BYU sports boss Tom Holmoe still believes

Provo • On a recent night in New Orleans when his Cougars couldn’t score a point against LSU, the boss of BYU sports pivoted on the sideline in the Superdome, leaving a hard footprint in the turf as he left the field.

It was not a happy exit.

The game had given Tom Holmoe darn near everything he’d worked for, everything he wanted for his football team and his school … a great opponent, a huge opportunity, a vast venue, a lucrative payday, a national television audience. Everything except for the score, a 27-0 shellacking.

Holmoe had pivoted hard at the end of an unhappy result before, last fall, when the Big 12 did not include BYU, or any other school, in expansion, leaving the Cougars surprised and isolated, on the business end of a rejection that resonates with them still.

“We’ve got to get better,” he says.

Yeah, they do. But can they?

Led by Holmoe, BYU sports — which mainly means BYU football — is wading through a murky period, caught as it is in a kind of no-man’s land, stuck as an independent on the outside looking in, between the Power Five conferences and the lesser Group of Five. It has neither the money nor the competitive advantages of being an authentic P5 school, but its expectations are not murky at all. They are completely, comprehensively, and maybe blindly big time.

“We can’t use not being in a P5 league as an excuse,” he says.

That’s the message Holmoe incessantly tells his coaches — in football, basketball and every other sport: “I say to them, “Sharpen your skills, recruit better, go get the LDS players and supplement them with the non-LDS kids who fit. They’re out there. We can be, we have to be successful.’”

Winning becomes a habit

Holmoe has always had to be successful, and usually made good on his requirement. The few exceptions along his path have been personally painful, anomalies that go on bothering him. He reflects on his life through sports, through victory, all the way back to his grammar school flag-football team, the one at Monte Vista Elementary in La Crescenta, Calif., that was undefeated and un-scored upon.

“People ask me all the time which of all the teams I played on was my favorite,” he says. “It might be that Monte Vista team. We learned to win. We played in jerseys and helmets on asphalt. It was a rough sport. We practiced hard. I still remember the players and coaches. We were so, so good.”

Um, Holmoe also won three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers and four conference championships at BYU. But the mighty Monte Vista Monsters were so, so good. Point is, losing, from the beginning, was and is counter to his self-identity. It is not in his DNA, not in his plans moving forward for BYU, not in the book by which he lives his professional life.

That book — “Finding the Winning Edge,” co-authored by Bill Walsh, the legendary 49ers coach, an innovative, detail-oriented man for whom Holmoe played and coached, who influenced him as much as anyone — sits on the desk in the athletic director’s office, the principles therein often read, often referenced, often reflected upon, sometimes replicated.

The 500-page volume features Walsh’s actions, philosophies, notes and procedures as a coach, right down to minutes of meetings and lectures he led and presented to those great San Francisco teams.

“I know everything that’s in there,” Holmoe says.

On the book’s front page is a handwritten note to Holmoe that reads: “For Tom, good luck to a fine player, a fine coach, and a lasting friend — Bill Walsh.”

When an anecdote is relayed to Holmoe from a visitor, reminding him of the time Walsh was interviewed for a previous profile on his protege, showering Holmoe with compliments and kind words, the plumbing in the typically composed AD’s eyes backs up, the room apparently filling with dust.

Such was the connection between the two men.

Just like in his years at BYU, Holmoe was never the best player on the 49ers. He wasn’t even a starter. Drafted in the fourth round in 1982, he was a nickel back who also backed up All-Pro safety Ronnie Lott. But Walsh showed him the same respect he showed Lott, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and the rest. Holmoe remembers Walsh telling him: “You treat everybody as though you were going to trade places with them.”

Walsh, who later hired Holmoe as his assistant at Stanford, taught him the importance of being inclusive with all his players and with all the other team employees, from the president to trainers to custodians. “Everybody belonged,” Holmoe says. “If you played your role, you were part of the family. If you didn’t, you were gone.”

All backgrounds, all ethnicities, all races, all sexual orientations were welcomed to the family. Walsh hired Harry Edwards, the noted sociologist and civil rights activist, as a team adviser, trying to bridge any gaps that existed on his team, and started programs for minority coaches at 49ers preseason camps, programs that have blossomed in the 30 years since around the NFL, where access and tutoring takes place.

That openness had a permanent, profound effect on Holmoe. He is the AD who hired Kalani Sitake, the first Tongan Division I head football coach.

Chad Lewis, an assistant Cougar athletic directer, says his boss to this day “wraps his arms around everyone.”

Lott once said of Holmoe: “You can have a discussion with him and walk away feeling better, feeling like this is a good, good guy. If there’s an Opie out there, Tom’s it.”

Lost — and then found

After he retired as a player, Holmoe gained acclaim as an assistant coach at BYU, Stanford, the 49ers, and Cal, before he became the lead dog at Berkeley, which was an unmitigated failure. He could not win there, getting tangled in an academic mess among a couple of players, and was then fired.

Holmoe came to trace his Cal crash to an attempt to copy in a melded way two of his biggest mentors — Walsh and LaVell Edwards. He was not Walsh, was not Edwards, and he couldn’t be them.

“I got lost,” he says. “I wasn’t me. I’ve thought about it for years. My ego was shattered. I had messed things up pretty bad.”

He learned subsequently to take some of those coaches’ methodologies and implement them into his own version of leadership: Tom being Tom.

That’s what he’s done at BYU, where he was first hired as a fundraiser and later ascended to the AD’s chair 13 years ago. Since that time, he’s rearranged his department and established relationships with power-brokers around college sports, including as a fourth-year member of the NCAA Basketball Selection Committee.

Bruce Rasmussen, the athletic director at Creighton and the chairman of the men’s NCAA Tournament Selection Committee, says Holmoe has gained great sway with ADs around the country: “It’s rare in today’s age to have an athletic director who has seen the business from a professional sports perspective, as an NFL player and coach, and as a college player and coach, and as an administrator. He’s got the trifecta — passion, intelligence and character. He’s unbelievably respected.”

Says Holmoe: “When I got the job, I thought, ‘You’re a lucky sucker. This is a good job.’ But I was ready. At BYU, I remind and ask myself all the time: ‘What do you want to do?’”

What he wants to do is raise the profile of BYU sports to new levels, first and foremost with football and secondarily with basketball. That was part of the reason BYU went independent in football seven years ago, stuffing most of its other sports in the West Coast Conference.

That decision has stirred challenges, many of which fall into Holmoe’s lap.

Scheduling for football is difficult: “November will always be tough,” he says. “Once you get into conference play, even the Group of 5 don’t want to get out of the rhythm of league games. Their conferences won’t let them.”

That results in front-loaded slates, such as this season’s brutality, with LSU, Utah, Wisconsin, Boise State and Mississippi State, and then a tapering off into inconsequential games against opponents that excite nobody.

It’s a lopsided situation Holmoe says he will live with, even as his team presently gets crushed early and goes against softies down the stretch, with the whole idea being to catch up to and beat the P5 teams, without those advantages of belonging, in the seasons ahead, at least enough to show that the Cougars do belong. He does not believe returning to, say, the Mountain West is a good idea.

A helping hand

ESPN has been helpful in giving BYU the opportunities it craves.

“The two pillars we built independence on are exposure and access,” he says. “We have that with ESPN. This works for us. The exposure part is huge. And the money is better than what we had before.”

Holmoe hints that the ESPN deal, signed with BYU from independence’s onset, a move he oversaw, will be renewed in the near future.

If he had to guess, does he really think that renewal will happen?

“I wouldn’t guess.”

Do you know?

“We’re close to an extension,” he says, with the face of a poker player. “That’s what we want. That’s what they want.”

If that deal gets done, again, the issue is not exposure. Rather, it’s the sort of exposure that’s actually beneficial to BYU. Losing to LSU without crossing midfield, getting slapped around by Wisconsin does Cougar football little good in enticing a major conference to invite them in, or in building the school’s brand. On the other hand, Holmoe mentions a list of P5 teams BYU has beaten, including Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi State.

“It’s important for us to get into a P5 league,” he says. “That’s where the best competition is, that’s where the money is. We want to be with the best.”

Time is running short, though, because over the long haul the Cougars risk falling further behind as the gap between the haves and the have-nots widens, instead of nurturing or substantiating hope that it will somehow close.

“There’s a separation, there’s a time out there when we wouldn’t be able to compete,” he says. “It makes it harder and harder, the longer it goes. It comes to a point where you couldn’t compete. Do the math.”

With some P5 league members getting $45 million extra a year in TV money alone on account of their conference affiliation, the math is indeed unfriendly.

Holmoe marvels at those P5 teams that never take advantage of the increased money they get. They compete at no higher level, at least not in terms of success, and in some cases at a lower level, than BYU. The programs at college football’s pinnacle — Ohio State and Alabama and Texas — have departmental budgets that hover around $170 million. That’s out of sight for BYU, but the Cougars manage — via booster donations, sponsorships and ticket sales — to do what they do with substantially less — for the time being.

“It’s enough for us to compete,” Holmoe says, declining to get specific.

But to gain access to a P5 league, he knows they must improve, win more, and go beyond puckering their lips and batting their eyes. They must prove to conferences that they have much to offer.

Deciphering the Code

When the Big 12 spurned BYU, Holmoe was surprised: “Going in, I was confident,” he says. “We had a really good proposal. When the Big 12 decided not to do anything, we didn’t see that coming. I just felt like we had something good going here. When we went through the process, we were stronger than I thought we were. Going to powerful people, alums, we realized, we’ve got something great here. People say, we got rejected. I don’t look at it like that. It was the wrong time, that’s all. We’re not weak, we’re strong.”

Stronger, they must get.

Holmoe says the peripheral issues that emerged in the bid process, such as BYU’s stance towards LGBTQ students and groups, and the Honor Code, actually helped the school face down some of its shortcomings and make adjustments.

“When that all went down, I said, “Let’s deal with the problems,’” he says. “If people wanted to have those conversations, we had them — with LGBT groups and others. We said, ‘Talk to us.’ And we listened. It wasn’t all public, but we took a deep look at ourselves and examined some of the critiques and we faced them. We took them to heart. We progressed. We strengthened ourselves.”

Some skeptics believe the school’s Honor Code, with its ban on alcohol and drugs and premarital sex, and the way it is enforced, will forever hold BYU back, severely limiting recruitment of great players.

How many exceptionally athletic, milkshake-slurping Boy Scouts are there?

Holmoe concedes that only players — both LDS and non-LDS — who fit at BYU will or should come here. But he disagrees that the code is overly restrictive or harsh.

“I’ve been involved with every case,” he says. “There’s a lot of mercy here. If I had my way, there would be even more mercy. But I’m aligned with it. I believe in what the Honor Code does. Every case is handled individually. Ninety-eight percent of the students here say one of the reasons they come is because of the environment. Some parents of kids who aren’t LDS want this environment for them. I don’t buy that BYU can’t succeed because of the Honor Code.”

When it comes to hiring coaches, Holmoe says the school’s requirement for head coaches to be LDS members shrinks the pool, but top administrators want student-athletes who seek guidance in spiritual matters — going on church missions, getting married, having kids, etc. — to grasp everything in the religion’s mix. Non-LDS assistant coaches, Holmoe says, which are permitted and encouraged, play a huge role in adding diversity and a broader view to athletes’ experiences.

Holmoe would know. He came to BYU in 1978 as a non-Mormon who leaned on non-Mormon coaches to make his way through. He converted to the faith later, but sees the value in his roots.

“Diversity is important to me,” he says. “If kids want to come to BYU, and they’re not LDS, it’s our responsibility to make it great for them. We’ll be better for it.”

Leaving a legacy

While Holmoe aims to handle coming business — upgrades to LaVell Edwards Stadium, and such — he says priority No. 1 for him is the welfare of the 631 student-athletes at BYU: “I go out of my way to meet them, to see them. That’s the best thing I can do. That’s what matters most.”

Lewis, a former Cougar and Pro Bowl tight end, describes Holmoe as a wise-to-the-world, open-minded man “who can relate to all and any student-athletes, no matter what their backgrounds. Tom is perfect for that.”

One more goal is to pass the whole sports shebang on to the next AD stronger than it was before: “That’s why I don’t look back, only forward,” the 57-year-old says. “I’ll do this as long as I’m feisty and I can fight.”

To those inside and outside the BYU community who see only gloomy doom ahead for Cougar sports, Holmoe has a different message. He sees a time when BYU will find common ground with and be welcomed in among P5 schools, when it will compete in football and basketball and all sports with the best and beat the best, too. He says the firepower and infrastructure are in place to accommodate that kind of upward and forward move.

“We just have to keep fighting,” he says. “I don’t know if it will happen or when it will happen. But I’m not planning on it not happening. Let someone else do that.”

GORDON MONSON hosts “The Big Show with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone.