Editor’s note: Third in a series exploring BYU’s 1984 national football championship.
He was in his 13th year of coaching, not exactly a newcomer. His teams had won eight consecutive league championships and three of the last four Holiday Bowls. But entering the national championship debate? Slugging it out with people who played on New Year’s Day and lived in the top 10 and didn’t countenance newcomers well? That was a mountain never climbed.
As a sports writer for the Deseret News covering BYU’s national championship run in 1984, I have an abiding memory of how LaVell Edwards negotiated that minefield.
Special Collector's Issue: "1984: The Year BYU was Second to None"
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America got to know Edwards that year. In many ways, they’d never seen anything like him. A head coach without pretense and with no discernible ego. As combative as a golden retriever. He looked like the guy changing your oil.
This was important in 1984, because the college football establishment was none too enthused about BYU’s meteoric rise in the polls.
Without LaVell Edwards running interference with his dry wit and refusal to take offense, who knows how the season might have gone?
The more the Cougars kept winning, the louder the criticisms, the more shrill the insults. LaVell absorbed them like they were compliments.
When coaches groused that the Cougars had an unfair advantage because of the older, more experienced returned missionaries who anchored the offensive line, Edwards smiled wryly and with tongue in cheek said, “That’s one of the reasons we win. Because we’ve got a bunch of old men who know how to hold.”
When the national media began showing up in hordes to watch BYU play, home and away, Edwards, referencing his favorite singer, observed, “It’s like discovering Willie Nelson after he’s been singing 20 years.”
When the Cougars reached No. 1 for the first time after beating Utah in the 11th game of the season, prompting NBC “Today” show host Bryant Gumbel to say, “How can you rank BYU No. 1? Who’d they play, Bo Diddley Tech?” Edwards, in sharp contrast to outraged Cougar fans, answered with, “If he thinks BYU’s alumni are upset, what about Bo Diddley Tech?”
Maybe people didn’t like what upstart BYU was doing to the established order of things, but it was impossible to dislike the BYU coach.
He was an enigma, a man who didn’t fit any molds.
It was Edwards, of course, who’d created the problem for BYU in the first place. It was Edwards who had the idea to use the forward pass to help a moribund program finally gain entrance into the college football mainstream, Edwards who implemented an open door policy for returning Latter-day Saint missionaries, welcoming them (and their two years of inactivity) back to the program instead of trying to run them off, Edwards who hired a staff of assistants as loyal as Dobermans and got out of their way so they could do their jobs.
No one (including him) expected it to develop so fast or work so well. In 12 years coming into the ‘84 season, his BYU teams had a record of 105-37-1.
And yet, watching him stand stoically on the sidelines during games, arms folded, somber expression (“I’m happy, I just forgot to tell my face,” was his stock explanation), it wasn’t easy to tell how he did it, or, for that matter, even what he did.
“You’re not sure if he’s just looking at the mountains,” said Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry when asked during the Cougars’ ascension up the polls what he thought of the BYU coach. “But he doesn’t miss anything. He’s one of the most underestimated coaches in America. With the price of coaches today, BYU has got the biggest steal in America.”
Edwards’ biggest nemesis that season was Barry Switzer, coach of the Oklahoma Sooners, who led the chorus in pointing out the weakness of BYU’s schedule. Switzer said BYU needed to beat its Holiday Bowl opponent, Michigan, “by 60″ to keep the No. 1 ranking after the bowl games. When BYU beat Michigan by seven points and Switzer’s No. 2-ranked Sooners dashed their chances by losing to Washington in the Orange Bowl, the Oklahoma coach then pivoted and said Washington should be No. 1.
As the 40-year anniversary of BYU’s No. 1. season approached, I called Barry Switzer at his home in Norman, Oklahoma. At 86 — “four from 90,″ as he put it — the coach lives across the street from the OU campus, 600 yards from Memorial Stadium. He has an all-access pass to Sooner sporting events. “I go watch anything I want, I got it all right here,” he said.
Reflecting on “the good old days” of the 1970s and 1980s, when Switzer’s teams won three national championships (including one in 1985), the coach said his criticism of BYU’s lackluster 1984 schedule was as legit then as it is now. “Their schedule was an easy thing to disparage,” he said, “and I did it to make us look good.”
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But then or now, he had no disparagement for BYU’s coach. “We always got along great,” Switzer said. “We’d go on those Nike cruises in the summer and have a good time. He was a good coach who had a very good football team. They were throwing the football and doing it well. I had no problem with LaVell. I don’t know anyone who ever did.”
Only when the dust of BYU’s national championship season had settled in the first week of 1985, after The Associated Press writers poll and the United Press International coaches poll made it official and agreed that BYU had survived the tumult and was indeed No. 1, did LaVell Edwards muse on why it had been so hard.
“It’s strange,” he said to reporters. “As long as we were No. 3, fourth or fifth, nothing was said. Everyone felt comfortable with that. But as soon as we were ranked No. 1, a lot of people became uncomfortable. We were always having to defend our ranking. I think the team handled the pressure well.”
I think I know why.
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