Finally.
Bobby Bowden will retire as head football coach at Florida State University next month. He will stay through FSU’s bowl game and then leave.
Too bad it wasn’t gracefully. Bowden deserved better than this poorly orchestrated exit. His successor, “head coach in waiting” Jimbo Fisher, had already been anointed. It was hoped Bowden could ride off into the sunset a winner, maybe even on the shoulders of his players after one last big win.
But it wasn’t to be for a coach whose team had gone from unbeatable in the Atlantic Coast Conference to eminently beatable by the Wake Forests. Whose team was routinely embarrassed by the University of Florida. Whose team will now need a bowl win to avoid a losing season this year.
Bowden tried to hold out for one more year, but it didn’t happen. The program was in relative free fall. And everyone saw through the “retirement.” He chose that over the humiliation of a final year as figurehead without portfolio. A year’s worth of being more relic than icon. More Charlie McCarthy than Edgar Bergen.
But this also should be said – and it may be a minority opinion. While Bowden deserved a better sendoff, he didn’t deserve to “call his own shot” and “go out on his own terms.”
Here’s why. Naïve as it may sound, Bowden is still a COACH, albeit a very successful one for a very long stretch, but he’s still a coach at an institution of higher learning. You don’t tell the president when it’s time to find your replacement.
Cure a disease. Win a Nobel Prize. We’ll talk. But a football coach, even a “legendary” one? No.