The old Mission Valley stadium was reduced to rubble three years ago. A gravel parking lot sits now where San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium stood. Listen closely on a crisp evening, though, and you might still hear the cheers that echoed throughout the stadium the night 40 years ago when a national championship was decided.

BYU’s 24-17 victory over Michigan in the 1984 Holiday Bowl capped the Cougars’ 13-0 season and earned them the mythical national championship. The game remains one of San Diego’s most significant sporting events. It involved something that never happened before. It may never happen again, though this year’s expanded 12-team playoff at least provides an opportunity for anyone to play for the championship.

“Not many days go by where it’s not talked about or people want to ask about how it felt,” BYU quarterback Robbie Bosco said this week. “It means everything.

“There’s not a lot of teams that have won national championships. To be part of that history means a lot to the program, it means a lot to us as players and coaches and the community and our amazing fan base.”

BYU coach LaVell Edwards didn’t hoist a crystal trophy over his head while being showered in confetti when the Cougars won the 1984 national title.

Neither Edwards nor anyone else was certain BYU was the No.1 team in the country after beating Michigan.

Confirmation would not come for two weeks. By then, Edwards was 500 miles removed from the victory that completed BYU’s 13-0 season, leaving the Cougars as the only undefeated major college team in the country.

Edwards was coaching a practice for the East-West Shrine game in Palo Alto when word came that BYU was voted No. 1 in both The Associated Press and UPI polls.

There was no one around to hug or high-five.

“I don’t think anybody there cared two cents about it,” Edwards, who died in 2016, told the Union-Tribune 10 years ago. “But by the time I got home everybody was very enthusiastic about it.”

Rising to the top

BYU was unranked at the start of the 1984 season, rose to the top of the rankings with 12 straight regular-season victories and stayed there with a season-ending bowl win. Over the past four decades, no other team from a Group of Five school has won the national title.

Controversy swirled well before the Holiday Bowl kickoff. BYU’s strength of schedule was greatly questioned in the national media.

“Today” host Bryant Gumbel asked: “How can BYU be ranked No. 1? Who’d they play — Bo Diddley Tech?”

The most vocal critic was Barry Switzer. The coach of No. 2-ranked Oklahoma stumped for his Sooners, although Oklahoma would lose to No. 3-ranked Washington in the New Year’s Day Orange Bowl. After the season, the town of Midvale, Utah, named its sewage treatment facility in honor of Switzer.

Holiday Bowl officials had trouble simply finding an opponent for the Cougars for a game played four days before Christmas.

“We naively thought the chance to play the No. 1 team in the country would interest just about anybody,” John Reid, who was the Holiday Bowl’s executive director from 1980-2000, told the Union-Tribune in 2014.

Reid said the bowl “made moves on a whole host of people,” like Boston College (with Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Doug Flutie), Iowa, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Tennessee, USC, Washington and Wisconsin.

Most of the schools went for bigger paydays than the $470,000 then offered by the Holiday Bowl. Washington received $2 million to play Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. Several schools declined because of conflicts with final exams.

“Everybody was off the table who had a decent record or decent ranking,” Reid said. “The team that was still out there was Michigan. … Our hope was that by the time the game rolled around, people would forget their 6-5 record and realize it is Michigan, a traditional powerhouse. That’s the way it turned out. It worked very well for us.”

The Wolverines likely would have had a better record had starting quarterback Jim Harbaugh not been hurt early in the year. Injuries hit hard that season in the Michigan quarterbacks room. Chris Zurbrugg, who began the season No. 5 on the depth chart, started against BYU.

Contrast that to BYU’s Bosco, who led the country in passing yardage with 322.9 yards a game. In fact, BYU led the nation in total offense with 446 yards and scoring with 36 points a game. While the Cougars were known for their offensive output, they also had a top 20 defense that limited opponent to 14 points a game.

Drawing a crowd

The game sold out six weeks early and drew a crowd of 61,243, nearly 10,000 more fans than any of the previous gatherings since the game’s 1978 debut.

Previous Holiday Bowls drew coverage primarily from local newspapers and those who covered the participating teams. Newspaper reporters from Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Miami, Denver, Dallas, Cincinnati and San Francisco were among those credentialed for this game.

“It elevated our stature a great deal,” Reid said.

Bosco completed 30 of 42 passes for 343 yards and two fourth-quarter touchdowns against Michigan in one of the more gutsy performances anyone can recall. The quarterback suffered injuries to his left knee and ankle midway through the first quarter on a late hit by Michigan’s Mike Hammerstein.

“I tried to get up, thinking, ‘Don’t get hurt now,’ but I couldn’t stand up,” said Bosco, who was carried off the field to the locker room.

Bosco asked medical personnel about the seriousness of his injury while being examined.

“The biggest thing is I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to be a career-ending injury if I went back in,” Bosco said. “When they said it wouldn’t be, I just told them to tape it up as tight as they could. As I came back on the field, I heard a big roar. That helped motivate me to get back in there, but just being out there with my team was probably the biggest adrenaline rush I had.”

“Even as I was warming up, I wasn’t sure I could play. I had a hard time planting on my leg.”

‘I’m going back in’

That didn’t stop Bosco from telling BYU quarterbacks coach Mike Holmgren: “I’m going back in.”

Bosco took snaps from the shotgun when he returned, something he had not done all season, so that he didn’t have to drop back in the pocket.

BYU overcame three fumbles, three interceptions and a blocked field goal in the game. The Cougars had a 10-7 halftime lead, but Michigan scored 10 unanswered points in the second half and had a 17-10 advantage one minute into the fourth quarter.

Bosco threw a 7-yard touchdown pass to Carlsbad’s Glen Kozlowski with 10:51 remaining to make it 17-17. The BYU defense, which limited Michigan to 202 total yards, made a stop to get the ball back late after Bosco’s third interception.

“The biggest key to that game is our defense played so well,” said Bosco, who delivered a 13-yard TD pass to Kelly Smith with 1:23 remaining for the game-winning score. “We just made plays down the stretch when we needed to. Whether it was third-and-8 or fourth-and-10, we had been in all those situations before. When we had to make plays, we made plays.”

Edwards couldn’t believe Bosco was able to pull it off.

“He’s out there limping around and we had to go on an 80-yard drive the last few minutes,” Edwards said. “I wasn’t thinking so much about the national championship at that time but just having an undefeated season.”

Additional inspiration

BYU linebacker Leon White was named Defensive MVP after collecting seven tackles, including two sacks of Zurbrugg. White, who starred at Helix High School, was motivated beyond the quest for an undefeated year.

White’s father, James White, was diagnosed with cancer before the season.

“The doctors were saying he had a few months to live, so he may not even be able to see me play again,” White recalled this week. “That whole season was really me trying to help our team get back to the Holiday Bowl so he could have one more chance to see me play.”

James White’s illness had progressed to the point where he couldn’t watch the game from the stands. Family friend Becky Charles, a nurse helping out with White’s dad, came up with the idea of getting him on the field. Bowl and stadium officials worked together so that James White could watch on the sidelines from a gurney lifted high enough off the ground that he could see over the players.

“He was about the 20- or 30-yard line,” White said. “Had the best seat in the house. …

“Usually after a series the defense comes to the sidelines and meets with the coach about what we needed to do. My coach, Ken Schmidt, said, ‘Leon, you don’t need to talk to us. Go over and be with your dad.’ Every series I would come off to the sidelines and my dad would talk to me, encourage me and tell me what I needed to do. That was huge for me.”

After the game, White hugged his father before rejoining his teammates for the victory celebration.

“It was a special experience for our family,” he said. “It was something that gave me inspiration. I credit that to getting me defensive player of the game. Every time I looked over and saw my dad there and how strong he was, it gave me strength. You couldn’t stop me that night.”

Vote goes their way

Bosco said Edwards constantly told the team “not to worry about the things we can’t control. One of those was voting, people voting on how they feel. We went out there and did everything we had to, and it was in their hands. We felt pretty confident that we should be No. 1, and I think the right thing happened.”

BYU received 38 of 60 first-place votes in the AP writers’ poll and 28 of 40 first-place votes in the UPI coaches’ poll. Washington (11-1) finished second in both polls. Florida (9-1-1), Nebraska (10-2) and Boston College (10-2) rounded out the top five in the AP. Nebraska, Boston College and Oklahoma State (10-2) finished 3-4-5 in the UPI poll.

White said he was still on campus when news came that BYU was No. 1.

“I was waiting, hoping that they’d make the right decision,” he said. “When they did, Provo was rocking that day.”

Bosco, back at his parents’ home in the Northern California town of Roseville, said: “I remember my dad waking me up in the morning and saying, ‘Hey, you guys are No. 1.’ “

“The greatest thing for us is we had that opportunity, and we took full advantage of it. We were the only undefeated team that year. If there was another team that was undefeated, we probably wouldn’t have won it all. Because of that, we were voted No.1, and rightfully so.”