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PROVO — It was the golden age of BYU sports. The late 1970s and early 1980s were to Cougar athletics what the '60s and '70s were to rock ’n’ roll.
In 1980, Jim McMahon threw a Hail Mary touchdown pass to complete a 20-point comeback in the final three minutes of the Holiday Bowl, later to be known as the Miracle Bowl. Three months later, Danny Ainge famously dribbled from one end of the court to the other to beat Notre Dame and send the Cougars to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament. Later that spring the BYU golf team won the NCAA championship.
The football team produced All-American and future NFL quarterbacks like an assembly line. After a half-century of futility, the Cougars won conference championships with boring regularity and in 1984 won the national championship. That same year BYU graduates Paul Cummings, Doug Padilla and Henry Marsh won the three distance races at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Los Angeles, and Ed Eyestone was the NCAA cross-country champion (a year later he would claim the triple crown of distance running by winning NCAA titles in cross-country and the 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs in track). Wally Joyner, Cory Snyder and Rick Aguilera made waves in the major leagues. McMahon won the Super Bowl. It seemed the run of BYU fortune would never end.
But it did.
[To read the full story go to DeseretNews.com](<http://www.ksl.com/ad_logger/ad_logger.php?location=https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865693183/The-rise-and-fall-An-inside-look-at-the-decline-of-BYUs-marquee-sports-programs.html&sponsor=The rise and fall: An inside look at the decline of BYU's marquee sports programs>).
