Have Your Head Screwed On Right When You Get Here

By Charlie Barnes

Our Seminole team in the 1971 Fiesta Bowl featured All-American receivers Barry Smith and Rhett Dawson, All-American defensive back J.T. Thomas and Heisman candidate quarterback Gary Huff. Seminole fans liked what they saw in first year Head Coach Larry Jones.

The swell of optimism was short-lived. Though the 1972 season was promising with wins over Top-20 ranked Miami and Pitt, the wheels came off the following spring, and the fall of ’73 was the 0-11 disaster.

Former Coach Bill Peterson had left the program in good shape when he departed. Larry Jones proved to be an unfortunate choice to be his replacement.

Jones had never been a Head Coach before and would never be one again. “I had to take my fling at it,” he shrugged. One sportswriter speculated that Seminole fans “wish he had flung it in another direction.”

Senior linebacker Phil Arnold described the run-up to that 1973 season as a “perfect storm…a disaster out there just waiting for us. There were too many signs to think otherwise.”

Arnold was one of the few senior leaders who stayed and toughed it out after 30 other players, all juniors and seniors, quit the team in the spring amid stories of abusive practices. The NCAA got involved, and the state’s newspapers delighted in spinning tales about what came to be known as “the chicken wire scandal.”

The next two seasons under Head Coach Darrell Mudra were awful. Mudra came with impressive bona fides but the task of reconstructing an entire program in just two years was too daunting and he was let go with a 4-18 record.

Bowden’s first season was a losing one, 5-6 in 1976. After the second game, a 0-47 loss to the Hurricanes, he shook up the roster and went forward the rest of the season with younger players as starters.

On one of the long, late night drives on the Bowden Tour I asked Coach if he was pleased that his first team won more games than the Seminoles’ victory total over the previous three years.

“No,” he said. “We should have done better.”

Bowden went on to explain that he had inherited players with talent but the winning mindset wasn’t there. “[Darrell Mudra] recruited well. He left me with a lot of talent, but the guys just didn’t know how to win. We’d get ahead in a game, and they’d start looking back over their shoulders like they were asking themselves how we are going to blow this one.”

It took Bowden a year to get the program focused in the right direction. He had already been Head Coach at three other schools before his return to Tallahassee and he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

On August 3rd, before players arrived back on campus for the 1977 campaign, Bowden sent a letter addressed to each of his players.

The letter was terse and direct. Bowden was clear about who was in charge, and that Florida State going forward was going to be winning.

“Be sure to have your head screwed on right when you get here,” it read. “Report in top physical condition. We depart for Southern Mississippi three weeks after you report and I am looking for the 50 toughest men to go with me. Fat people will be left behind in their tracks.”

“Have your hair cut before you report,” the letter continued. “No beards, no moustache below your upper lip, sideburns no lower than your ear lobes, no hair sticking out in front of your helmet and flaring out the back rim of your helmet. Keep afros normal or braid it.”

And this: “Bring a coat and tie and dress shirt with you for trips. We will dress like men – not children.”

That 1977 season was a welcome breeze filling the lungs of Seminole fans with fresh cool air. It was Florida State’s first-ever 10-win season. In each of their long histories, both Florida and Miami had won as many as nine games in a season, but never 10. It was sweet.

Our 1977 team suffered a close loss to Miami early, and then at the end of the year a shocking loss to San Diego State.

Seminole players flew over 2,000 miles to California to play a school whose name they’d probably never heard. Coach said, “We were warming up and then – boom – here comes this Indian (Aztec) out onto the field waving a flaming spear and the crowd went wild. Our kids’ eyes were big as plates.”

By the next fall we had our own flaming spear.

As the years passed Florida State became more and more of a darling in the media and a fan favorite nationally. Our facilities were upgraded, and then again and still more again. Doak Cambell Stadium grew from the erector set into a gothic castle, the largest contiguous brick edifice in the United States.

We became a great program, with great teams. And every good program and every good team has fallen prey to hubris at one time or another. There’s no need to remind our fans of the Rap Video summer and the 0-31 thumping in the Orange Bowl that opened the season. We did not arrive in Miami with our heads screwed on right.

Two weeks ago a photograph I had never seen before came to my attention. It’s a picture of me riding on a float in the Centennial celebration of my home town in West Virginia. I was five years old and my mother had dressed me in white shoes, white shorts, a white shirt and white suit coat. I was adorable.

In the picture I can see people lining the road watching the parade. A lot of them looked to be hardscrabble boys, coal miners’ kids. It’s unlikely any of them ever had a white suit. Looking at their faces now I wondered how many of them imagined tossing me off that float into a muddy ditch.

Football is like that sometimes. If I have a chip on my shoulder and you don’t respect me and you look down your nose at who you think I am and you think way too much of yourself, I’m going to muss up your hair and make you cry and send you home all dirty and embarrassed.

The Miami Hurricanes used to be that way. I think perhaps Houston and maybe Louisville are like that now.

Coaches understand all that. Motivation is more difficult when the three-deep chart is comprised of all three, four and five star players. Young men are especially vulnerable to hubris, and the great coaches can offset that mentality most of the time. But they can’t do it all of the time.

Coaches can see it coming, but they are limited by their players’ age and experience, and sometimes by an absent spark of leadership that must come from within the team itself. Former Secretary of Education William Bennett understood. He said, “Everyone who is 40 has been 19, but no one who is 19 has ever been 40.”

Talent is necessary to win, but it’s not enough. You have to have the will to win and you have to start every game with that commitment. The great coaches teach this, but even the greatest coaches despair at their inability to get that message across all the time.

In 1998 Chris Weinke was actually our 2nd string quarterback, having inherited the team from an injured Dan Kendra. When Weinke was brought down by a severe neck injury the week before the Florida game, Florida State would have to face the Gators with an unknown 3rd stringer at Quarterback.

Going into that November 21st game Florida was ranked 4th and the Seminoles 5th. The Gators had not won in Tallahassee since 1986 and now they strode in overconfident, certain of victory.

After the 23-12 Seminole win, several Gator players who hailed from the Fort Walton area said they had tried to warn their teammates that Marcus Outzen was a smart quarterback who could scramble and run. “We knew [Outzen] was a real football player,” they said. “But we couldn’t make [team mates] believe us.”

There was another fellow who had his head screwed on right back in 1973. Had he not forced the right decisions at the crisis point, Florida State would be a poorer and much diminished university today.

Dr. Stan Marshall was President of Florida State from 1969 through 1976. In many ways it was a dreadful time: losing football combined with social upheaval and general chaos.

After the chicken wire scandal and the subsequent 0-11 season Dr. Marshall challenged local supporters to retire the school’s $300,000 athletic department debt and to fund needed improvements. The alternative, he said, was to drop football.

When Stan Marshall said Florida State might consider dropping football he was not speaking in a vacuum. In fact he was actually being encouraged to take that step. Some of those voices pushing the elimination of football were no doubt sincere. But some saw it – and this will come as no surprise to you - as an opportunity to do permanent damage to Florida State as an institution.

There is a particular strain of nastiness and condescension in one newspaper editorial written 43 years ago this fall. This one was published on December 6, 1973 and entitled, “FSU Football; An Autopsy.”

“To rebuild winning football at FSU would require millions of dollars and it is money the university simply does not have,” it began. “And even if the administration could corral enough money it may be too little too late. It could never hope to collect enough cash to rebuild to the level of an Alabama, a Norte Dame…or a Florida.”

The editorial was just getting started. Now it veered into social commentary.

“The football fan of today is a different beast than his counterpart of a decade ago. He is not as noisy, as wild or as intense…he is more sophisticated. And with the exception of the upper echelon football schools (those who play in the Top 10) college football for the first time in years is losing popularity; attendance is dropping.”

Here was the editorialist’s smug conclusion.

“Before the FSU Administration jumps into an expensive football rebuilding program, it should think of the consequences. It should consider, perhaps, a reorientation and de-emphasis of the game. A different brand of football, maybe. The alternative could be many years of embarrassment and frustration.”

The words of that editorial are painful to read and to remember, but they are instructive as to what might have been had not great leaders emerged in 1974 to recreate and reenergize the Seminole Boosters.

Stan Marshall was not really ever going to drop football. He knew the value of a winning athletics program to a southern university aspiring to greatness. He had to fire two Head Coaches in three years before he got to hire Bowden.

“Have your head screwed on right when you get here.” That’s pretty sage advice for any young person. Actually, there’s probably not much advice in life better than that.

Charlie Barnes is the retired executive director and senior vice president of Seminole Boosters. Contact him at cbarnes161@comcast.net.