Gordon Monson: At BYU, retiring AD Tom Holmoe did what 49er great Bill Walsh instructed and expected him to do

The voice on the other end of the phone belonged to a man who was one of the most innovative and enlightened football coaches of all time, an NFL Hall of Famer. And with great enthusiasm, he wanted to talk about Tom Holmoe.

“Anything to do with Tom, I’d love to be a part of,” Bill Walsh said.

And so, he was, heaping praise on his protege.

When the BYU athletic director was told what Walsh said, let’s just say the room got real dusty real quick.

With the 49ers, Walsh had won three Super Bowls, Holmoe in the lineup as a defensive back and later he joined the Niners as an assistant coach. Walsh also hired him as his assistant at Stanford. Walsh was a studious, meticulous, uncompromising, brilliant professor of football — one of the first coaches to be labeled a “genius” — who had no time, no need, no desire, no inclination to suffer fools. Impressing the master was no easy task.

But Tom Holmoe managed to do exactly that — with Walsh and with a whole lot of others, particularly at and around BYU, where he hacked a trail through the complicated matters of college sports at a school with extra layers of complication for 20 years as its AD. It’s not easy leading an athletic department with authoritative religiosity up top, down low and all around.

Holmoe, 64, decided on and announced his own retirement — as it should be for a professional as accomplished as he — on Tuesday, effective at the end of the 2024-25 collegiate sports year. He’s done enough to feel pretty much filled up as a football man and as an administrator who ran a 220-member department, overseeing 21 sports and some 600 athletes, a number of which won championships of assorted kinds.

He’s been proud of that, he once told me as he punched up a cushion seeking and finding a comfortable place to sit in his spacious office. Over on his desk was a book co-written by … Walsh. On the first page of the 500-page tome, called “Finding the Winning Edge,” was scribbled a note from the author. It read: “For Tom, good luck to a fine player, a fine coach, a lasting friend.”

Said Holmoe, with an expression of utter satisfaction on his mug: “I know everything written in this book.”

Blowing past just BYU pride, though, Holmoe said after so many years he’s felt a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of fulfillment in helping along not just coaches and quarterbacks whose names most readers would recognize, but also thousands of hurdlers and outfielders and setters and strikers and divers and shot-putters and vaulters you’ve never heard of, but who worked at their own pursuits equally as hard.

“Everybody’s important,” Holmoe told me once while scarfing a slice of pie at a corner table on the second floor of a Provo pizza joint.

In most cases, people have come first for the athletic director — “He wraps his arms around everyone,” assistant AD Chad Lewis said — followed closely by issues of the day, issues that shot out of a water cannon at the administrator. At BYU, he hired and fired coaches, he dealt with faculty, he helped athletes through honor code troubles, he considered independence for the football program, he stuffed the basketball team for a time in the West Coast Conference, where it was an awkward fit, he filled out football schedules, he danced through the ecclesiastical peculiarities of BYU, he worked to get his school’s athletics into the Big 12, failing a few times, he cheered on Cougars in a wide variety of sports, he lived and died with the outcomes of big games. And, as mentioned, some of his teams won championships, both conference and national.

Throughout, he was a proponent of keeping the Utah-BYU rivalry alive in football and basketball, even as some powers on the Utah side preferred not to play the traditional games.

Three years after taking over as AD in 2005, as the Utah football program was climbing upward, Holmoe said this of his rival: “You better respect them. The relationship counts. It matters. Some people say they don’t pay attention to Utah. I do.”

Holmoe wanted to replicate what the Utes achieved when they got into the Pac-12. As BYU rose up at times in independence and at times fell flat, he said: “We’ve got to get better. We can’t use not being in a P5 league as an excuse.”

Shortly after the Cougars got shellacked 27-0 by LSU in the Superdome back in 2017 on national television, Holmoe expressed as much determination as he did anger, saying: “This isn’t good enough. I say to the coaches, sharpen your skills, recruit better, go get the LDS players and supplement them with the non-LDS kids who fit. They’re out there. We can be, we have to be successful.”

But the road en route was occasionally as much a pie-in-the-face as it was pie-in-the-sky. Whoever’s idea it was for BYU to leave the Mountain West for independence in football and to enter the WCC in basketball had half a mind to shove BYU’s major sports to lunacy’s edge.

“The WCC is a great fit for us,” Holmoe said when it happened in 2010, looking as though someone who had much more power than him had a knife to his throat. “And we’re a great fit for them.”

Even an individual of honesty can’t always tell the truth, especially not in dark, desperate times.

As BYU flailed as it tried to entice a power league to invite it in, Holmoe remained upbeat, at least publicly, as he worked his tail to make that happen. In the midst of the struggle, he said: “People take shots sometimes. It’s OK. We’re strong. And because of that, we get stronger. I don’t want anyone [from BYU] thinking, ‘Woe is me.’ … We are just competing with everyone else.”

He reiterated: “We’ve got to get better.”

As much winning as Holmoe had done as a player at BYU, from 1978-82, when the Cougars won four conference championships, and later with the 49ers, Holmoe did fail miserably as a head coach at Cal, where he lost more than twice as many games as he won, a period of time that he compared to walking through a wall of “doom.” Just as bad, investigators determined that Holmoe, at least in part, lost control of his program.

For a man who centered his professional and personal life on integrity, that failure was like a swinging tire iron to the side of the head.

In describing Holmoe, former 49er great Ronnie Lott told me: “You can have a discussion with him and walk away feeling better, feeling like this is a good, good guy. If there’s an Opie out there, Tom’s it. … Integrity is first and foremost with him.”

Still, what happened at Berkeley stayed with Holmoe and stung him. When he retreated to BYU initially as an assistant athletic director, he said: “I hope somebody sees that I’m doing something right.”

Ouch.

He hasn’t been perfect in his two decades as BYU’s top sports boss, but he has taken what he learned from LaVell Edwards, from Bill Walsh, and from thousands of experiences from here to there and climbed to the upper reaches of his administrative ascension.

After Holmoe worked for a handful of years with Bruce Rasmussen, once head of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament selection committee, Rasmussen said of Holmoe: “It’s rare in today’s age to have an athletic director who has seen the business from a professional sports perspective, as an NFL player and coach, and as a college player and coach, and as an administrator. He’s got the trifecta — passion, intelligence, and character. He’s unbelievably respected.”

Rasmussen wasn’t alone in his praise.

As the seasons went by, two coaches who Holmoe hired and retained for a time, Bronco Mendenhall and Dave Rose, said the following:

Mendenhall: “He’s passionate to do the job on behalf of the institution. He’s been a unifier and called on the passion of the coaches here.”

Rose: “You know how important it is to him that our teams are successful. He spells out what his expectations are for your program. You know what he expects.”

What has Holmoe expected? “Great teams don’t get there by accident,” he said. “They get there being led by a coach who’s willing to take them there. It’s not magical, it takes a lot of effort.”

A lot of effort in recruiting and developing athletes and decent humans.

“If you have better athletes,” he added, “you’re going to win. We have a lot of things to be concerned about — academics and the honor code. But we have to win.”

Through his years at BYU, there have been wins and losses, on and off the field, on and off the court, on and off the pitch, on and off the diamond, in and out of the Honor Code Office, in and out of the AD’s office with the 500-page book on the desk, a book Holmoe has darn near committed to memory, and attempted to exemplify.

What he said in his moment of despair: “I hope somebody sees that I’m doing something right.”

That much has been pretty clear.

Oh, yeah, did we mention? BYU got into the Big 12 — and has even won some games there.

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