Unmatched

(Photo from TTessori's flickr page.)

I come not to bury Bobby Bowden, but to praise him. Yes, I recognize this may surprise you, since lately I have been less than kind towards Saint Bobby. But long before he angered me by holding on past his time and hurting my alma mater, I adored him. And now that he is leaving, and finally letting go of the team that he made great, it is time to thank him and to recognize that we have witnessed something that may never be matched again.

Bobby Bowden was not a great football player on his own (he enrolled at Alabama as a QB but stayed only one semester). He did not rise to the pinnacle of football coaching because a fanbase fondly remembered his playing days, or because he was from a family of football royalty. He became a coach because he loved football, and had studied it while confined to his bed for nearly a year as a child. He started off small at colleges nobody has ever heard of, then moved up to colleges nobody wanted to coach, then had moderate success at a moderately successful football program. Then he finally was recruited into a school that had only started a football program 2 decades earlier, and had lost all but one game the year before he arrived. As a friend who has a few years on me is fond of saying, things were not always rosy for Florida State football. This is something that those of us who have only known Bobby Bowden as head coach for our entire lives have a tendency to forget.

I grew up in Orlando, smack dab in the middle of a three team rivalry that was unique in the quality of the teams, the notoriety of their coaches, and the closeness of the finishes. I remember Wide Right I and II, when FSU inexplicably lost to Miami two years in a row by missed field goals in the final minute and had their national championship hopes derailed. I remember the hatred we held for Spurrier even then, before his teams were REALLY good, when he was just a nasty visor-throwing smirky jackass. And I remember how each of us along the way picked the one of the three rivals we cleaved to, either from family tradition, local proximity, or instinct. I had neither of the first two going for me, being centrally located between all three and with a family that had attended college in Iowa and Minnesota. So I was drawn to Florida State, and it was because of Bobby Bowden.

My childhood memories of Bowden are of his wisecracking press conferences and halftime interviews. He was always so blunt and honest, so down to earth, so REAL. If his team was losing at the half, he shrugged and told the reporter he was going to whip them into shape and hope they played better in the second half, as he ran to the tunnel. If his team got beat on a last second field goal missed AGAIN against the same team, he had no choice but to make a joke about it and shrug it off, because there was always another game coming and he intended to win it. His honesty and his resiliency were endearing, and made me root for him. And by rooting for him, I came to root for FSU. When it was time to pick a college, I didn't have any intention of going to Florida State. I applied to the likes of Duke, Wake Forest, and Emory, but didn't get enough scholarship money and FSU offered a full ride. My parents made me go for a weekend visit, whining all the way, and to my great surprise I loved it. I never intended to go there, but it felt meant to be the second I arrived. I never for a second considered even visiting UF, even though Gainesville is considerably closer and was arguably the "better school" academically at the time. I was an FSU girl, and if I had to go state school it was the only choice.

I enrolled in the fall of 1993, a glorious time to be an FSU student. Charlie Ward would win the Heisman, we FINALLY held on to beat Miami, we blew out every other home game by double digits, and thanks to a BC field goal against Notre Dame that sent a cheer through the campus of FSU, we played Nebraska for the National Championship and won, fittingly on a last second field goal. Bobby Bowden had finally put all the pieces together and nobody deserved it more. We did not lose a single game I attended during my four years at FSU.

In the 1990's Bobby Bowden ran up a string of records and accomplishments that may never be equalled. Just a few off the top of my head:

• 14 straight top 5 finishes and 10 win seasons
• Most wins in a decade by any FBS/Division I-A team ever (109). This is particularly notable because in the 90's there was no ACC championship game.
• an .890 winning percentage for the 1990's
• Played in 5 national championship games from 1993 to 2001, won 2
• First wire-to-wire AP #1 in 1999
• 28 straight bowl game appearances, the longest active streak in college football
• Longest streak of bowl game victories (1985-1996)

We were definitely all spoiled. A "down year" for FSU was one in which we had two losses and did not play for the national championship. For the entire decade, Bobby Bowden was known as a great recruiter, a 5-star general overseeing his highly skilled assistants, and a man that his players and fans loved. Along with the other fans, I was in heaven.

But things had to turn eventually, and they did. With benefit of hindsight, the decline has been precipitous and it is not surprising that many of us eventually turned on Bobby. After Mark Richt left to coach Georgia, Bowden elevated his son Jeff to offensive coordinator with disastrous results. Bobby refused to fire him despite the team's rapid offensive decline, and eventually the boosters paid Jeff $500,000 to walk away quietly. Bobby was reportedly furious about the boosters' forceout. While the offense has rebuilt thanks to new offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher, the team still has not managed more than 9 wins since 2000, and Bowden steadfastly resisted the many calls for change year after year. If anything, he became more defiant in the face of the criticism. But he should not have been surprised that the torches and pitchforks eventually reached his door. As one writer said today, "the first time the team went 6-6, they came for his son Jeff (offensive coordinator). The next time the team went 6-6, they came for him."

I was ready for Bobby to go three years ago. After graduating from FSU I'd moved to Boston, where college football is unimportant and it was easy to barely pay attention and only watch the big games, which we suddenly started to lose a lot of. Then I moved to Georgia in the fall of 2005, and decided that my newfound proximity to Tallahassee and my newfound prosperity meant that I should get season tickets. As a sign of how far we had fallen, I not only had no trouble obtaining season tickets, but did not even have to give a donation to get them. And so, in the fall of 2006 I walked into Doak Campbell stadium for the first time in a decade to watch us play Clemson. We lost in a squeaker and so I had my first experience of walking out of Doak forlornly while an opposing team's fans cheered. Since that game, I've been an FSU season ticketholder for four seasons now, have attended 10 games, and we've won two of them. TWO. It was bizarro world, and it seemed like it was never going to end.

But for all my rancor, and all of my wholehearted belief that the team needed a change at the helm, when Bowden finally announced his retirement yesterday I was overcome by sadness and appreciation. I was sad because I knew Bobby's heart was breaking over leaving, and how it had all come to pass. I was sad because the man who has been the coach of my team for as long as I have been alive was being shuffled off to retirement, where he had once famously said there was only one big event left, and he wasn't ready for that yet. I was sad because just like Bobby wanted to be the coach for one more great season, I wanted that for him too. But unlike Bobby, I had recognized that he could keep hanging on and hoping for that, but it just wasn't going to happen while he was there. And so I was sad that the football gods had denied him the sendoff season with a great team that he richly deserved. It simply was not meant to be.

I also wanted to make sure that the greatness that Bowden brought to my alma mater is not forgotten in how it all went down at the end. He has become an old man, lost a step as some said, but that is exactly why we should not remember him as he is now, but at his best. William O. Douglas was a lion of the Supreme Court who wrote some of the most important landmark decisions of an era, but at the end he refused to retire even after he suffered a stroke and could barely speak or read. He waited too long to go, but we do not remember him for how he fell at the end, but for how he rose before it. And we should do the same for Bobby Bowden. The man lived the life of a legend, built a program from nothing into a powerhouse that broke records and left everyone in the dust for an entire decade. That is the Bobby I will choose to remember fondly going forward. That is the Bobby who I will see in the statue outside Doak Campbell Stadium when I go to a game next year, when I watch my team run onto Bobby Bowden Field.

There is another statue outside Doak that features a Seminole warrior on horseback, holding a spear above his head. It says on the base "Unconquered." The Seminole tribe of Florida is known for having never been conquered by the U.S. government or any other tribe, despite many attempts that included driving them deep into the swamps of Florida. They may have been diminished, may have lost control of the lands they once held, but they were never conquered. Bobby Bowden may give up control of the Florida State football team, but the heights he brought our team to will never be matched again. And all of us who live this team must honor that tradition, and honor the man who gave his life to Florida State.

Goodbye, and thank you, Saint Bobby. We will never see your kind again.