Schools started realizing if they’re Mormon give them a couple more pluses, that it’s a positive rather than a negative. There’s a lot more schools now who look to LDS kids, who want them. – Tom Holmoe
PROVO — He has enough Super Bowl rings for every finger on his left hand. He went to a bowl game every season he played at BYU, including the fabled Miracle Bowl of 1980. In 11 years in college and the NFL he never came close to playing on a losing team. LaVell Edwards and Bill Walsh were his coaching mentors. He has Jerry Rice, Roger Craig, Ronnie Lott, Steve Young and a bunch of other San Francisco 49er teammates on speed dial.
You might be able to find football pedigrees more impressive than Tom Holmoe’s, but you won’t find many.
And yet, he hides it well.
The BYU athletic director of the past 10 years has all the swagger of a monk in training. Unlike his fiery game-day attitude back when he was a defensive back, irritating receivers in every way possible, he’s the picture of gentility. He speaks softly. He wears sweaters. He declines to tell people he’s right and they’re wrong.
All of which has served him well, considering he’s been the one maneuvering BYU athletics through the most tumultuous, uncertain times in its history. The football team is an orphan, all other teams play in the not-exactly-prime-time West Coast Conference, and, oh by the way, the LDS Church has phased out NCAA sports at its other colleges in Idaho and Hawaii.
No one who knows him in Provo is surprised at Holmoe the diplomat. He’s been that way ever since he left home in Los Angeles in 1978 and enrolled at BYU. He was like every other 18-year-old freshman — other than he wasn’t a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to which 98 percent of the student body belongs. Didn’t matter. Even when it got a little rough that first year as he adjusted to the Utah County culture, discovered what “Utah winter” means, and was redshirted by the football team, he did not panic or waver.
Five years later, he graduated in zoology, flanked by his wife, Lori, who he’d first spied when she was cheerleading at BYU basketball games, and who once delivered this memorable quote: “My mom sent me to BYU to meet a nice Mormon boy, and I came home with the only Lutheran in the whole school.”
He might have pursued a career in medicine after graduation, if not for the San Francisco 49ers drafting him in the fourth round.
After playing on BYU teams that went 42-8 and won four conference championships, it only got better in the pros. Holmoe played on 49er teams that won Super Bowls in 1984, 1988 and 1989. Prior to his third Super Bowl, on Feb. 3, 1988, he was baptized into the LDS Church. After his third one he retired from the NFL and returned to BYU, where he was a graduate assistant coach for two seasons.
Bill Walsh, Holmoe’s old 49ers coach, lured him to his staff at Stanford for two seasons. That was followed by a return to the NFL on George Seifert’s San Francisco staff for another two seasons, resulting in yet another Super Bowl ring in 1994. He then joined Steve Mariucci’s staff at the University of California-Berkeley for the 1996 season.
Between 1979 and 1996, Holmoe played or coached on teams that qualified for a bowl game or the NFL playoffs every year. No one was surprised when California named him to replace Mariucci in 1997, even if he was just 37.
For the first time in his sporting life, genuine adversity entered the picture. In five years as Cal’s head coach he never had a winning record. After going 1-10 in 2001 he resigned before they could fire him.
And that’s what got Tom Holmoe back to BYU — when he returned to work in athletic administration. Three years later, in 2005, he was named athletic director to replace Val Hale.
In a free-flowing conversation, the veteran A.D. sat down with the Deseret News to talk about his perceptions on the past, present and future of BYU athletics.
DN: Thank you for taking the time today. To what do you credit all you’ve seen and done?
TH: I think anything I’ve accomplished can be attributed to being in the right place at the right time and being prepared. Chad Lewis has a book called “Surround Yourself with Greatness,” and that’s something I really believe in. I think I was able to do that. I mean I didn’t do it all on purpose. I got drafted by the 49ers. That just happened. I would be crazy to think of all those teams I played on that I was the factor. But I think I made some right choices and I’ve been blessed to be around really, really good people.
DN: How much did the five years as head coach at California shape you as a person and an administrator?
TH: The experience at Cal was very, very valuable. It’s helped me many times over in my position here at BYU. I think I was a really good position coach but I wasn’t a good head coach. I failed at it. One of the reasons I failed is because I had never been on teams that lost. I wasn’t prepared to deal with that. I would love to have been successful. I loved what Cal represented and the people there were awesome. I just got outmatched and outwitted. John Robinson, Bruce Snyder, Dennis Erickson, Dick Tomey, Tyrone Willingham, they were Pac-10 coaches at that time. They looked at me and thought, who’s this young punk? If I had to do it over again I’d do it differently but I’d still take the job. In hindsight you learn so much.
DN: The main lesson you learned?
TH: I wasn’t myself. That was the problem. I wanted to be a combination of Bill Walsh and LaVell Edwards. I wanted to take Bill’s football acumen and I wanted to take LaVell’s personal touch and put it together and it was going to be a sure bet. But I didn’t have any Tom Holmoe in it. You can take the best practices from others but you have to put your touch on it, and a lot of your touch on it. I had to learn that.
DN: Has that helped in hiring and working with coaches as athletic director?
TH: Oh my goodness (yes). It’s put me in a position where I can say, look, I’m not Mr. Know It All, but I’ve been down some roads that I don’t want you to go down and I can give you some counsel that will help you make a decision that’s best for you.
DN: You chose to enroll at BYU although you were not a member of the LDS Church. How much has that helped you in dealing with non-member recruits?
TH: That’s one of my favorite things to do. It’s easy for me to put myself in their shoes. We go after LDS kids first. It’s a better fit. It’s not always a great fit to bring a non-LDS kid into this environment. Initially it wasn’t for me. My freshman year I kind of struggled with some of the social things. But it became a good fit for me and it can be a good fit for others. I can tell them honestly that you can have great athletics, great academics and a great social scene here.
DN: You had scholarship offers from so-called football schools as well as schools with good academic reputations. Why did BYU win out?
TH: I was impressed by the recruiters, LaVell, Dick Felt and Fred Whittingham. They did a great job. And I had a few LDS friends in high school and when they found out I was interested in BYU they started recruiting me too. In the end I chose BYU because I thought it was the best balance between academics and athletics. I was a good student and ended up with good grades and got a degree. In hindsight it was exactly what I wanted and what I needed.
DN: You also found your wife at BYU. How did that happen? Who stalked who?
TH: (Laughs). I stalked her, initially, but once we hooked up she didn’t leave. The way it really went down was back in the olden days of the Marriott Center they had that pit where the floor was elevated above the seats. That’s where the recruits sat. Norm Chow was the recruiting coach and he wanted me to be a host. I said I’d only do it if I could sit in the good seats in the pit, right next to the cheerleaders. I know he knew I had my eye on that girl and so that’s kinda how I’d see her and wave. We went on our first date when I was driving back to BYU from L.A. in 1981 for winter semester. BYU was playing basketball in Las Vegas and one of my best buddies was playing for UNLV. She cheered at that game. My friend had a bad game and didn’t feel like going out after. So I tracked her down and said, hey, my friend didn’t want to go out, can you go out? So that was our first date.
DN: With all you have to deal with — missionaries, the honor code, no play on Sunday, tough admission standards, no league for football, a rather non-descript, no-football conference for everything else — do you have the toughest A.D. job in America?
TH: I didn’t really think that, believe it or not. It’s all relative. I know my peers at other schools have their own difficulties and challenges. I’d say there are many others who think they have one of the hardest jobs right now. For me at BYU, I understand this place and I know what we’re trying to do. People might look at BYU and say, why do they send kids on missions, why do they have an honor code, why do they not play on Sunday? But that’s who we are, that’s what we thrive on, that’s why people come here. The closest thing I can say is that the mission of our athletic department is aligned with the mission of our school and that makes it easy to keep what matters in focus.
The West Coast Conference is a really good fit for most of our teams. It’s very competitive and the athletic departments are aligned with the missions of their schools. We do belong there, outside of football.
DN: Was going independent in football five years ago a good decision?
TH: I think it was. We went independent not saying we were going to do this for a set number of years. We went in saying this will give us the exposure and access we need. I believe it’s helped us to do that in many ways. We knew there would be pros and cons. Sometimes you don’t get exactly what you want exactly when you want it. We’re striving to put our players in the best possible games, and if it means independence for football, scheduling the way we do, it’s because the goal is to play at the highest level of every sport.
DN: What’s the best-case scenario for BYU football in the future?
TH: I don’t hide this. I would like to see our football team play in a Power 5 conference.
DN: Which one?
TH: I’ll say there are five conferences, pick one.
DN: Is there one that’s more of a possibility than the others?
TH: No. Here’s one of the things I think is important. We’re in continual conversations with people that are in these conferences. We’re friends, we’re associates, we know each other. It’s not in our best interest to throw BYU seeking admission on their doorstep every week. They shouldn’t have to answer that question all the time. What I try to tell some of our fans who are so distressed is we have to focus on what we have and that we have something really good to offer.
DN: Care to quote odds on your chances?
TH: You’d have to ask MGM.
DN: Is college football broke?
TH: I think there are aspects of it that are cracked. It’s kind of a perfect storm right now with legal issues you never dreamed of. It makes it very difficult to look into the future. There’s so much money involved, that’s really the root of it. I don’t know that you could ever spin it back to where it was. I think we’re at the point of no return as far as getting to the place where everybody’s happy. I do think the game is in good hands. It’s a great season and there’s some great football being played, great races in the conferences. That part of it is not broken. But trying to make sure everybody’s happy, you can’t do that.
DN: Why don’t some of the top LDS athletes come to BYU?
TH: I have a couple of answers to that question. I think it used to be that schools and coaches were afraid of Mormon kids. They didn’t know how to deal with missions, or they didn’t know how to deal with Mormons. But that changed. Schools started realizing if they’re Mormon give them a couple more pluses, that it’s a positive rather than a negative. There’s a lot more schools now who look to LDS kids, who want them. So that’s one reason. I think another reason is there’s a lot more LDS athletes now and they all can’t come to BYU, so you have to make choices. We’ll miss on some kids that end up doing well, and some LDS kids simply choose other schools.
DN: Any fears that the LDS Church might cancel intercollegiate athletics at BYU, as has happened at BYU-Idaho and BYU-Hawaii?
TH: No. The reason I say that is because on those other campuses, athletics played a totally different role in the university. The role was smaller. We get compared because we fall under the same sponsoring institution, but the role of BYU athletics, and the opportunity athletics has at BYU in fulfilling the mission of the Church and the school, is way more significant than it was at those sister schools. We are a Church institution, but I don’t see that on the horizon.
DN: Please comment about the school’s decision to discipline athletes privately rather than publicly.
TH: I’m grateful that we had some really good conversations a couple of years back, when things got really public. Brandon Davies was the firestorm. That was rough on him, having to play out your repentance to the world. The way he handled it was phenomenal. Brandon Davies is one of my favorite student-athletes we’ve ever had. But we realized that wasn’t the way to go about it, and some positive changes came out of that. There were a lot of people in the media who said, this is ridiculous, you guys are blasting these kids in public. But then when we changed the policy, and don’t report to the public, now they say, come on, how come you’re not being transparent?
DN: What’s down the road for you?
TH: I’m here a year at a time. I love what I’m doing, but if at the end of this year there’s another direction they want to go, let’s go! This isn’t about me. That’s the thing I learned from LaVell. It wasn’t about LaVell and it’s not about me. This will go on bigger and better into the future, and for the time being I have a role here. I represent President Worthen and BYU and the Church. I know what I’m supposed to do. I can do a great job in it, a fair job, or a bad job, and some days are better than others.