The 1984 Holiday Bowl was one of the games that determined the national championship in college football for the 1984 season. Played on December 21, 1984, at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego, it pitted the BYU Cougars against the Michigan Wolverines; BYU won the game, 24-17. The attendance of 61,248 was a record for Jack Murphy Stadium at that time.

At the conclusion of the 1984 college football season, BYU was the only undefeated team in Division I-A. As such, BYU was the leading candidate to win the national championship if it were to win its bowl game. However, BYU, as nine-time defending champion of the Western Athletic Conference (WAC), was obligated to play in the Holiday Bowl. The Holiday Bowl was only in its fifth season, and the WAC was only considered a second-tier conference at the time. As such, the Holiday Bowl would not automatically draw a high-caliber opponent for the WAC champion. Many poll voters were reluctant to crown BYU as national champion. They felt that BYU had not played a legitimate schedule (the Cougars only played one ranked team—Pittsburgh—all season, and no one in the WAC was even close to being their equal), and also felt the Cougars' statistics were inflated by the heavily pass-oriented brand of football played in the WAC.

Rumors spread that BYU would break its contract to play in the Fiesta Bowl. Doug Flutie's Boston College team and six others turned down the Holiday Bowl's $500,000 payout. It chose the 6-5 Michigan Wolverines, which had been ranked #3 early in the season before quarterback Jim Harbaugh broke his arm. Michigan's Bo Schembechler was among those skeptical of BYU, stating that "There's no way this team should be a better passing team than Illinois, Miami, Iowa, or Purdue". The Wolverines managed to give BYU a tough game, but BYU won the game by a score of 24-17 and would later be awarded the consensus national championship after all of the other bowl games had been completed.

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