It's Never In The Bag

By Charlie Barnes

Bobby Bowden

It was morning in Miami and already hot. Clouds of dust and throngs of fans and long lines of slow moving cars made the heat even worse. In this fourth game of the 1980 season, the Top-10-ranked Seminoles were expected to make short work of the unranked Hurricanes before launching into the "real" schedule - the October marathon of Nebraska, Pitt and Boston College. This was Bobby Bowden's fifth season and his best Seminole team to date.

On this day Miami was not quite yet the Miami they would become over the next several decades, but they were still the 'Canes and this was the Orange Bowl. We were the better team. Actually we were a great team. The first three games had been spectacular: shutouts of both LSU and Louisville and a 63-7 annihilation of East Carolina. The offense was averaging 44 points per game. The defense was embarrassed about ECU's single touchdown.

Andy Haggard and I were standing alongside the road, talking, worrying, fretting. Haggard was already a renowned local attorney but not yet the star of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers; the national chairman of Seminole Boosters and chairman of the FSU Board of Trustees. All of that would come later. On this day in 1980 he was just a good Seminole.

Andy Haggard

Haggard lived his entire life in Miami; his father was a Hurricane. Andy had long had a bellyful of UM and its fans. We both knew that this game was more than a speed bump. The win here would launch our Seminoles into a possible championship season. The real test - Mighty Nebraska - loomed.

A black Town Car pulled alongside and the passenger window whispered part of the way down. Seminole offensive coordinator George Henshaw peered from within. No one smiled.

George Henshaw

"George. Tell me," Haggard said.

Henshaw looked straight ahead and stuck out his fist with the thumb up. "Andy, it's in the bag." The window rose and the car moved on.

Of course that's not the way the game turned out. Our starting center went down hurt and on the next play his back-up was also injured. A guard was moved to center but some of the exchanges were muffed. Still the Seminoles held the lead until a questionable pass interference play gave the ball to the 'Canes on the goal line.

The final score was 10-9 Miami.

Miami jumped into the Top 20 and Florida State nearly fell out. Somewhere out there on the flat Nebraska landscape was a friendly bar where red-clad fans celebrated as the Miami-Florida State score update crawled across the bottom of the screen.

Nebraska in 1980 was the Nebraska of your youth, that awesome Red Machine always in the front of the chase for another national title. And in just seven days little Florida State would present themselves in Lincoln.

Surely, Nebraska fans felt little need to respect an FSU team that lost to Miami. Ranked No. 3 at the time, Nebraska had defeated its first three opponents by a combined 133-16 points and allowed only one touchdown.

The first half of the game in Lincoln didn't do anything to arouse Cornhusker concerns. The halftime score was 14-3 Nebraska. The second half would be just a matter of finishing off the visitors. This one's in the bag.

But the Seminole defense rose up and shut down Nebraska in the second half. Cornhusker turnovers led to 15 unanswered Seminole points and the final score was 18-14 FSU.

One measure of the distance that Florida State has travelled in the 35 years since that day is the fact that when the national standings were published after our upset victory in Lincoln, the Cornhuskers still ranked ahead of the Seminoles.

The very next week, Tallahassee welcomed the mighty Pitt Panthers, ranked fourth in the country and led by future All-Pros Hugh Green at linebacker and quarterback Dan Marino. Pitt's entire offensive line would go on to start in the NFL.

Monk Bonasorte

FSU's Monk Bonasorte was a Pittsburgh boy who knew the Panther players well. Bonasorte's family owned a local bar popular with the Steelers and Pitt coaches and they extended Monk the courtesy of allowing him to work out in Panther facilities in the summer. As you might expect, summer chatter turned to the upcoming game vs. the Seminoles.

Bonasorte had already won All-American honors after the 1979 season, but the Pitt players were too focused on a 1980 national title chase to believe that the FSU game was anything other than already in the bag. They hooted at Monk's suggestion that the Seminoles might give them a battle.

Words were exchanged, as they say. Panther Head Coach Jackie Sherrill pulled Bonasorte aside and offered some good-natured advice. He said, "Son, don't let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash."

As it came to pass on that October night in Tallahassee, Hugh Green's Pitt defense was stymied, and quarterback Dan Marino was flustered by Bonsorte and his fellow defensive backs. Following the Seminoles' 36-22 win, Sherrill acknowledged Bonasorte, who had one of the three picks against Marino. "You cashed that check!" he said laughing.

It was Pitt's only loss of the season. They finished No. 2, but as many as a dozen publications and selectors, including the New York Times, awarded Pitt a national championship over Georgia.

Assuming that it's "in the bag" is a natural human failing, not limited to coaches, commanders or presidents or anyone else who's in charge. You might assume that the most egregious example in the history of college football would be Michigan head coach Lloyd Carr's catastrophic opening loss to Appalachian State in 2007. Michigan was ranked No. 5; Las Vegas sportsbooks did not even bother to publish a line. An instant after the loss, Michigan disappeared from the rankings altogether.

You would think that was the worst ever. But, no.

One would never expect that the sainted Knute Rockne would bear the infamous reputation of committing what the Associated Press called "perhaps the greatest coaching blunder in history."

It was 1926 and Notre Dame was churning along, methodically clearing its path to an undefeated season. The Irish weren't just undefeated; they were a blitzkrieg. Notre Dame had shut out seven of its first eight opponents. Only Minnesota's Golden Gophers had managed to score as much as one touchdown. The offense averaged more than 44 points per outing.

The ninth game on the schedule was Carnegie Tech, a team that had already lost to Washington & Jefferson and New York University.

Head Coach Knute Rockne decided that it was not necessary for him to attend the game. Rockne handed a game plan to his assistant and boarded a train to Chicago to watch the Army-Navy game while the Irish team travelled to Philadelphia for the game against Tech.

It was even worse than it sounds.

The cover story was that Rockne was in Chicago to scout Notre Dame's great rival, Army, before next season. But the truth according to later accounts was that Rockne owed a favor to his agent and had agreed to write a column on the game for the Chicago Tribune.

Sportswriters stirred up rumors that the Carnegie game was so inconsequential that Notre Dame's first string players would stay behind in South Bend to rest before the season-ending battle against Southern California. It wasn't true and Rockne was forced to send a telegram to the Carnegie coach assuring him that the Tartans would receive Norte Dame's best efforts.

As the game progressed on that snowy November day, Carnegie led 13-0 at the half. The final 19-0 shutout loss ended Notre Dame's perfect season and probably cost them the 1926 National Championship.

One final note here at the end. The Capital One Bowl in Orlando at the conclusion of that 2007 season that began with Michigan's loss to Appalachian State would be poor, disgraced Lloyd Carr's final game as Head Coach. It was assumed that the hapless, unranked Wolverines would be merely one more sacrificial oblation to Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and the ninth ranked Florida Gators. Defending National Champion Florida was playing less than two hours from home and was the prohibitive favorite.

But Michigan beat Florida 41-35. You just never know. It's never in the bag. Go 'Noles.