Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Salt Lake Tribune: Former Bear at home in Cougars' den

BYU's Holmoe: His stint at Berkeley was a disaster

By Kurt Kragthorpe

LAS VEGAS - He could see it coming in the middle of the season, when the Brigham Young University football team started winning regularly and California began losing.   "Wouldn't it be funny?" Tom Holmoe remembers thinking.  "Well," he said, "here it is."   It's BYU vs. Cal in Thursday's Las Vegas Bowl, and it's funny - as in coincidental, and slightly weird - for Holmoe to be participating in his first bowl game as BYU's athletic director, while facing the team he once coached with very little success.  The circumstances brought about by the bowl's contracts with the Mountain West and Pacific 10 conferences are forcing Holmoe to look back on those five seasons in Berkeley and answer questions about what went wrong - at the same time he enjoys what's going right in Provo.   At this time last year, Holmoe was part of a transition team operating BYU's athletic program. He was the point man in the school's move from former football coach Gary Crowton to Bronco Mendenhall, who has improved things just enough to get the Cougars into a bowl game with a 6-5 record.   That's nothing like what Cal coach Jeff Tedford did with the Golden Bears immediately after replacing Holmoe. Tedford took Cal from 1-10 in Holmoe's final season to 7-5, then 8-6, 10-2 and 7-4.   Naturally, Holmoe can look at Tedford's success a couple of ways: with pride, for having recruited capable players, or as an indictment of his coaching ability.

"At first, I didn't know what to think," he acknowledged Tuesday, while watching BYU's practice session at a Las Vegas high school.  But as the years go by, and his administrative career takes shape and his 12-43 coaching record becomes less and less meaningful, he's glad Tedford could give Holmoe's recruits some rewards.   "I knew they had pretty good talent; that's why I left," Holmoe said. "It's a long story, but we weren't winning, and there was something missing, and I couldn't be ignorant to that fact. I'd recruited all those kids, and I wanted them to have success. It wasn't working."    It's working in Berkeley now. A handful of Holmoe's last group of Cal recruits still plays for the Bears. One of them, All-America center Marvin Philip, started several games as a freshman in 2000 before serving an LDS Church mission and returning to anchor one of college football's top rushing offenses.

Not long after being forced out at Cal, following a 2001 season that included a 44-16 loss to BYU, Holmoe returned to the school where he had played defensive back in the early 1980s, becoming an athletic fund-raiser. And now, he's running the department - a job that has involved hiring coaches in the two highest-profile sports, football and men's basketball.  The Cougars' immediate future appears far less tumultuous. Thursday, Holmoe will witness a rejuvenation of BYU's football program as some 25,000 Cougar fans help fuel the first sellout (40,000-plus) in Las Vegas Bowl history. "I'm glad to see people responding," he said.   And if the Cougars' breakthrough after three losing seasons brings them face to face with the school that drove Holmoe out of coaching and into administration, that's OK with him. Mendenhall seems motivated by Holmoe's Cal connection, citing "underlying significance" in wanting to win the game for his boss.   But after three weeks of talking about old times, Holmoe sounds ready to move forward. BYU vs. Cal "is not really about me," he said. "It's a weird thing; I'm not playing, I'm not coaching

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