“I followed the season any way I could. When I was living in New York doing my residency, the hospital had a Watts line (enabling a free call anywhere in the country). I was on it a lot. There was no way to listen to or watch BYU games if you weren’t in Utah. I used the Watts line to call my father-in-law and he would give me play-by-play over the phone.”John: “In all honesty, it felt like any other year. Football season always was a fairly intense time. We did well during the ‘80s. We were winning a lot of games (11-1 the previous season). It felt like any other year till the very end. It’s almost more magical retrospectively than it was at the time.“You wanted them to win because it was your family. I remember the pressure was building each week, as you can imagine, as we kept winning and rising in the polls. I remember once I went to see my dad on the practice field. He was talking to (athletic director) Glen Tuckett. I walked up just as Glen said to my dad, ‘You know, LaVell, I’m pretty sure we could get our jobs back at Murray and Granite (high schools).’ Life was a little easier and less complicated for them then.”
Jim: “We had a players-only meeting the night before the Holiday Bowl. Nobody mentioned the national championship or finishing No. 1, but (Glen) Kozlowski comes right out with it. He said, ‘Look, we’re a team, but we have one responsibility and that is to beat the guy across from us. Every play think, I’m going to beat this guy in front of me.’”
Ann: “Dad did say at some point, ‘We might have a better chance at this (a national championship) than I thought. Anyway, we’d been to the Holiday Bowl a lot. We hoped this time things would be different (they had lost there in ‘78, ‘79, ‘81, ‘82). It did and there we were. People complained about the weakness of schedule. It takes a lot to win game after game after game.
“We lived in Salt Lake. I remember driving to Provo and seeing the signs congratulating my dad and the team. That was cool. It was a really happy time in our family. It seems like a long time ago that that happened. I doubt it will ever happen again.”Patti: “We really didn’t know the final result until we were in San Francisco. LaVell was coaching the Shriners all-star game with (Baylor coach) Grant Teaff and (Iowa coach) Hayden Fry. We were in a Chinese restaurant having dinner with the Teaffs when we learned that we had won the national championship. That was a wonderful, exciting time. There was some criticism about the schedule, especially by (Oklahoma coach) Barry Switzer and (broadcaster) Bryant Gumbel. Barry Switzer later wrote LaVell an apology for the remarks he had made. Bryant Gumbel apologized too.”
Jim: “People criticized the schedule. But there was something about that team; we weren’t going to be denied. We were going to win every game. It wasn’t cockiness, just quiet confidence. If we had played Oklahoma or Washington that year we would’ve beaten them. Look, it’s not like we were just a bunch of overachievers. We had a lot of players on that team that ended up in the NFL
