The LaVell Edwards we all know and love is a humble, self deprecating man who is deft with a quip, yet doesn't let his quips turn poisonous or hurtful. He is a man who is competitive, yet even the coaches of rival schools couldn't bring themselves to say anything bad about him.

Even the most uncouth rival fans were so unarmed by LaVell's charm that he couldn't say more than that he was the model for the "bitter beer face". Weak smack, indeed.

In this world, as the saying goes, good guys don't finish first...apparently, someone forgot to tell Coach Edwards that.

Even more amazing, perhaps, wasn't that he turned a perennial doormat into a national football program, but that this soft spoken, buttondown conservative, was to be a revolutionary radical. A force for change so potent, that when he left the game, the landscape of college football and offensive football--in college and Pro--was completely changed.

Who knew in 1973 when he first walked the sidelines that we were looking at a revolutionary? Nobody.

Even LaVell didn't see it. He has said that he figured that, like all the other BYU coaches, he'd likely last three years. Planning ahead, he got his Ed.D in these years, so he could go into education once he was fired.

University President Oaks was so underwhelmed by LaVell that when the Athletic Director told him he wanted to hire LaVell, he reportedly said: "you're sure about that?" In fact, he wouldn't have been hired at all, except that the players were behind him, and went to the athletic director to plead for him to hire LaVell.

Before LaVell, football was a blood and guts sport of "three yards and a cloud of dust". The single wing, the wing T, the triple option...all offenses that involved an almost superfluous QB whose primary responsibility was to decide after the snap which running back to hand or pitch the ball off to, and then--2 or 3 yards later--do the same thing again.

College recruiting involved finding the biggest, most athletic offensive linemen, fullbacks, and halfbacks, and pounding the opponent into submission.

As LaVell said, he knew he'd never be able to compete in that world, so he searched far and wide for a way to do things differently. The old defensive coordinator, the guy who was only put on BYU's staff originally because he was the only coach in the state who ran the single wing offense, found a great equalizer: the pass.

Instead of big, amazingly athletic olineman, BYU just needed big olineman who could swallow up dlineman and keep them off the QB.

Instead of needing RB's that were human bulls that could throw their bodies into a 1000 pound pile and keep doing it again and again, BYU needed quick guys that could find a hole in a draw trap play and make defenses pay. Instead of being able to run over the middle linebacker, BYU just needed RBs who could catch a flare pass and run away from the middle linebacker.

And, instead of WRs who could block like tight ends, BYU needed quick guys who could run great routes and catch anything from a QB who, instead of being a glorified triple wing center, actually had the charge to run an offense, and throw the ball anywhere on the field, at any time.

Opposing coaches scoffed and dismissed it as a "gimmick", but when no defense could stop it, and BYU started beating Top 10 teams who, on paper, should have beaten us badly, teams were forced to take notice.

It is no coincidence that the revolution of the West Coast offense in the NFL started on the West Coast. For a decade colleges in the West had been exposed to BYU's brand of explosive offense, and the 49er's Walsh--once a college coach at Stanford--took the basic principles of a controlled, ball control aerial attack and made them his own.

Even today, the most sophisticated high school passing attacks are on the West Coast, and when one of these offenses are installed in the South, they are called "revolutionary". The Pac 10 is now considered a passing league almost exclusively, and people wonder how that came to be. They throw ideas out like "with the sun and the surf, they aren't tough enough to play hardnose football" or other ridiculous theories.

We know that they have adapted because they wanted to win, and the single wing wasn't going to do it any longer in an area where your opponent might put up 30 points in a half through the air.

It is also no coincidence that LaVell disciples continue to leaven the ranks of college and NFL coaching staffs. Ambitious coaches could sense the shift, and men such as Mike Holgren, Andy Reid, Norm Chow, Ted Tollner, Mike Leach, Brian Billick, Steve Sarkisian, and others learned at LaVell's feet, then took those lessons with them throughout the country.

It is a story misunderstood and seldom told around the nation, but it is starting to find its way to popular consciousness. Just a couple of years ago, ESPN's dean of college football, Bill Curry, wrote a blog in which he said that LaVell revolutionized college football.

For those of us who remember the slights and digs about a "gimmick" football team, it was a moment to be savored.

There is a recent documentary called "New York Doll" where they talk about how an obscure, transvestite looking band in 1973 went on a "very serious, somber" music show in Britian called "The Old Grey Whistle Test", and even though they were mocked by the host (who called them "mock rock"), they started a revolution that led to literally dozens of bands in England from the Sex Pistols to The Smiths to The Clash to Generation X to the American Glam Rock bands of the 80's.

The New York Dolls in their day were trying to be revolutionary--and they were. They looked like revolutionaries, and no one looking back at them now was surprised to see them be so.

No one, though, looking at LaVell Edwards in that same year of 1973, would have put that label on him. Yet, looking back at it now, he was in that same vein: a man who, after his efforts were done, left his world completely changed.