Let's cut out all the wish-wash and euphemisms and get straight to the point.
Florida State fired Bobby Bowden Monday morning, sacked him, canned him, showed him the door. Pick your phrase. But please don't say Bobby Bowden retired.
Because Bobby Bowden did not retire, did not step down.. At the very least, he did not chose to chose to end it.
No, Florida State president T.K. Wetherell fired Bowden, made the decision for Bowden, and for Wetherell's sake, Bowden complied.
According to various reports, Wetherell and athletic director Randy Spetman met with Bowden this morning and gave him two choices: retire or come back as head coach in name only.
If he did the previous, they would say it was his choice. If he did the latter, offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher would take over almost all the day-to-day operations of the Seminoles team, including hiring assistants, running practice, and calling the plays.
Simply put, Bowden would merely be an ambassador with the title of head coach, a figurehead, a head coach emeritus in some sense.
But really, there was only one thing Bowden could do.
Bowden could have chosen to hang it up. But his comments from the past few days show anything but a desire to do that.
“I want to coach next year, but let me say I need to go home and do some soul searching,” Bowden said following the Seminoles 37-10 loss to Florida on Saturday, the team's sixth straight loss to their in-state rivals. It completed a 6-6 season that easy could have been worse, trailing into the final minute against FCS-side Jacksonville State and two-win Maryland.
Moreover, ESPN's Mark Schlabach reported Sunday that a source close to the legendary coach said that Bowden planned to come back in 2010, that he wanted to coach one more year.
Unless Wetherell had a really convincing heart-to-heart, I doubt he convinced Bowden that Bowden wanted to retire. How do you convince a man that he wants to give up what he's done for nearly three dozen years and still loves?
Quite simply, you can't. At the very least, I know I can't. Even Wetherell, who played for Bowden when Bowden was the wide receivers coach in Tallahassee in the mid-1960s, wouldn't know how to do that.
No, Wetherell convinced Bowden that he needed to retire, that the only choice was to retire, that Florida State and Bobby Bowden needed Bobby Bowden to retire. That T.K. Wetherell needed Bobby Bowden to retire.For his good and for the team's.
And Bowden was not happy about it.
When Wetherell gave him the two options, he knew which one Bowden would pick. He knew Bowden had too much pride to accept being a figurehead.
After 388 wins, 315 of those at Florida State, and two national titles, Bowden was not going to accept working for someone else. He had been the boss ever since Jim Carlen left West Virginia for Texas Tech in 1970, almost forty years ago.
By comparison, Fisher, Bowden's heir-designate, was four years old when Bowden coached his first game at West Virginia. And Wetherell expected Bowden to agree to work for Fisher?
Somehow, the ultimatum was leaked to the public, whether by design or not, who knows. But it was leaked. And more likely than not, it was a bluff.
If Bowden wanted to return, if he wanted to be the head coach in 2010, he would have been. He could have told Wetherell, “I'm taking my swan song and then you won't hear from me again. I'm not an ambassador, I'm the coach.” And Wetherell would have had to accept it.
Wetherell couldn't actually fire the man who coached him 45 years ago, no matter how much he knew he had to. God knows Spetman couldn't.
Tom Jurich couldn't fire Denny Crum at Louisville, but he could convince him that he had to leave. And he did. Wetherell did the same to Bowden.
Wetherell bluffed. He had to. He wasn't actually going to fire Bobby Bowden, at least not this year. Bowden was going to get one more year if Bowden persisted. And when Bowden left the meeting to think over his decision, Bowden in essence was calling Wetherell out on his bluff.
But after he had time to think of it, something Wetherell said made sense. Somewhere during their meeting, Wetherell must have instilled in Bowden's head that Bowden needed to retire.
Somewhere it sunk in that Florida State is no longer Florida State, that the mystique that lead to 14 consecutive top-five AP finishes, two national championships, and a 152-19-1 record from 1987 to 2000, was gone.
Since losing to Oklahoma for the BCS Championship in the 2001 Orange Bowl, Bowden's Seminoles are 73-42 in nine seasons. They've won only three ACC titles after winning every ACC title from the time the school joined the conference in 1992 through 2000.
Moreover, this year was quite possibly the worst in Bowden's 34 years in Tallahassee, and at least it was the most bitter.
First, Bowden was forced to forfeit 14 wins from the 2006 and 2007 seasons for using ineligible players as a result of a university-wide academic scandal. While the allegations were not tied to Bowden himself, it did effectively end, pending appeal, his race with Penn State's Joe Paterno for the NCAA Major College record for most career wins.
Second, the Noles performance on the field was sub-par. After losing on the final play to arch-rival Miami in Tallahassee on Labor Day, Florida State trailed FCS team Jacksonville State until two touchdowns in the final minute staved off a huge upset.
After a 2-4 start, Florida State did reel off four wins in their next five, all close games, to clinch bowl eligibility. The final three wins, against North Carolina State, Wake Forest, and Maryland, were all against teams that are not bowl eligible. Their only win over a bowl eligible ACC team came in mid-October in Chappel Hill by three points.
Third, the Seminoles had their worst defensive seasons under Bowden, surrendering 30.75 points per game while being outscored for the first time since 1981, the last time they did not get a bowl invite.
Finally, Florida State lost six games for only the fourth time in Bowden's 34-year tenure, but the third time in the past four years.
It was time for Bobby to hang up the whistle and go fishing, no matter how anyone looked at it. Wetherell made sure Bowden saw that too.
So he gave Bobby the ultimatum, the bluff if you will, and even if Bowden saw it as a bluff, and he's too smart of a man not to, he knew Wetherell was correct.
Wetherell wanted to fire Bowden, and one way or another he let Bowden know that. And Bowden chose the option that would cause the least public stir.
Even if he wanted to coach in 2010, and Wetherell wouldn't have been able to stop Bowden, if Bowden decided he wanted to coach, Bowden also did not want to embarrass the university, and by association Wetherell, like that. If Bowden was on the sidelines in 2010, it would be an embarrassment to Wetherell, a life-long friend of Bowden's. And Bobby wasn't going to embarrass Wetherell just to coach for one more year.
So Bowden agreed to accept his dismissal as head football coach with his head up, showing for just one more time the dignity and class that along with unprecedented sustained success on the field earned him the distinction of one of the greatest coaches of all time.
He could have come back, gone 0-12, retired, and his legacy would have been exactly the same. But if he did that, T.K. Wetherell's would have been ruined. Any sign of Bobby in 2010 would have destroyed the outgoing president's prestige.
And in his final act as head coach, Bobby Bowden prevented that from happening.
Use whatever word you want, but Florida State fired Bobby Bowden Monday morning. Bowden just accepted it gracefully for the sake of the legacy of everyone else around him.
