Bowden Returning to Morgantown
September 26, 2014 06:00 PM | General
 |
|
| Bobby Bowden, pictured here with the late Bill Stewart following Florida State's win over West Virginia in the 2010 Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida, coached six years at West Virginia from 1970-75. | |
| All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
A familiar face will be in Morgantown next weekend when the Mountaineers play host to the Kansas Jayhawks on homecoming: Bobby Bowden.
The hall of fame coach and his wife, Ann, have agreed to return to WVU to serve as honorary marshals for this year’s homecoming parade.
Bowden, who led Florida State to national championships in 1993 and 1999, coached 10 seasons at West Virginia University – four as Jim Carlen’s offensive coordinator from 1966-69 and six as West Virginia’s head football coach from 1970-75.
When Carlen was hired to replace Gene Corum in 1966, he wanted an offensive minded coach who, in Carlen’s words, “knew the throwin’ game.”
The late Carlen once said that when he was an assistant coach at Georgia Tech he used to listen to coach Bobby Dodd talk about the passing game like it was “a disease,” and he figured if Dodd thought that way about it then it was something worth considering when he became a head coach at West Virginia.
Then after Carlen got a good look at the players that he was inheriting, he became even more convinced that he needed an innovative offensive coach like Bowden in order to move the football against the bigger, more talented teams that the Mountaineers were playing such as Syracuse and Penn State.
“A lot of the schools that I coached at, we were the smallest one in the litter so we had to have some trick plays to try and overcome that,” Bowden recalled earlier this week. “I had the reputation when I first came to West Virginia of being a riverboat gambler because of some of the trick plays that we tried. A lot of them worked and a lot of them didn’t.”
Bowden had other coaching opportunities when Carlen hired him, but he figured that going to West Virginia University to work with Carlen would provide an easier path to realizing his ultimate goal of becoming a head coach at a major college.
What he didn’t realize was the cultural differences that he was to encounter coaching at a school located in the northeast just 75 miles south of Pittsburgh.
“When I went to West Virginia the biggest change I had to make was with myself, because the culture was so much different from what I was raised in down in Alabama, Georgia and Florida,” Bowden recalled. “I had never coached north. The communication and expectations were different and I really had to be sure I was in line with it as much as getting the players to be in line with us.”
Bowden also didn’t realize that he was coming to a school that put more emphasis on basketball than it did football at the time. West Virginia’s athletic director, Red Brown, was a basketball man first who spent nearly every day on the job sitting in his office thinking about how he was going to build the WVU Coliseum.
In the late 60s, Carlen and basketball coach Bucky Waters frequently butted heads trying to get Brown’s attention.
“It was kind of like North Carolina and Duke with their basketball,” Bowden said. “One thing about it, when Coach Carlen went up there he kind of changed that. He got them a little bit more involved in football. I would say those were the changin’ times (at West Virginia).”
Indeed they were.
West Virginia got out of the Southern Conference and began playing a big-time football schedule. Bowden’s teams got a much bigger dose of that in the 1970s when the grid schedule evolved from schools such as The Citadel, William & Mary and Davidson to Stanford, Cal, Indiana, Illinois and SMU.
“We got out of the Southern Conference where we had people we could beat,” Bowden said. “Then we started playing, my gosh, SMU, California and those teams and we began to spread around a little bit.”
When Bowden was hired in 1970, he immediately told his coaching staff that they were going to recruit West Virginia first because WVU was a state university.
Soon Bowden realized that wasn’t practical because there were simply not enough good football players in the state to remain competitive against the teams they were playing. More than 40 years later, that is still issue No. 1 with the Mountaineer football program.
“When I became the head coach, since I was at a state university, I had told my coaches that I wanted to get at least half of our kids from West Virginia. Well, West Virginia doesn’t have that many guys, or I-A football players - at least they didn’t back then,” said Bowden.
Compounding matters, West Virginia is not THE school in neighboring states and Bowden was frequently required to use his powers of persuasion to attract players to WVU.
Many of them came to West Virginia University simply because they liked Bowden so much.
“Once you cross that state line you are next,” he explained. “You’re not No. 1. We went into Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and when I left there we were really beginning to recruit Ohio pretty heavily because it was so close.”
Carlen, Bowden and their successors Frank Cignetti, Don Nehlen, Rich Rodriguez, Bill Stewart and now Dana Holgorsen have all encountered one specific challenge when it comes to recruiting good football players to West Virginia University … getting the big, dominant linemen on both sides of the football.
Go back and look through the years and you will see that West Virginia has never had trouble landing plenty of good running backs, wide receivers, defensive backs and linebackers.
Carlen had them in abundance, Bowden had them in abundance and so did Cignetti, Nehlen, Rodriguez and so forth.
But having an abundance of good linemen? Now, that’s another story.
Carlen, Bowden, Cignetti and Rodriguez’s solution to the dilemma was to run unorthodox offenses such as the wishbone, veer and the spread that didn’t require having massive guys up front.
“That was the hardest thing for us to recruit at West Virginia was the imposing lineman – the tough kid who could knock them off the ball,” admitted Bowden. “Penn State would get them and Pitt would get them. Now we were never as big and as strong as they were because their backyard was full of them and we didn’t have as many.”
When Don Nehlen arrived in 1980 his solution was to make them.
Of course, Nehlen had one huge advantage over his predecessors – time. Nehlen got a multiyear contract that afforded him the luxury of developing linemen by redshirting them and getting them stronger in a highly organized and sophisticated weight-training program.
Before Nehlen, coaches at WVU didn’t have multi-year contracts or the time to really develop their players.
“It’s not healthy to have a one-year contract and that’s what we had at West Virginia,” Bowden noted. “If a guy’s got a five-year contract or a four-year contract and they don’t like him and they want him to leave after two years, at least he has a good buyout. When I was coaching there it was a one-year contract.
“They could call you in after any year and say ‘we’re going to bring somebody else in.’ Now they didn’t do me that way,” Bowden continued. “They were really good to me at West Virginia. I felt like I learned how to coach there. If I could have gone through those six years there again I think I really could have done a lot better because I made a lot of mistakes. So I go to Florida State and I had learned and it really helped me down there.”
Having spent 10 years at West Virginia University and understanding some of the obstacles and limitations the school encountered at the time, Bowden marvels at the job Don Nehlen did to stabilize Mountaineer football in the early 1980s.
Not only did Nehlen enjoy success at a place that had never really experienced sustained success before, but he also chose to stay once he became successful. Nehlen’s decision to coach for 21 seasons at West Virginia was almost as important as his two national championship runs in 1988 and 1993.
“Don did an amazing job,” said Bowden. “No. 1, he had that Michigan background. He used to coach at Michigan and he was used to being big-time all the way so when he comes to West Virginia he just assumes he’s going to do the same thing here. He changed the uniforms to even look like Michigan. Don is one of the best coaches ever, in my opinion.”
So was Bowden.
And next weekend, he’s coming back to the place where he got his start in major college football - to a place where his children still call home.
“We’re anxious to get back because we love those people up there,” Bowden said. “They were so good to us when we were there. All of my children, if you ask them where they’re from they don’t say they’re from Alabama or Florida. They say they are from West Virginia. It will be good getting back.”
West Virginians are certainly looking forward to it.
2026 Mountaineer Invitational Preview
Thursday, April 09
Nate Gabriel | April 8
Thursday, April 09
Coach Rich Rodriguez | April 8
Thursday, April 09
Coach Rod West | April 8
Thursday, April 09
