Jim McMahon said it best - the teams he and Steve Young were on in previous years would had easily beat the '84 team - and the Michigan team they beat despite a jillion turnovers was UM's worst team in memory before the R-Rod came to Ann Arbor. Problem is that year the #1 team went down virtually every week except for U-Dub, who just had a quality late season loss at USC. If not for the Sooner Schooner at the Orange Bowl - OU may had ended up champs this year - and look which two teams play each other in Dallas to open the year - karmic...

Appropos of nothing, the Bowl Coalition came before the Bowl Alliance.

A true mythical national champion.

yeah, yeah. been there before, but for old times sake I'll say it again: BYU had no control over their opponents records--Pitt was #3 when BYU beat them on the road; they did what they had to, they did all they could do. They beat the teams that were scheduled years prior. Sure, it would be more convincing if they had demolished them all (actually, they had been doing that for several years previously. '84 was a rebuilding year for them after Steve Young, Gordon Hudson, & several others graduated), and it would be nice if they played in a better conference. But everyone also wants to keep regional rivalries going (hence the USU game, among others)--y'know, the tradition & pagentry of college football schtick?--and if we're totally honest, the travel costs of playing in a bigger, farther away conference like the big 12 would be something of a problem. Tried it under the old 16 team WAC, and it didn't work out too well. The PAC 10 is probably the most do-able as far as reasonable geography, but the PAC 10 isn't interested in expanding. So what. Sound and fury signifying nothing. As for '84, Washington had its shot at BYU, having been invited to play in that Holiday Bowl. They passed, as did other teams, opting for bigger cash pay-outs in higher profile bowls. I don't blame them for that, but by the same token, don't hold BYU's bowl game opponent against them. Michigan was the best the Holiday Bowl could get. Everybody was anxious to diss BYU, but few wanted to tangle with them when given the chance. Doesn't that say something? Maybe even just a little? We'll never know what the results would have been if Washington had accepted, but based on the '85 BYU-UW game results (31-3, BYU), I'd say the odds would have been decent for BYU to open a few eyes. That BYU squad had several all-Americans on both sides of the ball, was led by a Heisman contender (Bosco finished 3rd), and put around a dozen players in the NFL; they were better than many will ever give them credit for. The shame is they never got a chance to really find out how good they might have been. And neither did Utah in '04 & '08, or '06 BSU. Sure, as a whole the WAC & MTW can't compare to the 'big 6', and they know it. (Actually, the 'big 4.5'. the Big Least is no better, and the ACC of late is suspect.) But that doesn't mean that in any given year they can't field a team that could compete and deserves a fair shot at the title, no matter what their conference's record. Just because BYU, BSU or Utah was no good in 1968 doesn't mean they can't be relevant now. Or in 1984.

For those of you who subscribe to the Bryant Gumbel "Bo-Diddley Tech" school of thought (BYU didn't deserve the 1984 national championship because UW played a tougher schedule and are the REAL '84 nat'l champs), I offer the following.
If you compare 1984 schedule to Washington's 1984 schedule, and compare the W-L records of their opponents, there is very little difference.
Some of the highlights of the comparison:
Average record of UW opponents - 5.4 wins, 5.8 losses
Average record of BYU opponents - 4.7 wins, 6.5 losses
Average UW margin of victory - 16.9 pts
Average BYU margin of victory - 20.7 pts
UW beat 5 teams that finished with a winning record
BYU beat 4 teams that finished with a winning record
BYU beat some bad teams (3-7-1 Pitt, 3-8 CSU, 2-9 UTEP, 1-10 Utah State)
UW beat some bad teams (2-9 Northwestern, 4-7 Miami, 2-9 Oregon St., 2-9 Cal). Some will argue that a 2-9 Cal is better than a 2-9 UTEP because Cal is in the Pac-10, but both are AWFUL teams, so arguing which is worse is absolute nonsense.
UW lost to the only good team they played (USC)
BYU didn't lose.
In 1984 BYU and UW had one common opponent - MICHIGAN. UW beat them at the beginning of the year by 9 points, and BYU beat them at the end of the year by 7. People who criticize BYU for struggling to beat Michigan seem to conveniently forget that UW didn't exactly beat them into the ground DURING THE SAME SEASON. The argument that MI was ranked when beaten by UW is meaningless, because Pitt was ranked #3 when BYU beat them at Pitt. Neither Michigan nor Pitt turned out to be very good, so neither UW nor BYU should get much credit for the road win against a "ranked" opponent.
The bottom line is that UW played a slightly tougher schedule, but BYU won their games by a larger margin than did UW, which would be the expected result if BYU was as good as their record indicates (a good team should have a higher M.O.V.). If BYU was struggling to beat these "nobody" schools, then maybe the lousy schedule argument would hold water, but they didn't, and the argument is empty.
There are two reasons UW has no claim to the 1984 National Championship:
1) They LOST to USC
2) They turned down the chance to prove it on the field when they chose to play OK instead of BYU in their bowl game.

Another interesting fact: Oklahoma was offered the chance to play BYU in one of the open the season classics in 1985. In spite of all his complaining about BYU's poor strength of schedule the prior year, Barry Switzer refused the opportunity, saying: "We already have a tough schedule, we shouldn't have to play the world"

I wonder which genius decided to give them a national championship, especially when all of the big time teams were either young or had a lot of injuries, so that pretty much deflates that argument for BYU.