A look back at a happy - sometimes funny - season

By Charlie Barnes, Executive Director - Seminole Boosters

The football magazines coming out now have tagged the Seminoles No. 1 in the preseason for the fourth time in eight years. Well, I suppose if you want to be No. 1, then you have to embrace No. 1 whenever it comes courting, and now here it is standing on our porch in mid-summer like an over-eager prom date.

Before we accept the bouquet and drive off to the dance, perhaps we can treat ourselves to one more glance back at last year:

Labor Day weekend saw the Seminoles run up a big score on Virginia. In their bid to be the first ACC team to upset FSU, the Cavs brought their own lucky totems: nifty new navy-blue helmets with crossed orange swords. The charms had limited effect; Virginia was buried under an avalanche of Seminole touchdowns.

Seminole fans, already anxious about life in a post-Charlie world, were aghast to see Maryland leading 20-17 at half-time in week two of the season. The tribe won 55-20, but the fans were not appeased. On Monday, the Weekly World News featured a story announcing that the moon was turning to blood.

Other signs of the Apocalypse were listed: your boiling seas, your plague of frogs, etc. At the bottom of the list someone had written in: "Florida State trails at the half to an ACC opponent for the first time in history."

The Wake Forest game went about as expected: 56-14. This was Alan Schmadtke's lead in the Orlando Sentinel:

"Given the number of Atlantic Coast Conference coaches who devoted the offseason to discussing how their gap behind Florida State has narrowed, it becomes clear now that more research is necessary."

Our 31-18 victory over North Carolina was the closest any ACC team had come to beating us since we beat Virginia 13-3 back in 1992. The late-game Tarheel surge had some Seminole faithful hemorrhaging internally before the gun sounded. One young fellow in the stands wore a T-shirt that pretty much summed up the attitude of most of our fans. It had a big Seminole head on the front, and on the back was written: "It's not whether you win or lose...it's whether I win or lose!"

Week five, the 'Canes. Oh, well...Like so many games against Miami, we had them on the ropes, then let them roll the momentum back the other way. We had them down by 13, until three `Cane interceptions turned into 21 Miami points, and a two-touchdown margin in the final score.

Homecoming saw the Seminole defense shut out Clemson 17-0 before a crowd of nearly 80,000 at Doak Campbell. The Orlando Sentinel's Larry Guest wrote:

"While 17 points is considered offensive calamity at FSU, it was more than enough to turn back a Clemson team that is, uniquely, the only team in the country with two offensive coordinators, but no offense...Clemson's 'attack' gives new meaning to the old saw about football being a game of inches."

In the Duke game, it was rumored that Basketball Coach Pat Kennedy was down on the sidelines trying to get Coach Bowden to hold the score down. Columnist Gene Frenett of the Florida Times-Union wrote of Duke University's preeminence in medicine, law and engineering:

"You can't be the best at everything. An esteemed institution of higher learning such as Duke needs to be mediocre at something. History tells us that football is its humiliation of choice."

Final score was 59-20.

National champions in 1990, Georgia Tech is a program that fades in and out like the reception on a bad antenna.

Scatback Warrick Dunn split the seat of his pants and had to leave the Tech game for a play or two. Bob Harig of the St. Petersburg Times wrote that that turned out to be Tech's best defense against him. FSU's 41-10 win at Bobby Dodd Stadium insured the tribe of at least a share of its third consecutive ACC title.

Father Terry Morgan, an FSU alum who is stationed, if that is the word, at the Vatican, dispatched this telegram to the FSU Alumni Office after the Notre Dame game:

"Regards to all the 'Bravi' (that's Italian for good ole boys)...Perhaps the sweetest part of beating Notre Dame is the sound you cannot hear from over there: the moaning and groaning and explaining and taking-back-of-huffing-and-puffing that is going on all over the Vatican amongst my colleagues. Please thank Coach Bowden for the kind words and the photograph which will be mounted in my room. I'm still looking for one of the Pope..."

The Seminoles beat the Wolfpack of North Carolina State by eight touchdowns in 1993. In 1994, the Pack managed to hold the Seminoles down to half that total in a 34-3 `Nole victory that anointed them undisputed Conference Champs. Larry Guest opened his column with this:

"The proverbial 500-pound gorilla completed its third lap of the Atlantic Coast Conference, unbeaten and apparently unlikely to drop an ACC game until well into the next century."

It was a 31-31 tie, but make no mistake: it felt like a win to us, and a loss to them. The game story in the Gainesville Sun began, "Florida fell to Florida State Saturday, 31-31."

The St. Pete Times' Hubert Mizell wrote: "If there's been a better comeback than Saturday's, it was by Lazarus, a Biblical figure who was even deader than Bowden's team."

The Orlando Sentinel's Brian Schmitz saw the Sugar Bowl rematch coming early:

At the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, the scoreboard read "31-31...5th quarter" before the game started.

The game lived up to the hype. As soon as Warrick Dunn bounced a ball off a Gator defender's helmet into the hands of `OMar Ellison for a Bowl-record 73-yard touchdown strike on a trick-play halfback pass, Florida came charging right back with a third and 12 Wuerffel-to-Hilliard 82-yard touchdown pass that set the record again.

The Seminoles' 23-17 win marked an NCAA-record 13 bowls in a row without a loss.

And now, it's already next year. This will be Coach Bowden's 20th season as Seminole head coach.

The talk shows will start to buzz, bewildered freshmen will show up and join the veterans in the brutal late-summer heat, and vast numbers of our loyal and generous fans will be assailed by the fear that we might actually lose a game. It's going to be another wonderful year.