After a weekend full of rumors, Bobby Bowden has officially announced that he's retiring as the head coach of Florida State University's football team after 34 years. Thirty-Four Years. In that same time Miami had 8 coaches, and Florida had 5.
He'll coach the Seminoles for the final time in their bowl game, and then release the reins to offensive coordinator and head coach-in-waiting Jimbo Fisher, perhaps taking some sort of "ambassador" or fundraising position at the school.
Riptide realizes there's more than a few Florida State fans in these parts, but we also realize this is Canes country. So, even if you've cursed the man's name after a few games, there's no denying Bowden was the one constant during the hay day of college football's greatest modern rivalry. And unlike other programs (*cough* Florida *cough* Notre Dame *cough*) that took Miami off their regular schedule, Bowden never backed down. Those games came to define Bowden's legacy as much as they have Miami's.
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"They're going to chisel on my tombstone," Bowden said in the fall of '91, "'He played Miami.'"
Still, he didn't shy away. "We were going 11-1 every dang year, and what I was thinking when I said that was, 'Daggum. What we ought to do is drop Miami like those people did,'" he recalled. "Notre Dame played them and dropped them. Penn State played them and dropped them. Florida, too. I was thinking, 'At least, I played Miami.'"
There'll be grumbling for months about how FSU's handling of the situation was less than graceful (though, at least, he won't face the indignity of coaching at say Florida Atlantic or San Antonio like some of his former coaching rivals...we kid, of course), and it sure will be weird that both sides aren't given the chance to at least savor one more Bowden coached UM/FSU game (...a missed field goal will never feel the same).
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