LaVell Edwards: Just Call Him the Holiday Bowl Historian

If anyone is going to write a first-person account of the history of the Holiday Bowl, that man would have to be LaVell Edwards.

It would be as natural as MacArthur writing the history of war in the South Pacific, Bush writing the history of presidential elections of the 1980s or Stengel writing the history of the 1950s New York Yankees.

If you want to talk Holiday Bowl, Edwards is the man.

Edwards, of course, is the football coach at Brigham Young University, which for a while looked as if it was about to annex San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium as a home away from home. The Cougars played in Holiday Bowls I through VII and would have played in VIII if a rule change had not called for two at-large teams that year.

That first BYU-less game, 1985, matched Arkansas and Arizona State and drew what has been the smallest crowd of the past eight years and the lowest television rating ever.

So much for abandoning the connection with the Western Athletic Conference.

But something strange happened when the WAC champion once again became the automatic host in 1986. BYU didn’t win, nor did it win in 1987 or 1988.

“The last three years,” Edwards said Wednesday, “we managed to play our way out of coming.”

San Diego State (finally) won the WAC in 1986, and Wyoming won the past two years. Sellouts were back.

Meanwhile, BYU was not exactly suffering from bowl withdrawals. The Cougars have been to a bowl every year since 1978, when they lost to Navy, 23-16, in the inaugural Holiday Bowl.

The beginning for the Cougars, thus, coincided with the beginning for the bowl they are in once again after an amazing four years away.

“That first match-up couldn’t have been better,” Edwards said. “Us and Navy. This is a Navy town . . . and we have a large following here, too.”

That Edwards was standing aboard the U.S.S. Independence underscored the liaison between the Navy and both the community and the bowl game. When you live in Provo, Utah, you do not sit at the head table on an aircraft carrier if you do not get your football team to the Holiday Bowl. The lunch aboard an aircraft carrier annually kicks off the local buildup to the game itself.

In those early years, the Holiday Bowl needed all the buildup it could get. It usually sold out, but not as early or as easily as it does now.

The early at-large teams, such as Navy, Indiana, SMU and Washington State, were all teams dreaming of national prestige they had not yet attained. SMU finally got all it never wanted in terms of national attention . . . the death penalty for NCAA rules violations.

However, before that happened, SMU was also a participant in a football game that might have put the Holiday Bowl on the national landscape. It was the 1980 game, when SMU led, 45-24, with 3:56 to play . . . and lost, 46-45, naturally to BYU.

And, naturally, BYU was a part of the most-watched Holiday Bowl. The Cougars beat Michigan, 24-17, in 1984 to finish an unbeaten season and win the national championship.

Little did anyone expect at that time that it would be five years before the Cougars would get back to what had been their own private little party at the beach.

Basically, the WAC began to catch up with BYU.

“As much as anything,” said Edwards, “that was what happened.”

So this was a conference developing along with the game that has done as much as anything to put it on the map, as far-flung a map as it takes to envelop Laramie, El Paso and Honolulu.

Since its last visit to San Diego, BYU has played once each in the Florida Citrus Bowl and All-American Bowl and twice in the Freedom Bowl.

This, said Edwards, is home.

“We’ve had some good teams and gone to bowl games,” he said, “but there’s something different about the Holiday Bowl. A year ago, we went to the Freedom Bowl and sold between 4,000 and 5,000 tickets. This year, we’re back in the Holiday Bowl, and we had orders for 15,000 to 16,000 tickets. This, to us, is like the Rose Bowl to teams from the Pac 10 and Big 10.”

And the opposition in the Holiday Bowl has also become consistently tougher. The biggest and best football programs are now lured to San Diego.

Indeed, LaVell Edwards had his lunch Wednesday a few seats down the head table from Joe Paterno. You mention the name Paterno, and you hardly have to mention the university.

“What’s happened,” Edwards said, “has a lot to do with the Holiday Bowl organization and how it’s grown and developed and matured. When I first came down here for a kickoff luncheon to speak to sponsors, they had it in the press room at the stadium. They had it in the main ballroom at the hotel this time and the place was full.”

That’s the way it is with the Holiday Bowl. And it is appropriate that LaVell Edwards is back, since he has been such a part of making it this way.