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Robbie Bosco prepares to take a snap during 1984 Holiday Bowl game against Michigan in San Diego en route to the Cougars becoming national champs. | Mark Philbrick, BYU
Editor’s note: Ninth in a series exploring BYU’s 1984 national football championship.
Forty years have passed, and still hardly a week goes by, sometimes hardly a day, when Robbie Bosco doesn’t hear about it. From passersby on the street, from reporters, from incoming freshmen who weren’t born when it happened, from outright strangers who hear the surname and put two and two together — are you that Bosco? The quarterback who won the national championship?
Since he’s lived in Provo and worked for BYU in the athletic department for most of those 40 years, minus the two seasons he was in the employ of the Green Bay Packers, the attention and notoriety is no more surprising than it is unexpected. It comes with the territory. People like to cling to the past, especially this past.
And yet, amid all the attaboys, the pats on the back, the “can we take a selfie?” requests, no one gets very far congratulating Bosco before he deflects the adulation away from him and toward those who paved the way.
“No way what happened in 1984 happened without those guys who came first,” he says. “We don’t become national champions without Gary Sheide, Gifford Nielsen, Marc Wilson, Jim McMahon, Steve Young and the great players that played on those teams.”
By the time Bosco took the reins in 1984, the system was firmly in place. A dozen years had already passed since the launching of the most significant offensive revolution in college football since — maybe ever.
Upending college football tradition
Like most revolutions, this one began quietly enough. It all started when a football coach nearly ran his car into the Snake River outside Rexburg, Idaho.
The…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/1984-revisited-byu-qb-factory-030000119.html
Author : Deseret News
Publish date : 2024-10-21 03:00:00
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