Looking Back at BYU Football’s First-Ever Conference Championship

BYU fans are going to have to get used to thinking about football seasons in terms of conference standings again. After all, it's been more than a decade since the Cougars left the conference life behind and became independent.  However, prior to that move, BYU football teams had won seventeen conference titles outright and had tied for six more.  The one that started it all came in 1965, as head coach Tommy Hudspeth joined forces with a brilliant passing quarterback named Virgil Carter to end decades of mediocrity for BYU football.  The Cougars didn’t have a spectacular season, but in conference play, they did enough to be crowned champions and show that they could no longer be brushed of as WAC field-fillers.  Since that first title team gets perhaps a little less recognition than it deserves, I thought it might be fun to look back at how they achieved something that had never been done at BYU before—winning a conference championship.

Tommy Hudspeth was not a prototypical BYU head coach.  For one thing, he was not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is now the norm for anyone who holds the head coaching job at BYU.  Hudspeth was also unusual in that he had no previous ties to BYU.  Many of his predecessors and successors—including the man he replaced, Hal Mitchell, and the man who replaced him, LaVell Edwards—had played or coached at BYU prior to taking on the top job.  A standout defensive back at Tulsa, Hudspeth was working as an assistant coach in the Canadian Football League when BYU came calling.

Having struggled to stay afloat for 42 years by the time Hudspeth was hired, the BYU football program was seen far more as a regional punching bag than as a high-profile coaching opportunity.  In 1963, the year before Hudspeth was hired, the Cougars were beaten 24-7 at Kansas State and 14-0 at Pacific—remarkable, since neither team would win another game the rest of the season.  At the conclusion of the 1963 season, Hal Mitchell (whose 8-22 record as head coach impressed nobody) was relieved of his duties.  In that context, Hudspeth’s early career at BYU really was amazing—in two seasons, he took a program that was falling apart at the seams and won a conference title.

Not that he did it alone—Hudspeth had a very important secret weapon in quarterback Virgil Carter, who brought a totally new look to the BYU offense.  Football in the 1960's was a smash-mouth sport—the iconic phrase “Three Yards and a Cloud of Dust" pretty much sums up the most common offensive strategy of the day.  Hudspeth knew that BYU simply could not recruit the kind of athletes needed to run the power rushing scheme used by most major college football teams.  He also knew that a change in strategy might take the Cougars’ opponents by surprise and provide the foundation for a new era of BYU football.  To that end, he signed passing wizard Virgil Carter at quarterback and gave him a potent target in the form of athletic ex-Marine Phil Odle at wide receiver.  In 1964, Hudspeth’s inaugural season, the team seemed gripped by an identity crisis, vacillating between pass-first and run-first offensive schemes . The result was another joke of a season, as the Cougars slogged their way to a 3-6-1 record and a 5th-place WAC finish.  But the next season brought a new look for the Cougars, as Coach Hudspeth decided to let Virgil Carter unleash a real pass-first offense.  The WAC never saw it coming.

The Cougars opened the season with two wins (itself an achievement—not since 1958 had they won their first two games), and although Carter’s numbers weren’t eye-popping, his efforts forced defenses to focus on the passing game and left the door open for a much-improved rushing attack.  Against Arizona State in game 1, the Cougars ripped the Sun Devils for 400 yards of total offense in an easy 24-6 win.  In game 2, Phil Odle proved his worth by catching three touchdown passes in a 21-3 win over Kansas State.  Game 3 was the Cougars’ first loss, 27-14 to Oregon on the road, and the offense didn’t pass well (or do anything else well, either), but Carter still managed to throw two more TD’s.  The Cougars' opponents were not used to defending pass plays in potential scoring situations, and BYU was capitalizing.

Game 4 was too easy—San Jose State gave up 478 yards of total offense and Carter threw two more TD’s in a 34-7 rout.  As the season progressed, BYU suffered three more losses (including one to Utah State where Carter threw for a season-high 361 yards), but only one of them was to a WAC team, Wyoming.  The Cowboys obligingly lost to Utah and Arizona State in WAC play, both of which teams lost to BYU, so the Cougars’ title hopes stayed intact.  The Utah game, a 25-20 Cougar victory, was especially memorable—Virgil Carter tossed four touchdown passes and rolled up 253 passing yards as the Utes, like everyone else, struggled to cope with the Cougars’ innovative offense.

A beautiful 309-yard, 3 TD outing for Carter turned the Cougars’ season finale against New Mexico into a 42-8 romp and clinched the conference title for BYU.  Though this team’s achievements would be somewhat overshadowed by the dominant squads produced by Coach Hudspeth’s assistant and successor, LaVell Edwards, none of the success enjoyed by Edwards’ teams would have been possible without the passing foundation laid by Tommy Hudspeth, Virgil Carter, Phil Odle, and all the rest.  Here’s to more such innovation at BYU in the future!