40 years later: Former BYU SID Ralph Zobell remembers 1984 national championship season
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- BYU football coach LaVell Edwards, in blue coat, celebrates with fans and players after winning the 1984 Holiday Bowl.
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- The final score of the 1984 Holiday Bowl is illuminated on the scoreboard at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego.
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- BYU coach LaVell Edwards, right, is greeted at the White House by President Ronald Reagan (left) and Utah Senator Orrin Hatch (center) after BYU won 1984 national title in football.
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- BYU football coach LaVell Edwards, right, stands on the sideline next to a Cougar player at the 1984 Holiday Bowl in San Diego.
Unaided, some BYU football fans might have trouble remembering events along the trail to the 1984 national championship.
I have been reminded of some of those events thanks to recent and past publications along with my notes, so I’ll share a few memories of 40 years ago.
Since 1984, BYU is the only team outside a Power Five conference to win the national title in football and it was done by the Cougars who didn’t win it by playing on New Years Day. The 1984 Cougars only had five offensive players on the First Team All-Western Athletic Conference and three on the defensive team.
The closest any WAC team had come to finishing the season at No. 1 was Arizona State in 1975 with a 12-0 record at No. 2 behind Oklahoma in both wire service polls after beating Nebraska, 17-14, in the Fiesta Bowl (Nebraska had been No. 6 and ASU was No. 7).
Gone from that 1984 BYU team (but not forgotten) are some of the coaches: LaVell Edwards, Roger French, Dick Felt, Jim Paronto, Tom Ramage, and Ken Schmidt; Director of Athletics Glen Tuckett; football secretary Shirley Johnson; trainers Marv Roberson and Ollie Julkunen; orthopedic surgeon Dr. Brent Pratley; publicists Dave Schulthess and Jay Monsen; and treasured equipment manager Floyd Johnson among others. Gone too soon are some of the players like cornerback Mark Allen who died of cancer, offensive lineman Craig Garrick, All-American safety Kyle Morrell, Nebraska transfer receiver Scott Norberg, linebacker Jason Briggs and running back Paul Crawford.
I was privileged as a publicist to be in the thick of BYU’s national championships in football along with my late colleagues, Schulthess and Monsen. As the season progressed, we often were away from our second floor offices in the Smoot Administration Building hosting reporters like John Ed Bradley of the Washington Post, Rick Reilly and Doug Looney of Sports Illustrated, Gene the “Woj” Wojciechowski, Mike Lopresti of Gannett News and Ivan Maisel of the Dallas Morning News.
During the 1984 season, Sports Illustrated sent several photographers to capture the action, among them being Peter Reed Miller.
“I was really impressed by those photographers,” recalls former BYU photographer Mark Philbrick, who chronicled Cougar players in over 500 games during his BYU career. “They went through one roll of film per play (36 shots). I shot 20 rolls of film at the most in a game.
It is difficult to go through a season undefeated like the 1984 Cougars. In light of this season’s 5-0 start by BYU, here’s other undefeated Cougar strings to start the following seasons — 2021: 9; 2020: 5; 2008: 6; 2001: 12; 1981: 5; and 1979: 11.
In September of 1984, winning the national championship wasn’t on the minds of BYU fans. I was among the crowd in the Marriott Center watching ESPN’s first-ever NCAA football telecast on the big screen when the Cougars upset No. 3 Pittsburgh. The Panthers had Bill Fralic, an offensive lineman being touted for the Heisman Trophy.
Tulsa was coached by John Cooper, who was among the first to vote BYU high in the United Press International poll after game number three. Cooper would later be named head coach at Arizona State University (1985-1987), and the Ohio State University (1988-2000).
The large list of 50-50 winners at the start of 1984 narrowed to those in the Associated Press and UPI polls, starting with Miami, UCLA, Iowa, Tennessee, Michigan, Clemson, Nebraska, Penn State, USC, Georgia, SMU, Georgia Tech, and Vanderbilt; then narrowing to Ohio State, Oklahoma State, Oklahoma, Texas, Boston College, and Florida State (including Fullerton State at 9-0); then dwindling to Washington, South Carolina and BYU.
BYU cracked the top five in the polls at 5-0 with a victory at Colorado State, but Coach Edwards had more on his mind that day. It was one of the few times he didn’t fly home with the team. Instead, he was whisked away in a private jet back to Salt Lake City in time to speak at that evenings General Conference Priesthood Meeting. His talk “Prepare for a Mission,” was between talks by Elder Thomas S. Monson and President Ezra Taft Benson of the Quorum of The Twelve Apostles.
Cougar running backs surpassed the 100-yard rushing mark that season: Robert Parker 131 vs. Baylor, Lakei Heimuli 141 at New Mexico and 117 at Utah, and Kelly Smith 106 vs. UTEP.
“Kelly came in and filled a role for us,” recalls BYU running backs coach Lance Reynolds, who was in his second year on the staff. “(David) Mills patched up the tight end position, they were vital and perhaps underdogs.” Reynolds pointed out BYU’s running backs accounted for quite a bit of the team’s receptions.
Smith led the running backs with 46 of the 100 catches, followed by Heimuli 31, Parker 13, Vai Sikahema 6, Thor Salanoa 3, and Freddie Whittingham 1. The receivers 135 receptions came from Glen Kozlowski 55, Mark Belini 35, Adam Haysbert 32, Richard Orr 10, and Jimmy Edwards 3. Mills led the tight ends–David Mills 60 of its 70 catches, followed by Trevor Molini 8, and Lance Lindley 2.
As the season progressed with BYU moving up undefeated in the polls, Associated Press made a query to the Western Athletic Conference officials who contacted us when I happened to be the lone person in our office.
“Herschel Nissenson (Associated Press national sportswriter) made sure no one got overlooked,” said WAC publicist Nordy Jensen of those calls. They wanted to know which one of our players would be most likely to be nominated for its All-American squad. Because of Kyle Morrell’s acrobatic flip on a goal line stand in Hawai’i, I thought that gave him the inside track over other deserving Cougars.
It was difficult to pin BYU’s success on just one player with a team that sent several players to the NFL. A consistent factor was LaVell Edwards.
“One of LaVell’s best attributes was the way we practiced, he was a very consistent person,” reflects Reynolds, who played four years under Edwards and was on his staff for 18 seasons. “When you played LaVell in anything, you see how competitive he is and he made it a very competitive situation and we would get after it when we practiced. I didn’t even notice until LaVell retired about how he took care of all the peripheral stuff.”
For instance, days prior to the 1984 Holiday Bowl game versus Michigan, LaVell was called by authorities who detained Heimuli and Tom Tuipulotu while leaving Tijuana at the Mexico-USA border. They were late for a party that night at the San Diego home of Sikahema’s cousin Geraldine who later married Alema Fitisemanu from that 1984 team.
“It was awesome to be a part of it,” recalls Mel Olson, former BYU offensive line coach. “We worked hard and did the things we had always done. We approached it the same way each practice and game. Egos were out the door, there was no contention as to who won the championship among the different positions. There wasn’t second-guessing against him (LaVell Edwards).”
Two huge writing assignments were presented towards the end of the 1984 season. While everyone else was worrying about the national rankings, I was assigned to coordinate Sports Illustrated’s trips by reporter Gary Smith to visit BYU sophomores-in-waiting who were serving church missions: quarterback Sean Covey in South Africa, offensive lineman Don Busenbark in Brazil, safety Scott Peterson in Bolivia, and offensive lineman Duane Johnson in Louisville, Kentucky.
That article, “A Season For Spreading the Faith,” wasn’t published until August of 1985 after Gary Smith completed his honeymoon voyages with his new bride. I coordinated his trips, getting permission from the missionary department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and alerting the respective missionaries and their mission presidents of the planned Sports Illustrated article.
As it became apparent BYU could be the national champion, the RJ Publishing Company out of North Carolina contacted Schulthess about a potential wrap-up of the 1984 season. When BYU was crowned national champion, I was paid extra by that book company to write non-by lined accounts of three games: Tulsa, Wyoming and UTEP, while Doug Robinson of the Deseret News was assigned to write the more prestigious games. Our stories were in the 144-page padded blue-bound book emblazoned with the now seldom used logo of the crawling Cougar atop the letters BYU and was entitled “Brigham Young University National Championship.”
Although the 1984 Holiday Bowl against Michigan was played in December before the New Year’s Day bowl games that traditionally determined the national champion, many national media wanted to witness if BYU could remain undefeated at the No. 1 spot.
“Bruce Binkowski (Holiday Bowl publicist) and I had to squeeze in close to 250 media personnel in the press box at Jack Murphy Stadium and we gave up on controlling the sidelines, where we had too many people” recalls Jensen.
“At that time, it was very uncharacteristic to hold a press conference the day after a bowl game, but we needed to promote success,” said Jensen.
The media members who remained in town gathered at the Town and Country Resort in San Diego where the Michigan team had stayed, and Wolverine Coach Bo Schembechler was convinced to participate. He was critical of BYU and didn’t give resounding accolades about the Cougars remaining No.1.
Doubt remained in the minds of many about BYU’s No. 1 ranking, so it was fitting to watch No. 2-ranked Oklahoma lose in the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day to Washington, especially when the horse-drawn Sooner Schooner wagon cost OU a 15-yard penalty for driving on the playing field to celebrate a fourth-quarter touchdown.
On January 2, 1985, BYU students hadn’t yet returned to school, but some players and athletic department administrators were in the football office at the Smith Fieldhouse. Coach LaVell Edwards was in California for the upcoming East-West Shrine Game with three of his players, Morrell, Jim Herrmann and Louis Wong.
In Provo, we heard the No. 1 news via phone call to the offices in the Smith Fieldhouse. With Edwards not available, we had to convince recruiting coordinator and receivers coach Norm Chow to come upstairs and represent the staff. Photographers captured Chow emerging with his arms outstretched forward as disbelief and numbness was replaced by jubilation.
The 1984 national championship was a unique situation that, due to constant changes in the college football landscape, will never be repeated.
