It's December 21st and with college bowl season in full swing, let's go back to 1984 for a very interesting Holiday Bowl.

This edition of the Holiday bowl was interesting as much for what happened leading up to this game as what happened during the game.

BYU was the only undefeated team in the country in 1984 and were the top ranked team.

As the champs of the wac, BYU was obligated to play in the Holiday bowl at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego.

Now a few things here.

The wac, not a power conference.

The Cougars had run through the league with very little resistance.

They'd only played one ranked team all season and that was an out of conference game.

And it was their first game of the year against a highly overrated pit team.

Was ranked third at the start of the year, but they ended up with only three wins by the end of it.

So really they did not play a single ranked team.

The Holiday bowl was not an attractive destination for a lot of other teams.

I mean, San Diego is nice, but it was never going to have the prestige of a New Year's Day bowl.

That, along with a miniscule $500,000 guarantee to the opposing team, made it difficult to find an opponent for byu.

Seven teams, including Boston College and newly minted Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie, declined the invitation.

BYU considered buying their way out of the contract to go play in the Fiesta bowl, but then they opted to stay.

Finally, a 65 Michigan Wolverine team agreed to play the Cougars.

This was a Michigan team that had struggled with injuries.

Starting quarterback Jim Harbaugh broke his arm in the fifth game of the year and the Wolverines struggled under backups Russ Ryan and Chris Zurbrick.

So even if BYU won the Holiday Bowl, a lot of pollsters were not really pumped to vote the Cougars as the national champs.

Due to all of these factors, things did not start great for BYU on this night either.

Quarterback Robbie Bosco, who would finish third in the Heisman voting in 1985, threw an interception on the Cougars first possession.

And then when he got hit on a roughing the passer call by Michigan, he suffered a knee ligament strain and he had to leave the game for a couple of possessions.

When he did return, he fumbled the ball into the end zone and Michigan recovered for a touchback.

That would be one of the stories on this day.

BYU had six turnovers, three fumbles and three interceptions.

Despite that, BYU was only down seven in the fourth quarter.

The Cougars went on an eight play 80 yard drive and tied it up with this play.

Bosto has the team set.

He's back to throw again.

Case looks, throws for the end zone knockdown.

A tremendous belt and shot by Grabowski.

With under two minutes to play, BYU had the football and a chance to close it out.

With Bosco still hobbling around from his first quarter injury, he found a way third down play.

Bosco looking.

Samuel throws it.

Touchdown.

A Cougar interception of a Zurbrig pass sealed the win and they escaped with the 2417 victory.

So a struggling error filled win over a very average Michigan team did not really improve their resume.

So the Cougars had to wait until all the New Year's Day bowl games were played out to find out what the voters would say.

Well, the biggest bowl game to watch was the Orange Bowl.

Featuring no.

2 Oklahoma and no.

4 Washington, the Huskies beat the Sooners 28 17.

Now if the Sooners had won that game, there's a strong feeling that the pollsters would have leapfrogged them over BYU and crowned Oklahoma as the national champs.

So when it came time to vote, BYU received 38 of the 60 first place votes and held onto the top spot and were the consensus national champions.

The Washington Huskies got 16 first place votes and finished second.

With BYU in essence wrapping up the national championship on December 21, it's the only time the eventual national champion played in a bowl game prior to New Year's Day.

Let's go to 2003 and a wild finish in the NFL with what became known as the River City Relay.

The New Orleans Saints still had playoff aspirations, but in order to fulfill those, they needed to win their final two games of the regular season.

Well, here in week 16, for the first of those two, their backs were against the wall.

Trailing 20 to 13 with seven seconds left, the Saints had the ball on their own 25.

Aaron Brooks had a strong arm, but a 75 yard Hail Mary was not in his arsenal.

But that didn't mean they didn't have some ammo left.

Here's Kurt Mine with the call for Fox that day.

Seven seconds to go, Brooks.

Dante Stallworth catches it, stays in bounds.

He's going to have to score on this one and he's got a chance getting a couple of blocks.

Ladles it over to Michael Lewis, back to Mallister still alive.

And they got Jerome P with the catch.

He dives into the end zone for the touchdown.

What a play to keep your season alive.

75 yards and the score.

The only thing missing was the Stanford band.

As Jack Buck once said, I don't believe what I just saw.

Well, what happened following that touchdown had New Orleans Saints fans asking that same question.

Video review confirmed all the laterals were legal.

And so now the Saints just needed the always reliable John Carney to kick the extra point.

He had not missed one in four years.

Here's Jim Henderson's call for the New Orleans Saints Radio Network.

All sorts of incredible plays along the line for the Saints to stay alive pending the extra point by John Carney.

And he missed.

No, he missed the extra point wide right.

Oh, my God.

How could he do that?

This one is over as John Carney misses his first extra point of the season.

Oh, the heartbreak is so evident in Henderson's call.

Disbelief, rage, disappointment.

The Saints beat the Dallas Cowboys the following week to finish 8.

8.

With that one unanswerable question, what if always lingering.

On this day in 1891, basketball was born.

There was a fresh blanket of snow covering Springfield, Massachusetts that day.

A blizzard a few days prior coupled with a frigidly cold temperature outside meant folks were mostly stuck indoors.

And the young men at the YMCA training school were getting restless.

The roughhousing in the halls was escalating.

Tempers were teetering on the edge, and nothing could be said to calm them down.

A few activities were attempted.

A game of Drop the Handkerchief, which was a forerunner to Duck, Duck, Goose, did nothing.

How about a modified game of football in the gym?

Well, that didn't work out either.

So James Naismith, who was the new physical education instructor there, said he needed to do something different and something fast.

This 30 year old Canadian remembered a game that he played as a kid called Duck on a Rock, which featured a good sized rock placed on a large stone with a man guarding it.

Others threw their rocks at the placed rock, trying to knock it off.

Combining elements of that game along with rugby and lacrosse, he came up with an idea for a new game.

He asked the custodian for two square boxes, but all the custodian could find were a couple of peach baskets.

Naismith mounted those peach baskets to the lower rail of the gymnasium's balcony at opposite ends, which happened to be 10ft off the floor.

He cleared everything off the floor, grabbed a soccer ball, divided a group of 18 into two teams of nine and explained the object was to get the ball into the opposing team's basketball.

That was it.

Naismith blew his whistle and the first game was underway.

And that first game was rough.

In an interview 48 years later, Naismith said the boys tackled, kicked and punched each other.

One boy was knocked out cold.

Several had black eyes and there was one with a dislocated shoulder.

There needed to be some rules for this new game, so Naismith sat down later and he came up with 13 of them.

In January of 1892, Naismith's rules for the game he decided to call basketball was published in a newsletter and distributed to YMCAs across the country.

It became the fastest growing sport of all time.

Eventually the bottom of the basket was cut out and dribbling came along as an accepted way to advance the ball in 1901.

So today let's be thankful for James Naismith's game he invented on this day back in 1891, and also for the custodian not being able to find those square boxes that day.

Long live the peach basket.

And you can see the original of Naismith's 13 rules.

They are on display at the Debruce center on the campus of the University of Kansas.

From the origin of the game to the longest version of a collegiate basketball game, let's go back to 1981 when Cincinnati beat Bradley 7573 in seven overtime.

This was a battle of old rivals from the Missouri Valley Conference.

Cincinnati had departed to become a member of the Metro Conference.

And yeah, if you're thinking that 148 combined points is pretty low for a game that went on for 75 minutes, you are not wrong.

The game was tied at 61 at the end of regulation and from there it became a slowdown game.

Neither team scored more than four points in any of the five minute overtime periods and the third OT was scoreless.

Of course this was four years before the shot clock was introduced into the college game and the three pointer was not added for another six.

If a team did not have a layup or a 10 foot jumper, they just held onto it.

Prior to this one, the longest a basketball game had stretched on was six overtimes.

Niagara and Siena played a 6 0t affair in 1950 and Minnesota and Purdue played another one in 1955.

Well, this one nearly went to an eighth overtime, but Cincinnati's Doug Schlommer hit a double clutching jump shot with time running down to give the Bearcats the lead.

Bradley's Kerry Cook missed an 18 footer as time expired.

To end the madness.

Two guys, Cincinnati's Bobby Austin and Bradley's Donald Reese, played 73 of the 75 minutes, which is also a record for most minutes ever played by a player at an NCAA basketball game.

Time now for today's that ain't got nothing to do with sports.

Fun fact.

Say whaaaat?

And this one sort of fits with our final story in a roundabout way.

To make 1 minute 60 seconds of stop action footage for the movie the Nightmare Before Christmas, it took the 120 person crew an entire week.

What you talking about Willis?

Hey, this is Steve White, the host of this Day in Sports History.

Thanks for listening to this episode.

One quick thing.

I'm I'm up for an award.

I made the short list for the best sports Talk podcast in 2024 and there are some heavy hitters in this categories such as the Kelce Brothers, Scott Van Pelt, and Bill Rhoden.

Now there's not much hope for me winning this category against those guys, but if you're a fan of the show, then you may know that one of my favorite sports movies is Will Ferrell's Semi Pro and one of the things in that movie is his effort to get his team to finish in fourth place.

So I've kind of poached that idea and would love for you to help me finish in fourth place.

I put a link in the show notes that will take you to the page where you can vote.

You can only vote once in the category, so if you would cast your vote for my podcast, that would be awesome.

Appreciate it.

Have a great day.

I'll be back tomorrow.

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