1984 revisited: BYU’s QB factory laid foundation for Robbie Bosco to lead Cougars to national title

Editor’s note: Ninth in a series exploring BYU’s 1984 national football championship.

Forty years have passed, and still hardly a week goes by, sometimes hardly a day, when Robbie Bosco doesn’t hear about it. From passersby on the street, from reporters, from incoming freshmen who weren’t born when it happened, from outright strangers who hear the surname and put two and two together — are you that Bosco? The quarterback who won the national championship?

Since he’s lived in Provo and worked for BYU in the athletic department for most of those 40 years, minus the two seasons he was in the employ of the Green Bay Packers, the attention and notoriety is no more surprising than it is unexpected. It comes with the territory. People like to cling to the past, especially this past.

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And yet, amid all the attaboys, the pats on the back, the “can we take a selfie?” requests, no one gets very far congratulating Bosco before he deflects the adulation away from him and toward those who paved the way.

“No way what happened in 1984 happened without those guys who came first,” he says. “We don’t become national champions without Gary Sheide, Gifford Nielsen, Marc Wilson, Jim McMahon, Steve Young and the great players that played on those teams.”

By the time Bosco took the reins in 1984, the system was firmly in place. A dozen years had already passed since the launching of the most significant offensive revolution in college football since — maybe ever.

Upending college football tradition

Like most revolutions, this one began quietly enough. It all started when a football coach nearly ran his car into the Snake River outside Rexburg, Idaho.

The man’s name was Don Rydalch, coach at what was then known as Ricks College and is now BYU-Idaho. The newly hired head coach at Brigham Young University, LaVell Edwards, had talked Rydalch into joining the staff he was putting together over the winter of 1971-72. He wanted Rydalch to come to Provo and set up his offense.

Rydalch, a former University of Utah quarterback whose Ricks teams threw the football as much as a third of the time, had barely left Rexburg when a northbound car skidded on ice on the Lorenzo Bridge, hitting his Ford sedan head-on and sending him to the hospital. He took it as a sign he wasn’t supposed to leave.

Left without a key offensive coach and spring practice looming, Edwards hired an unproven 27-year-old former All-American quarterback who was coaching the freshman team at the University of Tennessee named Dewey “The Swamp Rat” Warren to handle the BYU offense. Warren, who had played one season for a pass-oriented coach in the NFL named Bill Walsh, didn’t want to pass some of the time — he wanted to pass all the time. The basic idea was being able to turn every running play into a passing play. The Swamp Rat, as it turned out, was the first in a chain of quarterback whisperers who would pass through Provo over the next decade, dramatically changing the way college football looked at the forward pass, and at BYU.

Dewey Warren gave way to Doug Scovil who gave way to Ted Tollner who gave way to Mike Holmgren who gave way to Norm Chow. These coaches were the architects of the modern college passing game born and raised in Provo, Utah — outside-the-box tacticians willing to depart from 100 years of major college tradition by using the pass, not the run, as a team’s primary offensive weapon. Edwards was the constant in the experiment, the coach with the vision and the sense to keep his mad scientists happy and stay out of their way. (Two other assistant coaches, Dwain Painter and Wally English, worked with the QBs at BYU during this time frame, although neither enthusiastically embraced the pass and didn’t stay long.)

A quarterback foundation

Placed on a traditional line chart, a graph of BYU football success from 1973 through the 1984 national championship season looks like a snapshot of Apple stock. The growth was exponential, the trend relentlessly upward. For the first time in history, people started complaining about BYU, a school that had just 16 winning seasons in its first 47 years playing football, running up the score instead of the other way around.

To fuel the experiment, quarterbacks largely uncoveted by others kept arriving as if via conveyor belt — players who embraced the system and who the system embraced right back. Gary Sheide came first. He was the guinea pig, the first to see if this pass-first approach might actually work.

Sheide arrived in Provo a largely unknown quantity (due to injuries, he’d started just six games in two seasons at Diablo Valley Community College in California, but all six were wins). After some fits and starts, by the time his two seasons were finished, he and the forward pass had taken BYU to its longest winning streak in school history (seven straight to close out the 1974 regular season), its first-ever appearance in the AP rankings (No. 20 on Nov. 25, 1974) and, after 48 years of trying, its first bowl game when the Cougars were invited to play in the Fiesta Bowl. Sheide was awarded the Sammy Baugh Trophy given to the nation’s top quarterback, finished eighth in Heisman Trophy balloting and was drafted by the Cincinnati Bengals.

Next came Gifford Nielsen, a hometown kid who dreamed all his life of one day playing for the Cougars — on the basketball team. Nielsen played varsity basketball for two seasons before joining the football team as a third-string quarterback in 1975, the year after Sheide graduated. Three losses to open that season threatened to bury the pass-first movement then and there, until Nielsen came off the bench in the fourth game and completed 10 of 12 second-half passes to engineer a 16-15 comeback win over New Mexico.

With Nielsen passing, BYU would win 18 of its next 23 games. In his junior year, Nielsen threw 29 touchdown passes (eight more than anyone else in the nation), led the Cougars to their first nine-win season (9-3) and their highest ranking yet (No. 17). He finished sixth in Heisman voting. When the Cougars outscored their first three opponents at the beginning of Nielsen’s senior year by a combined 158-25 and climbed to a No. 13 national ranking, “Giff Nielsen” and “Pass U” were the trending topics in the college sports world heading into a nationally televised game at Oregon State — until Nielsen blew out his knee. The Cougars lost, 24-19.

Wilson to McMahon to Young

That set the stage for Nielsen’s understudy, Marc Wilson, who in his first start the following week at Colorado State threw a school-record seven touchdown passes and ran for an eighth. A Latter-day Saint kid from Seattle, Wilson broke his jaw early in his last season of high school and, like his predecessors, wasn’t heavily recruited. The ease with which he stepped into Nielsen’s shoes added considerable credibility to BYU’s unconventional passing approach that kept getting revved up higher and higher by Scovil (who had arrived on the coaching staff a year earlier).

By Wilson’s senior year in 1979, the Cougars were throwing the football 60% of the time en route to an 11-0 regular-season record and a No. 9 national ranking (BYU’s first time in the top 10). Only a last-second loss to Indiana in the Holiday Bowl marred what would have been a perfect year. Among several NCAA records Wilson set was the all-time high for most yards total offense. He finished third in Heisman voting, won the Sammy Baugh Award, was a consensus first-team All-American and was taken 15th overall in the first round of the NFL draft by the Raiders.

If that appeared unsurpassable, look at what Jim McMahon did in 1980 and 1981. A competitive junkie who once begged his coaches to pop his separated shoulder back into place so he could keep playing, McMahon moved from California to Utah to play his final two years of high school football just up the road from the BYU campus in Roy. McMahon came to BYU expressly because he wanted to throw the football, and because he didn’t get an offer from Notre Dame, the school he really wanted to play for.

He was the team punter as he bided his time, impatiently, until Wilson’s eligibility was up. (In 1978, with Wally English calling plays in his lone season coaching at BYU, Wilson and McMahon split QB duties, resulting in one of BYU’s least productive, and most tumultuous, seasons of the Edwards era. The next year McMahon redshirted.) After losing the first game in 1980, McMahon took the Cougars on a 17-game winning streak that included one of the greatest comebacks in college football history in the 1980 Holiday Bowl.

In McMahon’s two seasons, BYU’s record was 22-3. In his senior year, he passed for more yards and touchdowns than anyone in major college history, setting and resetting 18 NCAA records (he surpassed Marc Wilson’s two-year-old total offense record by 1,127 yards — almost 100 yards a game). When the dust had settled, NCAA statistician Jim Van Valkenburg declared, “What Jim McMahon did is comparable to what Babe Ruth did in baseball. No quarterback in the history of college football has had a season like it. Ever.”

McMahon was a consensus All-American, won the Sammy Baugh Award and the newly instituted Davey O’Brien Award, also given to the nation’s top quarterback; finished third in Heisman balloting and was the fifth player taken in the NFL draft, by the Chicago Bears.

Watching all this was McMahon’s backup, Steve Young, a quarterback from Connecticut who ran the wishbone in high school, barely got a scholarship to BYU, and started out so far down the QB depth chart the coaches tried to talk him into playing defensive back. BYU finished 20-5 in Young’s two seasons, his career ending on an 11-game winning streak. He set 13 NCAA records during his 11-1 senior season as the Cougars finished No. 7 in the polls, the program’s highest ranking ever.

The 1983 BYU team was the most prolific offense in NCAA history, averaging a record 584.2 yards per game while outscoring opponents by a combined 505-244. Young won the Baugh and O’Brien trophies, by now a rite of fall for a Cougar quarterback, was a consensus first-team All-American, finished second in Heisman voting and signed a $40 million dollar contract with the Los Angeles Express of the upstart (and short-lived) United States Football League.

All that was what Robbie Bosco was replacing when he emerged as the starting BYU quarterback in 1984: five All-American quarterbacks in 11 years, 10 conference championships, a 75% winning percentage, a constant presence in the national polls and, perhaps most flattering of all, other schools were starting to play like BYU. (Penn State and Miami, the national champions in 1982 and 1983, averaged 31 and 35 passes a game, the first time in 114 years a national champion threw the ball more than 30 times — although still below BYU’s per-game averages in the high 40s.)

Bosco came with high expectations. A known quantity after winning national punt-pass-and-kick competitions as a youth, he was nicknamed the Roseville Rocket in high school — because he came from Roseville, California, and had a reputation for throwing the ball hard. With a multitude of scholarship offers to consider, he had the luxury to wait and see where a prized Latter-day Saint quarterback recruit, Sean Salisbury, decided to go to college before he made his decision. When Salisbury chose USC, Bosco, who was not of the faith, chose BYU.

How did he feel taking over from five consecutive All-Americans who had turned BYU into a perennial offensive juggernaut in college football?

In a word: petrified.

Before his first start, against third-ranked Pittsburgh on the road, “I didn’t even want to get out of bed,” Bosco confesses. “It almost felt overwhelming, following those All-Americans. I didn’t want to be the one who broke the string.”

Ironically, it was BYU’s defense that got him over his first-game jitters.

“I hadn’t realized our defense was that good,” remembers Bosco. “We’d been going up against them every day during fall camp. When I realized Pitt’s defense wasn’t as good as ours I thought, OK, this just got a bit easier.”

After upsetting Pitt, the Cougars, unranked to start the season, made their poll debut at No. 13 and the race was on. The next week, following a convincing win over Baylor in Provo, they moved into the top 10 and never left.

“We’d learned from the teams that came before us,” says Bosco. “We’d seen how hard it was to go undefeated. Those great McMahon teams, the year Marc Wilson’s team came within a field goal of doing it (not to mention Steve Young’s nearly unblemished season the year before). That could have happened to us. There were three or four games we could have just as easily lost. But we knew we had a chance to do something that hadn’t been done.”

For all the amazing things his predecessors had accomplished, they hadn’t accomplished this.

“It’s something that will never change, never go away,” says Bosco of “a really magical season” that 40 years ago took the BYU Cougars to college football’s highest rung.

“I’ll never get tired of talking about it,” he says, “I’ll never get tired of having people bring up the national championship. It’s an amazing piece of history that I got to be a part of. I get to take credit for something a lot of people and a lot of years went into building.”

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