The Bowden Years
December 25, 2009 10:44 PM | General
December 26, 2009
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - The 2010 Konica Minolta Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., will be Bobby Bowden’s final game as Florida State’s football coach. He will be facing West Virginia University - the school where he got his Division I coaching start some 39 years ago in 1970. Bowden spent 10 seasons at West Virginia, six as the school’s head coach.
 |
|
| Bobby Bowden takes his first portrait as West Virginia University's football coach in 1970.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
P.T. Barnum himself couldn’t have put together a more interesting event.
To get an accurate depiction of Bowden’s six-year coaching tenure at West Virginia, you first have to begin with Jim Carlen’s four years in Morgantown from 1966-69. It was Carlen who brought Bowden to WVU because, in Carlen’s words, he needed someone who “knew the throwin’ game.” Carlen vividly recalled a conversation Bobby Dodd and Bear Bryant once had about the emergence of the passing game in college football in the mid-1960s. Carlen just happened to be in the room listening to them.
“They talked about it like it was a disease,” Carlen laughed.
Carlen figured if that was how two of college football’s best coaches felt about throwing the football then it was something he ought to do at West Virginia. Carlen and Bowden hardly knew each other, having met a couple of times when Georgia Tech and Florida State coaches got together for clinics during the spring.
“I did not really spend a lot of time with him, but I realized right away that he was my kind of coach – real strong Christian Baptist with a good family," Carlen recalled from his home in Columbia, S.C. "I realized he had the ability to recruit because he was so personable and got along with everybody. And then the whole key to it was he knew the throwin’ game.”
Carlen said he relied a lot on his instincts when he hired Bowden.
“His spiritual life was strong and I liked his family style,” Carlen said. “I didn’t know his wife Ann that well, but I could tell that she was a doer. When she came to Morgantown they ended up starting a Baptist church there.”
The very first play Bowden called as West Virginia’s offensive coordinator was a long bomb to speedy safety John Mallory that went for a touchdown against Duke. Bowden had slipped Mallory into the game at flanker.
“Everybody in the stadium thought Garrett Ford was going to get the ball,” said Mallory.
The West Virginia players said Bowden would sometimes come up with plays in the dirt similar to what many of us used to do as kids in the backyard. Bob Gresham remembered Bowden doing that once or twice as West Virginia’s offensive coordinator.
“And it worked!” said Gresham.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, West Virginia had no choice but to throw the football and do innovative things on offense because the Mountaineers didn’t have linemen big enough or strong enough to consistently run the ball against Penn State, Syracuse and Pitt. Even later when Bowden became head coach, recruiting linemen to West Virginia was always a big challenge.
So Bowden improvised. One of the things he decided to do was run the veer offense.
“Bobby was an expert in the veer,” recalled Chuck Klausing, Bowden’s assistant head coach from 1970-75. “He started to use it when he was offensive coordinator under Carlen and they did really well with it.”
“The veer was an offense that you didn’t have to have the greatest offensive line in the world to run because you blocked low and you blocked at people’s feet,” Bowden explained. “When you start blocking high, you’ve got to be strong to knock them out of the way.”
“The veer became the hot offense in the late 1960s and through the early 1970s,” added Frank Cignetti, Bowden’s offensive coordinator at WVU from 1971-75. “If you were one of the traditional I-formation teams that relied on the isolation play, the power off-tackle and the toss-sweep you had to have a quality line. The best example was Penn State. They were the dominant program in the East at that time because they got outstanding linemen and they were very successful that way.”
Carlen associated Bowden’s desire to run the veer with his proclivity to do things that caught defenses off guard.
“He was a fool ‘em coach,” Carlen said. “He wanted to run trick plays all of the time.”
Klausing said West Virginia’s coaches in the early 1970s frequently discussed the use of trick plays.
“Everyone wanted to take credit for them,” Klausing said. “I wrote a book on trick plays and some of the ideas I got off of him, and some of the ideas were mine.”
Klausing said his interest in trick plays started when he was a high school coach in Pittsburgh. At the time he started taking officiating classes in order to make a few extra bucks refereeing games on the side when his school wasn’t playing.
“When I would go to these meetings people would come up with unique plays and ask if they were legal because they didn’t know how to call it the week before,” said Klausing. “Well, I got a lot of good ideas on trick plays from other officials.”
Cignetti said Bowden would usually include a trick play or two when the staff began assembling a game plan at the start of the week.
“He would have his ideas and usually they would involve a trick play. And usually they were successful,” Cignetti said. “The biggest thing about Bobby Bowden is he was fearless offensively. Bobby’s philosophy was this: if you practiced (a trick play) and it was high percentage, then call it up. Don’t be afraid of them.”
Bowden took many of those trick plays with him to Florida State where he later became famous for using them.
After West Virginia’s 1969 Peach Bowl victory over South Carolina, Carlen left to take the Texas Tech job. The very next day the school turned to Bowden to run the football program. Bowden was visiting his gravely ill father in Birmingham when Athletic Director Red Brown telephoned Bowden and offered him the WVU job.
“Sometime after Christmas in 1969 (Bowden) called me and told me he had just got the head job at West Virginia and he wanted me to come as assistant head coach,” Klausing recalled. “I said, “Bobby I know what assistants get paid. I’m athletic director and head coach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and I’m making pretty good money.’ He said, ‘I’m going to get $17,000 and I am going to pay you a dollar less.’”
About 10 years ago, Klausing scribbled a short note to Bowden and dropped it in the mailbox.
“He was making over a million a year by then and I told him that I was ready to come again for a dollar less than he was making,” Klausing joked.
When Bowden got the West Virginia job, Carlen thought it would take him a while to master the details of becoming a major college head coach.
“At the time Bobby wasn’t really a detail guy and I knew that,” Carlen said.
That came later, according to Cignetti. Bowden let Cignetti call almost all of the plays, but he was always heavily involved in the game plan.
After watching the 11 o’clock news at the team hotel on Friday nights, Bowden would saunter down to Cignetti’s room where a grease board was set up to go over the entire game plan. In essence, it was a dry run for the game to be played the next day. For Cignetti, it was like watching da Vinci sketch the Mona Lisa.
“He would start with the ball on the one-yard line backed up,” Cignetti recalled. “Then we would run through every situation down the field through the various areas of the field: first and short, second and long, second and short, third down and all of the situations as we’d march right down the field.”
Bowden would sometimes bring up situations to throw Cignetti off and force him to think through some of the different things that could come up during a game.
“He would come up with some great calls that I would plug in of things that he liked in particular situations,” Cignetti said. “We just covered every possible situation that you could come up with.”
At the time Bowden was hired as Carlen’s replacement, there were boosters steaming mad that the school didn’t try and do more to keep Jim Carlen happy. Carlen was a program builder, a salesman, and a promoter. He introduced a new way of thinking to West Virginians. There were new uniforms, TV shows, football camps, coaching clinics, and off-season training programs that most of the successful schools were doing back then.
He got the Mountaineers out of the Southern Conference in order to schedule more intersectional games, and Carlen wanted to sign big recruiting classes as they were doing in the South at places such as Alabama.
Carlen tells a story of a disagreement Dodd and Bryant once had about the difference in recruiting methods employed by the two schools they were working at. It was probably the only time the long-time buddies ever disagreed on anything.
“Coach Dodd and Coach Bryant were inseparable,” Carlen said. “But we were at the SEC meetings in Atlanta and Coach Dodd told Coach Bryant to listen closely. He said, ‘Paul I want you to get your pencil out and I want you to put these numbers down. You’re signing 55 players a year and I’m signing 32 players a year on average.
‘Then you redshirt your eight to 10 players like we redshirt our eight to 10 players – not necessarily because they are going to play well but because our academics are so tough.’ He said, ‘We’re never over the total of 120 and we’re on the cusp all of the time. You start writing those numbers down and you tell me what the difference is going to be?’”
When Carlen was at West Virginia he wanted to do something similar but on a much smaller scale. The Big Four, a gentlemen’s agreement between West Virginia, Penn State, Pitt and Syracuse that limited roster sizes, signing classes and redshirting, would have nothing of it. Then in 1972 when Johnny Majors got the Pitt job, the first thing he did was end the Panthers’ affiliation with the Big Four and he went out and signed a monster recruiting class that led to Pitt’s national championship in 1976.
“His first year he came in there he might have recruited a hundred football players,” said Cignetti. “After that the rules changed nationally.”
“We didn’t like it and we wanted to do everything possible to beat them,” added Klausing.
While Carlen usually kept his distance from the players, Bowden took a different approach. His players were encouraged to go into his office and talk to him any time they pleased. All of the years Bowden lived in Morgantown his telephone number was listed in the phone book.
“A bubbly sort of fellow,” was how late sportswriter Tony Constantine once described Bowden.
When someone asked Bowden a question he always answered it honestly and sincerely. Later when things began to sour in 1973 and 1974, his words were often twisted and used against him like a noose around his neck.
Even during Bowden’s first season in 1970, there was a faction of WVU fans that never really warmed to him, especially in the state’s Northern Panhandle where the culture there is a little different than the rest of the state. To them, Bowden was too much Alabama for their liking.
 |
|
| Bowden offers encouragement to his West Virginia players in this game played at Penn State in 1971. It didn't help. Bowden lost all six times he faced the Nittany Lions while coaching at West Virginia.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
Wheeling sportswriter Cliff McWilliams quickly became a harsh Bowden critic, often referring to Bowden in his sports columns as “Bobby Bow-Down.”
The McWilliams mob began adding members after a series of mistakes in 1970 called into question Bowden’s judgment. One was Bobby’s decision to punt near the Duke 30 yard line in a tight game West Virginia lost to the Blue Devils (his punter sailed the ball out of the end zone several rows up in the bleachers).
Bowden’s bigger sin was blowing a 35-8 halftime lead at Pitt when he decided to play it conservatively in the second half. After the game, Bowden needed a state police escort from the locker room to the team bus to get away from the drunks hanging around to give him a piece of their mind.
During Bowden's teleconference with West Virginia sportswriters last week, a reporter suggested to Bowden that the Mountaineers’ 13-9 loss to Pitt in 2007 had finally replaced his 1970 team’s tanking at Pitt as the most disappointing in school history.
Bowden shot that notion down quickly.
“Nothing will erase that,” he said. “In 56 years of coaching it’s still the blackest day of my career.”
The drumbeat of criticism grew steady and louder as the years wore on.
In 1971, a nose dive at the end of the year turned a 6-1 start into a 7-4 record. It seemed no one really cared (or more likely ignored) the fact that nearly half of Bowden’s team was out with injuries by the end of the season.
In 1972, it was an embarrassing loss to North Carolina State in the Peach Bowl that got people stirred up. Bowden was accused of letting his team run wild down at Atlanta before the game. Some upset fans even drove home with “Fire Bowden” signs in the back of their car windows.
In 1973, West Virginia got back into the Top 20 after beginning the season with three straight victories over Maryland, Virginia Tech and Illinois.
Then West Virginia lost to a very bad Indiana team (coached by college football expert Lee Corso).
Then quarterback Ade Dillon got hurt in a home loss to Pitt.
Then the Mountaineers self destructed in a quagmire of turnovers against Richmond.
And then Penn State put 62 points on the board against Bowden’s defense in the game John Cappelletti famously promised his dying kid brother Joey that he would score four touchdowns for him. To this day it remains the worst loss of Bowden’s coaching career.
“Boy if I’d have known that,” Bowden said years later of Cappelletti’s promise, “I wish he’d have scored a couple of more.”
After the Richmond and Penn State debacles, a pair of season-ending victories over Virginia and Syracuse couldn’t take the sting off another disappointing season.
But all of those disappointments were going to change in 1974. Even Bowden said so.
It seemed all of the ingredients were in place for a great season that year. The Mountaineers were not only going to rub Pitt’s nose in the dirt but they were also going to finally end their long losing streak to Penn State. Bowden spent the entire summer priming West Virginia fans and by the end of August he had everybody foaming at the mouth for football season.
Then Richmond came to Morgantown.
It took about three quarters for Bowden’s words to boomerang. All of the excitement he had generated had turned into rage. The Spiders had a quarterback named Harry Knight who went through West Virginia’s defense faster than Hitler went through Poland (Bowden, a student of military history, would appreciate that analogy).
It was so bad that secondary coach Alex Gibbs (today one of the most revered offensive line coaches in the NFL with the Houston Texans) broke out into hives after the game. Things were just as bad for Bowden, who had to make a miserable five-hour drive to Charleston after the game to shoot his TV show.
A local pilot stepped in and offered to fly Bowden down to the state capital to give him a few extra hours of sleep. However, as their plane was nearing Charleston, poor weather forced them to turn around and return to Morgantown. Bowden wound up making the drive to Charleston anyway, barely getting there in time for his 6:30 a.m. filming.
From there it only got worse.
Bowden lost half of his defensive line (including star nose guard Jeff Merrow) in a 17-14 loss at Tulane. At Pitt, a poor spot on fourth down led to Pitt’s big second half in a 31-14 Panther victory.
A week later, West Virginia had the Miami game in the bag, leading the Hurricanes 20-14 with 6:15 remaining. But the refs failed to see the football hit the foot of Ernie Jones during a West Virginia punt and Gary Lombard’s fumble recovery at midfield was overruled. Miami went on to score a late touchdown to win the game 21-20.
Against Penn State it was poor specials teams play that sank the Mountaineers. A botched punt, a missed PAT and a blocked field goal led to a 21-12 Nittany Lion victory.
Then Boston College hammered West Virginia 35-3. In fact, West Virginia is still trying to tackle Mike Esposito 35 years after the fact.
In mid-November, Temple’s Steve Joachim performed another surgical dissection on West Virginia’s secondary in a 35-21 Owl victory in Morgantown.
If not for a near-miraculous win at Virginia Tech when the Hokies missed two very makeable game-winning field goal tries, Bowden would have lost seven of his last eight games. Some were reporting beforehand that a coaching change was imminent - it was probably the only time during Bowden’s coaching career that he felt his job hinged on the outcome of a single football game.
Of course this was during the time when Bowden was being hanged in effigy in front of the library and “For Sale” signs were placed in his yard. Bowden may have lost some of the student body - and there was certainly a faction of disgruntled boosters out to get him - but the school never wavered in its support of him.
“The great thing about West Virginia University was the president, the athletic director and the athletic (council) all came to me and said, ‘Bobby, don’t pay any attention to them. You are our coach and we are staying with you,’” Bowden said.
Bowden kept the letters of support written by West Virginia University President James Harlow and Athletic Director Leland Byrd, even once pulling them out and waving them to a couple of antagonistic reporters.
Years later, Byrd said he never once considered firing Bowden during those difficult years in 1973 and 1974. Byrd understood what his coach was up against then at West Virginia. He knew the old stadium was falling apart. He knew Morgantown was a difficult place to get to in the mid-1970s. He knew Pitt and Penn State had better football players.
He knew the school was in a transitional period, having left the Southern Conference to play a much more difficult football schedule. And Byrd also knew of Bowden’s desire of one day returning to his Southern roots.
The harsh criticism Bowden received in ’74 forced him to take stock of what he was doing at West Virginia and he concluded that he had every right to look at other coaching opportunities if any should come about in ‘75.
 |
|
| Bobby Bowden will finish his coaching career second to Joe Paterno in career victories.
AP photo |
Florida State provided that opportunity.
“I didn’t apply for the job at Florida State. They called me and said, ‘We want you to come back to Florida State,’” Bowden said.
In 1975, the Florida State job was not very appealing. It was said that the guy Bowden replaced in Tallahassee, Darrell Mudra, used to coach the games from the press box.
Klausing remembered getting a phone call from West Virginia assistant coach Greg Williams informing him that he was going to turn down Bowden’s offer to run Florida State’s defense.
“He said, ‘Bobby has offered me the same job you had at West Virginia – assistant head coach and defensive coordinator.’ I said, ‘Boy that’s great!’” Klausing recalled. “He said, ‘Well, I’m turning it down. Bobby will never win at Florida State.’
“I said, ‘Why? He is such a good coach.’ He said – and I don’t recall the exact number – but he said, ‘There are 50 great football players in the state of Florida. The University of Florida will get the 30 best and the ones that live around Miami will go to Miami. Florida State will not get the No. 1 football player there.’”
But, according to Klausing, a year or two into Bowden’s Florida State tenure the Gators were placed on probation and that gave Bobby a brief window to recruit some of the top Florida players. It was the crack of light Bowden needed to begin a football dynasty.
“Bobby started to get the players Florida was getting,” said Klausing.
Fast forward 34 years to 2009 – Bowden’s last season at Florida State. After playing his old team on Jan. 1, Bowden will complete one of the most accomplished coaching careers in NCAA history.
Klausing has a unique take on Bowden’s unparalleled success at Florida State.
“I admired Coach (Joe) Paterno but Coach Paterno’s job is an easy job compared to Florida State,” said Klausing. “To win at Florida State you had to take chances on at-risk kids. Bobby gets condemned for some of the at-risk kids that don’t come through or do things they shouldn’t be doing. But how about the ones he’s saved? He’s done really well with the kids that he had to coach.”
The West Virginia old-timers agree that Bobby Bowden was essentially the same coach in Morgantown that he has been all these years at Florida State, although perhaps a little wiser for the experience.
Like the rest of the coaches at WVU, Bowden won when he had good football players and he lost when he didn’t. Sportswriter Shorty Hardman (one of the guys who used to cover Bowden during his WVU’s days) often used that line about some of the school’s other football coaches through the years.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
