Bowden Shot Pretty Straight
When Florida State football Coach Bobby Bowden retired last week he closed a big door behind him. It is unfortunate he went out the way he did but it may have been the right time. College football will never be the same.
Coach Bowden made the comment that he wished his teams had kicked a few more of them a little straighter along the way. It was his way of lamenting a poor performance this year. His teams kicked them as straight as any in modern history.
He nor anyone else should judge his career based on this last year, or the last five. Coach Bowden’s career is simply best summarized by looking at the numbers.
The most glaring number is the 75 percent of total games coached that were wins. When only including his time at Florida State that number goes up to 77 percent. Bowden won a total of 773 games in his career.
One of the greatest indicators of Bowden’s success may never be officially documented. That is the number of former players who showed up at his last game. They showed they carried the lessons of Florida State with them throughout their lives.
For many the passage of decades has occurred since they wore the burgundy and gold. They still took time to remember their coach. There is no doubt Coach Bowden will go down as one of the greatest coaches, if not the greatest, in the history of the Atlantic Coast Conference. When his team entered the conference they were almost unbeatable. Forecasters spent most of their time predicting who was going to finish in second most years before the latest round of expansions. When Florida State finally lost a conference game it made national sports newscasts.
It became a given that the Seminoles would win the conference until the likes of Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College found their way into the conference.
Coach Bowden coached one of the best teams I have seen in person, back in the era of Deion Sanders in the 1980s. I actually saw the Seminoles fall behind East Carolina 3-0. For a brief moment there was bedlam in Greenville with the prospect of a momentous upset on the horizon. The 44-3 final score, in favor of Coach Bowden’s squad, took that hope away and kept his reputation in place. I have seen many Florida State games over the years on television and in almost all of those the outcome was never in doubt. When Florida State played under Coach Bowden, fans expected them to win.
Penn State’s Joe Paterno now gets the spotlight of the college football world. Fans now wait to see if and when he is going to hang up his coaches whistle for the last time. He can only hope he is treated better than Bowden was in his final days. Florida State did not give Coach Bowden the respect he deserves. He will always be remembered as one of the greats, regardless of the way he was treated in the school he helped so much.