Winning the title in '84 raised the bar at BYU

PROVO, Utah

— 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