One last take on Bowden's retirement

This quote really strikes at the heart of the matter:

Maybe the rest of the Southeast did catch up the outsized football culture of the super program Bowden helped usher in and reaped the benefits as he lost the younger man's knack for adaptation after so many years of wild success. It happens to all the great ones eventually.

And if it doesn't, by some chance, the rest of us sit around wondering what might have been if only the genius had stuck around instead of going out on top. In Bowden's case, we've seen what was and wished we could have reversed the planet's orbit until we were back in 2001, encasing his legacy in carbonite, instead of watching him play out the sad spectacle of trying to resurrect the thing, always just one year away, like Joe Paterno had managed after his even more dire over-the-hill stretch at Penn State. As if it could be replicated, as if he could get all those plates spinning again at the same time. That's the thing with successful people, I guess: If they could accept walking away from their achievement when it begins to crumble, it never would have existed in the first place.