LaVell Edwards, who coached BYU from 1972 to 2000, died at the age of 86. He was of course the coach of the national champion 1984 BYU squad, which had an almost entirely White starting lineup and roster, in sharp contrast to today's program, and was widely disliked by the usual suspects in the media for that very reason.
Reading the AP obit on Edwards, I came across this: "Under Edwards, dizzying passing numbers became the norm, and college football fans stayed in front of their TVs late Saturday nights from the 1970s to the 1990s to see just how many points the Cougars could score. Jim McMahon, Steve Young, Ty Detmer and other quarterbacks flourished, and the Cougars grew in prominence, even being voted national champions in 1984."
Which got me to thinking, as it did back in the '80s and '90s as I watched a fair amount of BYU games -- quarterbacks like McMahon, Young and Detmer were widely praised and won numerous awards and were highly drafted and given every opportunity to succeed in the NFL -- but what about the White wide receivers who were catching their passes for all those points? Someone may be able to correct me, but I don't recall a single White BYU receiver being drafted in that same era, or given any opportunity at all in the NFL. Austin Collie, who played well after the Edwards regime, is the only one I can think of who was drafted, and he was head-hunted out of the league after showing loads of talent with the Colts.
It's like when Jake Plummer flourished at Arizona State, in large part because of the excellence of Keith Poole, but only Plummer received credit. But while Poole was at least drafted by the NFL (by the Saints in the 4th round in '97), he was always given the Caste treatment, even when he finished second in the NFL in yards per catch in 1999, the only season he was allowed significant playing time. (In that same '99 season, Tim Dwight led the league in yards per catch, Poole was second and Patrick Jeffers was third; the next year Dwight and Poole were demoted and Jeffers had his knee taken out in a preseason game, an injury which ended his career; such is the lot of White receivers and for that matter almost all White football players other than quarterbacks and o-linemen to some degree.)
Does anyone remember some of the White BYU receivers from back then? Not all were White, but most were. None received even a small fraction of the acclaim that McMahon, Young and Detmer did, so clearly only the quarterbacks "flourished" under Edwards' high-flying passing offense but none of the receivers.
