A title's legacy: Winning the national title in '84 raised the bar at BYU

PROVO — Less than a year after BYU won the national championship, the Cougars were booed at home. It was November 1985, and BYU was trailing undefeated, No. 4 Air Force by two touchdowns at halftime. The Cougars rallied and won the game, 28-21, but memories of those boos linger.

"It got a little out of hand, I thought," recalls quarterback Robbie Bosco, who was a senior in 1985.

Earlier that season, BYU inexplicably fell to a winless UTEP team on the road and some disgruntled fans unleashed their frustration.

Shirley Johnson, who has been a secretary in the BYU football office since 1980, remembers receiving "the meanest, nastiest letters" from fans. "One lady who works on campus called me," she says. "It made me cry she was so mean. The fans thought we should win all of the games for the rest of their lives."

That, apparently, is one of the unintended consequences of winning a national title.

Once fans have tasted a national championship, anything less than that pales in comparison. Indeed, that 1984 championship casts a long shadow even today.

Bosco later served as a Cougar assistant coach for 15 years. He understands as well as anyone the pressure to win in Provo. Yet he believes the high expectations were set even before the 1984 season and they just exploded after that.

"Once we won the national championship, the bar was raised even higher. The one bar before that was kind of a quarterback bar," explains Bosco, who now is involved in fundraising at BYU. "Nobody talked about all of the championships LaVell (Edwards) had won. It was always about the quarterback factory and all of the yards. Then we win the national championship and then it's like, man, we won over 100 games in the '80s, won a bunch of championships. It was to the point that fans took that for granted. They thought, 'It's going to happen. I know they're behind in the game, but there's still a couple of minutes left on the clock. They'll win.' There was a weird frenzy, like people were expecting it to happen all the time."

That aside, Bosco says he likes the fact that BYU fans have high expectations.

"It's a good thing that our fans are so passionate about the game and passionate about us winning. I'd rather talk about that than fans saying, 'Hey are you guys ever going to be better than 5-7?' As long as BYU keeps on winning and the standards are up high, I think it's a good thing. It gives you something to shoot for. Otherwise, you'd never go for anything high enough. But expectations are crazy. People are used to winning around here."