Samford plays a pivotal part in rich FSU football history

By Charlie Barnes, Executive Director - Seminole Boosters

It's like one of those summer novels in which the plot meanders through the characters' lifetimes. Main players dominate the story while minor characters weave in and out of the background, appearing as needed to tie the plot together.

In a few weeks, Samford University will emerge from the background again and into our story.

Samford was granting degrees for a full decade before Florida's Legislation authorized creation of the Seminary West of the Suwannee in 1851. Both schools took up intercollegiate football in the fall of 1902. The Bulldogs fought defending national champions Alabama to a tie in 1935. Paul Bryant was a senior end for the Crimson Tide then. Thirty-two years later, he was Alabama's head coach when our Seminoles also won a tie against his No. 2-ranked Tide in Tuscaloosa.

Though FSU and Samford (then Howard) were members of the old Dixie Conference, the two teams played each other only once. On Oct. 14, 1950, sophomore quarterback Bobby Bowden led his Bulldogs into Tallahassee. That evening during halftime, dedication ceremonies were performed to celebrate the opening of Doak Campbell Stadium.

Always the competitor, Bowden groused later that he felt the Bulldogs might have won had FSU not extended halftime to accommodate the ceremony. He could not have dreamed on that day that his first introduction to The Florida State University included playing on the field that a half-century later would bear his name.

Bowden was named head football coach at Samford in 1959 and stayed until 1962, when he left to become receivers coach at FSU.

In a few weeks, Samford Head Coach Pat Sullivan will bring his Bulldogs back to Tallahassee after an absence of exactly 60 years. Sullivan was born in 1950, the year of that first game.

The new coach arrives

Jimbo Fisher was born to be an athlete. He received various college offers to play football, basketball and baseball.

"I was only 17 when I graduated from high school," he says. "I wanted to play right away but I wasn't physically mature enough yet for big-time football."

So Fisher headed to Clemson in the fall of 1983 to play baseball for the Tigers.

But a charismatic 26-year-old football coach and former West Virginia University Mountaineer running back recruited Fisher to come home to West Virginia, to play football at Salem College. Terry Bowden had a law degree from Florida State, but he lived to coach football, and the youngest head coach in America was assembling a small-college powerhouse of transfers from Division I programs. These were good fellows and splendid players - first-rate athletes who were perhaps just slightly less scholarly than was required by the major schools.

Remember Alan Dale Campbell, the Seminole defensive end who later played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and monstrous Seminole tight end Orson Mobley, who played in three Super Bowls for the Denver Broncos? Yes, they both lettered at FSU in 1982. But by the fall of 1983 they were duly enrolled at tiny Salem College, and Coach Terry Bowden set out to terrorize the small-college landscape.

Bowden recruited Fisher to be the trigger man for this lethal concoction of talent. Long on both athleticism and brains, Fisher immediately won the quarterback job and started as a red-shirt freshman in the fall of 1984.

Their first game was against the Samford Bulldogs, whom they dispatched by a score of 82-9. The mayhem continued for two years. Fisher and the Salem Tigers led the nation in both points and scoring.

Terry Bowden left Salem, and a year later he was named head coach at Samford. Fisher transferred to Samford as a fifth-year senior, eager for a chance to work again with his mentor. Fisher was actually beginning to coach. While the team and staff rode the bus, Fisher and Bowden rode together in a car, going over the game plan.

Already twice named All-American, Fisher's offense averaged nearly 52 points and 525 yards of offense in that 1987 season. Fisher was proclaimed National Player of the Year. The now-famous photo of him wearing a Seminole hat was taken on the sidelines on Oct. 3, 1987, the day FSU played Miami. Fisher the quarterback was on the phone with coaches in the Sanford press box being fed updates on the FSU game. It was the first year of The Dynasty.

After college, Fisher played Arena ball in Chicago until he was injured. He returned to Samford and was hired as Terry Bowden's offensive coordinator in 1991.

Fisher's first game as a player was against Samford, and his last game as a player was as Samford's quarterback. His first game as a paid coach was for Samford, and his first game as a head coach will be Sept. 4, against Samford.

And so, the Bulldogs appear one last time as a plot device in our story. Twice in 60 years is probably as often as the Bulldogs care to visit Tallahassee, but their genetic ties with Florida State are strong.

Summer is ending. We'll close the cover on one book and open another, brand-new book on the history of Florida State football.