He did. "I want to clear up a little bit of controversy that might be written about tomorrow. My wife is dressed for Christmas, not in any kind of alliance issues," he joked in his opening remarks at the news conference. "Let me make that clear right from the beginning. That's why we're such a good team. I'm very focused. And she's not."

Six months later, she still gets comments on her red sweater. "I'm known as 'the lady who wore red,' " Holly says. "It's become quite the family joke."

Bronco owns several red articles of clothing from his days at the University of New Mexico, but he refuses to wear them anymore. "I think that's ridiculous. I love red," she says. "I understand the rivalry and everything, but in my mind, it doesn't mean that."

While Bronco is constantly in the limelight, Holly says he is an "extremely private" person. She, on the other hand, is very outgoing. "I am gregarious. I can't stop talking. When we go somewhere on an airplane, if I'm sitting next to a stranger, by the time we land, I'll not only know his name, but I'll also know all the names of his grandchildren, too," she says.

Holly goes to great lengths to remove Bronco from football mode when he's not working. "My job is to keep him grounded and broaden his horizons as a human being," she says. Holly has scheduled a couple of family vacations in July, including a wilderness trip to Montana, where the family will ride pack mules to a remote destination to camp, fish, float down a river and pick wild berries.

"It's good for the soul," Holly says of spending time in the backcountry. Later on in the month, they will travel to Mexico for some beach time.

"Holly's very perceptive that way, because unless I'm out of the state or away from here, I'm not out of the state or away from here," Bronco says. "So she knows for us to have true privacy and for my thoughts to be drawn back here to the same level, we have to be someplace else."

Since Bronco became BYU's head coach six months ago, he's relied on his wife more than ever. "It's really nice to come home and hear about other things besides football," he says. "I've purposely, oftentimes, kind of excluded her from what happens here because I talk about it all the time. Now what I've found in the role of head coach is, there's not very many people I talk to. I've found it being necessary to talk to her more about these things, which is both a positive and a negative. It's nice to be able to have a companion and a confidant to be able to do that with. Yet our home has been a sanctuary where, usually, football doesn't exist. I've included her more in what's going on out of, there's really no one else to talk to."