Golden memories: 1974 BYU football team honored on 50th anniversary
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- BYU football coach LaVell Edwards (kneeling) and members of the BYU football team pose with the Western Athletic Conference championship trophy during the 1974 season.
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- BYU President Dallin H. Oaks, left, consoles Cougar quarterback Mark Giles after a 16-6 loss to Oklahoma State in the 1974 Fiesta Bowl.
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- BYU football coach LaVell Edwards, left, and quarterback Gary Sheide on the sidelines during the 1974 season.
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- BYU quarterback Gary Sheide throws a pass during the 1974 season. The Cougars won the Western Athletic Conference championship and was the first BYU team to be invited to a bowl game.
Former Cougar football players Chris Crowe, Gary Sheide and their teammates are jokingly comparing surgery scars and body parts they’ve had to repair in the 50 years since they played together.
This weekend, they can also reminisce about making BYU football history.
The 1974 Cougar football team — the first to be nationally ranked and the first to be invited to a bowl game — will be honored during the BYU-Southern Illinois season opener at LaVell Edwards Stadium.
Around 50 players from that team arrived in Provo on Friday for a golf outing and a banquet that will be attended by their head coach’s wife, Patti Edwards. Four surviving coaches — Dave Kragthorpe, JD Helm, Dwayne Painter and Mel Olson — will also be there. Nancy Whittingham, whose husband Fred Sr. was a assistant coach at BYU, is expected to attend.
Four coaches and 13 players from that team have passed away, and Crowe has gathered obituaries to honor them at the banquet. Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox has recognized the team with an official declaration lauding their 50th anniversary.
“We had really good players (15 were drafted by the NFL) and great coaches,” said Sheide, who played quarterback. “We had an incredibly talented team and as far as I’m concerned, as good as any team that ever played at BYU.”
About four years ago, Crowe (an English professor at BYU) got together with former teammates Jeff Blanc and John Betham to talk about the upcoming golden anniversary. Crowe and teammate Doug Adams worked with the Cougar athletic department to coordinate the invitations and the activities for this weekend.
“We believe the 1974 team was the most important football team in BYU history,” Crowe said.
The 1974 Cougars started 0-3-1, losing to Hawaii 15-13, Utah State 9-6 and at Iowa State 34-7. BYU then tied Colorado State 33-33 on October 5.
“Coach Edwards was in his third year as head coach and he was feeling the heat,” Crowe said. “Some guys heard from him he was worried about losing his job. We all loved Coach Edwards and we all knew our team was underperforming. Guys like John Betham, Larry Carr, Brad Oates and Paul Linford started calling players-only meetings where we could re-commit and air our grievances in ways that made us a better team. From those meetings our coaches learned to listen to players more and give us more say in how we ran things.”
BYU won seven straight games, including victories against Wyoming (38-7), UTEP (45-21), No. 16 Arizona (37-13), Air Force (12-10), No. 16 Arizona State (21-18), New Mexico (36-3) and Utah (48-20) to win the Western Athletic Conference title. It was the first time the Cougars had beaten Arizona and Arizona State in the same season. The streak likely kept Edwards employed and it was a good call: He would go on to win 257 games and become the greatest football coach in school history.
“If we hadn’t won the next seven games, LaVell Edwards Stadium wouldn’t be LaVell Edwards Stadium,” Crowe said.
Sheide threw for 2,174 yards and 23 touchdowns that season, with his favorite targets being Betham (38 catches, 569 yards and six touchdowns) and Blanc (32-442-4). Also catching the ball from Sheide was future All-Pro NFL tight end Todd Christensen (21-134-2) and future NFL head coach Brian Billick (7-82-1). Two players on the roster — Gifford Nielsen and Craig Christensen — later became general authorities for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Sheide, who is from California, said BYU coaches recruited his home state very well and brought in a host of talented players.
“Instead of just getting the local Utah players, they got some tremendous guys out of California,” he said. “Coach Edwards decided he wanted to throw the football and nobody had ever defended the pass like we threw it. In high school, I had a coach who liked to run the football. I must have completed 70% of my passes but I only threw ten passes a game. Pete Van Valkenburg led the country in rushing at BYU before I got there. I told LaVell when he recruited me, ‘If I’m going to come there I need to throw the football,’ Sheide said. “He told me I would and was true to his word.”
Cougar fans got caught up in the hoopla, filling up then-Cougar Stadium (around 33,000 capacity) and sporting badges and bumper stickers that read, “Believe.”
With a record of 7-3-1, the Cougars were ranked as high as No. 17 in the Associated Press poll. They were invited to the Fiesta Bowl to play Oklahoma State out of the Big 12.
“The bowl game was on the 28th of December,” Crowe said. “It was kind of cool practicing on Christmas Day. There were only eight or nine bowl games back then, so it was a big deal and played on national TV. We stayed in a nice downtown hotel in Tempe. One of things I clearly remember is that we wanted recognition from the BYU administration for winning the WAC and going to a bowl game. We wanted a championship ring. Their response was, “Well, we’ve never done anything like that before,’ and we said, ‘That’s kind of the point.’
“At our Christmas party we wrote a parody of the ’12 Days of Christmas’ and called it the ‘Six Days of the Fiesta Bowl.’ Instead of singing ‘Five golden rings!’ we sang ‘No conference rings!'”
Crowe said 20 years later, the BYU administration stepped up and got them conference championship rings.
For the record, the Cougars lost the Fiesta Bowl game to Oklahoma State 16-6. Sheide completed 4 of 5 passes for 43 yards and led BYU on a pair of field goal drives in the first quarter but suffered a shoulder injury and didn’t return.
That’s probably the only bad memory the players will have to suppress during their weekend together in Provo.
“It’s so funny,” Sheide said. “There are a bunch of texts going back and forth about parking and stuff and the topic of ADA (Americans with Disabilities) parking came up. Everyone is chiming in on injuries, hip replacements and shoulder replacements. They’re going to set off all the metal detectors. It’s crazy because some of these guys we haven’t seen in 50 years but because of football, you remember what it took to win and you respect them. To see them again is very special.”
“Not many of us look like we did 50 years ago,” Crowe added, “But it will be fun to get together. When we had our 10-year reunion (in 1984), only about 20 guys showed up but we’ll have 50 or so this weekend. At the 1984 reunion, Coach Edwards told us that the 1984 team couldn’t have won the national championship if it hadn’t been for our 1974 team.”
