By Jeff Hunter ’96

As plans for the Jim and Carol Laub Athletics-Academic Complex came together in the mid-2000s, the Utah State athletics administration felt it was important to carve out some space in the new building to celebrate the notable achievements of Aggie athletes, teams, and programs.

At the time, a few trophies and pieces of USU memorabilia could be seen in the large cases located on the concourse of the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum, in the office spaces of various sports programs, and in the foyer of the HPER (Health, Physical Education & Recreation) Building. But many of the more noteworthy items were stashed away in a storage area located on the second floor of the Spectrum.

Deciding which items to pull out of storage — as well as securing the historical information and photographs to complete the displays in the new Steve Mothersell Aggie Athletics Hall of Honor — fell upon the shoulders of athletics media relations director Doug Hoffman.

Needless to say, condensing over a century’s worth of Aggie athletics successes into a handful of exhibits was a heavy load. So heavy, in fact, that Hoffman nearly lost a foot to one of the most prized awards in college football.

“I have a very vivid memory of Merlin Olsen gifting us his Outland Trophy,” Hoffman says with a chuckle. “It was so heavy that it darn near hit the floor and broke my foot.”

Early in the fall of 2009, Hoffman and then-USU athletic director Scott Barnes traveled to Salt Lake City to attend a weekly media luncheon for the state’s head football coaches. Knowing they’d already be down south, Barnes reached out to legendary Aggie football player Merlin Olsen and asked the famed actor and color commentator if he and Hoffman could come pay him a visit at his home in Park City following the event.

“I had never met Merlin before that day,” Hoffman recalls, “but Scott had a relationship with him, and he hoped to use that visit as an opportunity to just connect with Merlin, obviously our most notable alum, as well as to maybe get some items for our Hall of Honor.”

Sadly, Olsen had been diagnosed with mesothelioma earlier that year and the Logan native, who was a two-time All-American while playing defensive tackle for Utah State in the late 1950s and early ’60s, ended up passing away just six months later in March 2010.

But on this day during his final fall, Olsen was extremely generous to his alma mater, and he gave Hoffman and Barnes a number of items, including jerseys, a pair of pants, and several trophies he had been awarded during his Pro Football Hall of Fame career with the Los Angeles Rams. However, the final item came as a huge surprise — the 1961 Outland Trophy.

A national award given each year to college football’s best interior lineman on either side of the ball, winning the Outland Trophy represented the pinnacle of Olsen’s epic career as an Aggie. And Hoffman recalls that Olsen, despite being nearly 70 years old and battling cancer, reached up on top of a 6-foot-high bookcase, picked up the prestigious trophy with just his right arm, then handed off to Hoffman, who, not realizing how much the bronze statue weighed because of how easily Olsen managed it, attempted to hold it with only his left arm.

Fortunately, Hoffman managed to secure it before it hit the ground, and Olsen’s Outland Trophy is now the centerpiece of the Aggie Hall of Honor collection. It sits on the top shelf of a glass case — the only one that boasts two panes of glass in order to accommodate the trophy’s weight.

“That’s as big of a trophy as you can get for an interior lineman; interior linemen don’t win the Heisman, so that’s as good as it gets,” Hoffman notes. “For Merlin to gift that to Utah State Athletics was just unbelievable. I was not expecting that at all.”

Located at the north end of Maverik Stadium, just inside the west entrance of the Laub Complex, the Steve Mothersell Aggie Athletics Hall of Honor is named after the former Utah State tight end and California land developer who helped finance the project. The Hall of Honor was opened to the public in September 2009, and while it is closed on gamedays due to its proximity to the football team’s locker room, the 1,800-foot museum is normally accessible during regular business hours.

Members of the Utah State Athletics Hall of Fame are recognized in the space, along with other Aggie greats and many of the most successful USU teams in school history. Collecting accurate information and photographs, particularly from the early 20th century, was not easy, according to Hoffman.

“Anything we wanted to highlight, we needed to come up with something to help tell the story, whether it’s a team photo, an action photo of a specific athlete, or an artifact,” explains Hoffman, who credits former USU sports information director and longtime radio personality Craig Hislop for his help with developing the exhibits. “The amount of time and research that went into putting the project together was massive. It was probably a year-long project.”

Hoffman says they nearly had to change the way they celebrated All-Americans in the Hall of Honor because he was unable to find photographs of a couple of track athletes who competed for the Aggies around a century ago. But after visiting USU Special Collections, combing through the university’s photo library and diving through numerous file cabinets stored by the athletic department, he finally came across a folder containing photographs of track athletes from the 1920s and ’30s that had been filed away in the wrong place.

“I just kept digging and digging and digging, and I remember it was a Friday evening around 7 or 8 o’clock at night,” Hoffman says. “I was thinking there was nothing else we could do, and we’d have to restart things, when I found that folder just going through some random stuff.

“They were the photos I was looking for. It was just amazing.”

Among the celebrated items showcased in the Hall of Honor are the AIAW national championship trophies received by the 1978 volleyball team and the 1980 and ’81 softball teams — USU’s only national titles in team sports – and the trophy from 1993’s Las Vegas Bowl II, Utah State’s first-ever victory in a bowl game.

There are also game balls from notable Aggie football victories, a pristine letterman’s sweater from the 1928-29 school year that was donated by Floyd Noel, a pair of Olsen’s cleats and his uniform from the 1961 season, and two notable items previously housed elsewhere on the Utah State campus.

The basketball shoes worn by Aggie great Wayne Estes on the night of Feb. 8, 1965, when he scored 48 points against Denver to become the first Utah State player to surpass 2,000 points in a career just hours before his tragic death, were on display in the Spectrum prior to the creation of the Hall of Honor.

The large cases on the north side of the Spectrum concourse still hold many significant pieces relating to Aggie volleyball, softball and basketball, including a relatively recent addition of items belonging to all-time leading scorer Jaycee Carroll, who had his No. 20 jersey retired in 2023. And across the parking lot west of the Spectrum, additional artifacts that belonged to Estes can be found in the foyer of the Wayne Estes Center.

Opened in 2014, the Estes Center currently houses the coaching staff for volleyball and men’s and women’s basketball. It was named in honor of the Anaconda, Montana native, who was an All-American likely to be selected in the first round of the 1965 NBA Draft before he was electrocuted after stopping to view a car accident on 400 North just below campus.

The displays dedicated to Estes include two jerseys, a warmup jacket, a game-used basketball, and several different awards. There’s also a piece of the floor from the Nelson Fieldhouse where Estes made the final jump shot of his life on that fateful night in ’65, which was donated by Aggie booster and Cache Valley Electric CEO Jim Laub.

Numerous trophies celebrating conference titles and tournament championships are also displayed around the offices of the men’s basketball team, while former NBA head coach Dick Motta is one of the notable Aggies honored in the HPER Hall of Fame. Items related to Motta, who won 1,952 NBA games and a championship with the Washington Bullets in 1978, fills one of four cases packed with memorabilia in the front foyer of the HPER Building.

Former standout athlete and USU coach Fern Gardner, and Aggie football great and longtime BYU head football coach LaVell Edwards also share that space, along with track athlete and coach L. Jay Silvester. A star in throwing events from 1956 to ’59, Silvester went on to set several world records in the discus while winning six national championships and competing in four Olympic Games.

His case in the HPER includes a USA jersey and a towel from the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, but Silvester also donated a discus he threw in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. It was originally in the HPER, but Hoffman was able to secure it for the collection at the Hall of Honor after working with Campus Recreation and the Silvester family.

“We got that discus, which is a huge part of that track and field display,” Hoffman says of the discus Silvester used to finish fifth in Mexico City. “I mean, that is an awesome artifact to have. And that’s a prominent piece on that wall.”

But Hoffman, who says he switches out a few items in the Hall of Honor each year, didn’t just ask others to donate artifacts. The associate athletic director, who has been at Utah State since late 1998, also loaned many of his own championship rings he received through the years while working with the football and men’s basketball teams for the two displays celebrating the titles won by those two programs over the past 25 years.

“At least I know where they’re at, whereas if they were at my house, I’m not sure if I would know exactly where they were,” Hoffman says with a laugh. “But you know, when you’re producing a championship ring from the 1999-2000 basketball season, you don’t have the foresight to think, Hey, in 10 years we’re going to want to display some of this stuff. But now, we order an extra just for that purpose.”

There are many noteworthy Aggie artifacts that still sit in storage in the Spectrum because there’s simply not enough room to display them all in the Hall of Honor. And adding something new requires something else to be removed first.

“I would love for us to be able to display more things, but we unfortunately don’t have an infinite amount of space to display everything, especially when your athletic programs continue to be successful and win championships,” Hoffman laments.

“But,” he quickly adds, “I think it’s probably a good problem to have, having too many trophies and wondering, ‘Where the heck do we put them?’”