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Even though the Sooners had fired coach Gary Gibbs a few weeks earlier and were coming out of a damaging two-year NCAA probation, Las Vegas oddsmakers listed the Sooners as a 2 1/2-point favorite. No surprise there.

If BYU played OU 100 times, the oddsmakers would favor the Sooners 100 times.

On Christmas Eve, I drove to La Paloma to have lunch with Cougars assistant coach Chris Pella, who I had gotten to know when he was an assistant coach during my college days at Utah State.

“We’ll beat Oklahoma,� he told me, straight up. “We’re better coached. We care more. I don’t care how many big-name players they have. We’ll beat ‘em.�

BYU routed the Sooners 31-6 a few days later at ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Stadium.

Two months earlier, BYU was a significant underdog when it traveled to play No. 17 Notre Dame in South Bend. Same thing. The Cougars beat Lou Holtz and the Fighting Irish, 21-14.

In the post-game celebration, someone at BYU took a famous photograph of Cougars coach LaVell Edwards dancing around in a group hug with several of his assistant coaches. I recognized almost every BYU coach instantly. It was a coaching group that stayed together longer than the Rolling Stones.

Ken Schmidt was on Edwards’ staff for 21 years. Tom Ramage, another USU Aggie, coached for BYU from 1977-2001. Lance Reynolds was a BYU coach from 1983-2012. Norm Chow, the esteemed offensive guru, coached for Edwards for 25 years. Barry Lamb stayed at BYU for 16 years. Robbie Bosco, the QB who led BYU to the 1984 national title, coached with Edwards until his retirement in 2001.

Pella, who had played fullback at Utah State, connected to Edwards in the most direct way: Edwards had also been a USU football player. Pella and Edwards would coach together for 16 years.

Over the remarkable coaching career of LaVell Edwards, the Cougars were known for a lot of things: (a) quarterbacks, (b) miracle finishes at the Holiday Bowl and © winning more games than any Western college football team not named USC.

But I always remember what Chris Pella told me on that long-ago Christmas eve: We’re better coached than Oklahoma.

Obviously.

I bring this to your attention because the rookie coach on the ‘94 BYU Copper Bowl championship team was DeWayne Walker, who, too, had connected to Edwards by coaching at Utah State a year earlier.

Edwards knew a lot more than how to win football games. He had a special instinct to hire the right man. Walker would turn out to be among his best hires, going on to coach in 16 NFL seasons, become the defensive coordinator at UCLA and the head coach at New Mexico State.

Walker was the first man Pete Carroll hired when he became USC’s head coach in 2001.

A few months ago, ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ coach Jedd Fisch, who also coached for Pete Carroll, hired DeWayne Walker to be the UA’s defensive backs coach. Talk about coming full circle, or a small world, or any of those amazing coincidences.

The transaction almost got lost in the small print because Fisch earlier hired head-turning defensive assistants Chuck Cecil and Ricky Hunley, two of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s College Football Hall of Famers, and Michigan’s most recent defensive coordinator Don Brown, known and respected in the coaching industry at “Dr. Blitz.â€�

I don’t know what the record in college football is for hiring coups in one season, but Fisch might’ve broken the record by hiring Walker, Cecil, Hunley and Brown in the same month. That’s a four-coup special that you might expect at Oregon or Stanford, but not at ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, a team on a historic 12-game losing streak.

This is the way the great LaVell Edwards did it a generation ago: He hired the best men available, got out of their way and let them coach.

I’m not suggesting Fisch’s staff is superior to that of BYU’s Kalani Sitake. But coaching is ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s best chance to beat BYU on Saturday. Sitake, who was a freshman fullback on BYU’s 1994 Copper Bowl team, has his own way of hiring assistant coaches. He, like Fisch, has stayed in a familiar circle, hiring BYU blood as much as possible, with the most Utah-centric staff imaginable.

Six of BYU’s assistant coaches were on the staffs at Southern Utah. Four coached at Weber State. Four coached at Utah, and another at Utah State.

Although the names of the BYU assistants aren’t as well known as the men Fisch hired — such as Brennan Carroll, Pete’s son — you won’t get much argument about their ability. The Cougars have gone 38-26 under Sitake and swept ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ teams coached by more well-known coaches Rich Rodriguez and Kevin Sumlin, in 2016 and 2018.

I’ve always maintained that ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s best-ever defensive coaching staff was the 1993 “Desert Swarm,â€� 10-2 Fiesta Bowl champs, a group that included future Army head coach Rich Ellerson, future Texas and Stanford defensive coordinator Duane Akina, future New York Giants and San Francisco 49ers assistant Larry Mac Duff and 24-year NFL assistant Johnnie Lynn.

Those UA teams beat teams not just with generational talent like Tedy Bruschi, but with perhaps the top defensive coaching staff of the Pac-10/12 period.

Fisch hasn’t had time to recruit “Desert Swarm�-caliber players, but like LaVell Edwards decades ago, he has been wise enough to understand you don’t have to out-man an 11-point favorite like BYU. You can out-coach ‘em, too.

For now it’s the best chance the Wildcats have.