of the conference race, like the Aztecs, but that he'd rather be playing pressure-free.
"They can play loose," said French. "They can go for broke. What have they got to lose?
"In addition to that, they're a good team. They've always been good in the secondary."
The Cougars aren't being paranoid about all this. They don't just think anything wearing pads in San Diego is out to get them, with nothing to lose and everything to gain. They know that it's true.
As SDSU Coach Al Luginbill said, "I'd like to have this game mean more for us. But it's OK if we knock them out of it. I don't have a problem with that."
Throw into this mix the recent bad blood between the schools and the fact that BYU hasn't won in Jack Murphy Stadium since the Holiday Bowl of 1984, when they beat Michigan for the national championship, and the plot thickens.
They don't expect an audience in excess of 30,000 tonight for no reason. Only UCLA - for the second game of the season - has drawn over 30,000 fans this year in San Diego (31,639). The WAC opponents here have drawn an average of less than 17,000. But BYU is a different ticket. After cries of racism against BYU last year, Luginbill, who took over from outgoing Coach Denny Stolz, vowed to smooth relations between SDSU and BYU. But that didn't stop him from leveling charges on the eve of this year's game that BYU employs illegal blocking techniques on defense (see story by Doug Robinson). He just happened to mention his feelings on this topic to a friend of his this week, who just happens to be a sports writer for the San Diego Union.
There, now that relations are smooth . . .
It would appear that Luginbill is attempting to play up his team's underdog status for all it's worth; that he's telling the referees that if his guys are to have any chance at all, they've got to have pity taken on them.
As you might imagine, it's leaving BYU feeling uneasy prior to tipoff. What? Them worry. The whole season is riding on this one. Tonight's game will prove you can either get here from here, or you can't.