Seminoles Nurture Football Dreams

By Charlie Barnes, Executive Director - Seminole Boosters

After the first ten days of this 32nd Annual Bobby Bowden Tour, there's no doubt the land of the Seminoles is undergoing dramatic climate change. Clouds are scattering from the skies, the mood of the fans is markedly warmer, and any dark threat that might be lurking beyond the horizon seems to be too far away to spoil the party today.

So far, every banquet has been sold out and, perhaps more telling, every seat has been filled. In Lake City they turned away two golf foursomes because the field was already overfilled at 132. In Daytona, they had to cut the number of golfers down from 170 to a manageable 144.

Fans are thrilled with the "value added" benefits this year. In addition to the new offensive stars on the coaching staff, and the return of Chuck Amato to ride shotgun next to Mickey Andrews, and the reorganization of the football recruiting program (a move that has produced stunning results in the last few weeks), former coaching great Terry Bowden will be the speaker at about nine of the individual Club golf luncheons. Retired FSU running backs coach Billy Sexton will speak where Terry cannot, and Billy will accompany us and attend all the events and meet with fans.

After this Tour there will be selection of anecdotes to illustrate the sea-change in attitude among our fans. None may be more telling that the one woman in Panama City who re-scheduled her chemotherapy so she could hear what Coach Bowden had to say about the 2007 edition of our Seminoles.

Coach Bowden's step seems to be lighter these days. His humor comes more easily ("I wore hand-me-downs till I was 15. The problem was: all I had was an older sister."). He's been asked several times already about his depiction in the new movie We Are Marshall.

"I didn't even know I was in it," he laughs, "It looks to me like they got the fattest guy they could find to play me."

But there's another significant difference this spring. For the first time in 32 years, Coach Bowden directly addresses the issue of money and the Seminole Boosters. Coach makes the point in every speech at every stop on the Tour about the cost of doing business at the championship level. "We just hired the most expensive coaching staff in America," he says, "And the Seminole Boosters – your contributions – made it happen."

He tells how he tried to hire offensive line coach Rick Trickett several times, and how Trickett even called him and wanted to come to Tallahassee, but the money wasn't there.

This new coaching staff is excited to be working together. Bowden tells how Jimbo Fisher tuned down a higher bid for his services from Alabama to honor his commitment to Coach Bowden and come to Florida State. The implication is that Fisher is more enthusiastic about Florida State and the atmosphere here. But, as Coach points out, "Jimbo don't come cheap."

At the championship level, nothing comes cheap any more. Money doesn't guarantee success, but success hardly ever comes without the top facilities and top leadership that money attracts.

We Seminoles nurture dreams of returning to the glory that once was. And because we are ambitious, optimistic fans we dream of even grander things for the closing years of Bobby Bowden's reign. I suspect those years will number more now that they would have a short time ago.

Dream no small dreams, the poet tells us, for small dreams lack the power to inspire great achievement. That's what they say.

That's all true, no doubt, but small dreams do have their charm. I nurture my own small dream in quiet moments. It's a dream that will never be fulfilled, but it gives me pleasure to indulge thoughts of going back to live in my small home town in the West Virginia mountains, of sitting in the cold bleachers on Friday nights, wearing the blue & gold and cheering for the Logan County Wildcats.

I think that I would enjoy not caring if the Wildcats won or lost, but I'd be pleased if the boys gave everything they had to give. I'd enjoy liking the coaches without being concerned about their resumes, in a peaceful place where character and effort count and no one beyond the next mountain will ever know whether you won or lost.

Florida State alumni who were around when FSU began football in 1947 will tell you that scenario sounds familiar. We didn't win a single one of five games that first year, but school spirit was high and the camaraderie of that first team is still strong today among the veterans who remain Seminoles six decades later.

Not long ago Andy Miller and I enjoyed a leisurely lunch down in Inverness, with the Fohls and the Hagars and the Stewarts. They were all pals in college in the 1950s, fraternity brothers and sorority sisters. Bob Fohl played tight end for the 'Noles and has endowed a scholarship at that position.

The couples remembered fondly how, after the games, students would crowd around the locker room exit and applaud as individual players came through the door. Ours was a smaller, more intimate campus fifty years ago. There was a relaxed familiarity among the students and little pressure on the athletic program to fulfill grand ambitions.

Florida State was lucky. Some universities never get to choose the size of their dreams. They are limited by their location, their history or their size, their mission or very often the wealth and inclinations of their alumni. They never have the opportunity to pursue dreams of a national championship program.

We got to make our choice. We Seminoles made the decision to dream big. We dreamed so big that we built the most beautiful brick stadium in America, and under Bowden's generalship created a dynasty in the 1990s that will never be duplicated in its consistency and record finishes.

Each of us - Florida State, Miami and Florida - began to craft our big dreams at the same time in fact. For all three schools, it began in 1979.

In 1979, Florida hired Charley Pell. Although Pell dragged the Gators through the sorriest cheating scandal in NCAA history, he also won for them their first SEC championship and since then Florida alumni have never since been willing to tolerate anything less than championships. Eventually they even turned on Steve Spurrier when Gator fortunes waned somewhat after the 1996 national title. But that's the nature of business at the championship level. It's true at Florida, true at Miami, and we accept that it's also true at Florida State.

In 1979, Miami hired Howard Schnellenberger. Miami had never been an established power, yet Schnellenberger was determined to win a national championship by 1983. He drew a recruiting line above the Broward County line and declared the "State of Miami" to be inviolate. If FSU was the team of the 1990s, Miami was absolutely the team of the 1980s.

In 1979, Florida State occupied the highest rung on the State's ladder of glory and it wasn't close. Florida won no games in 1979 under Pell, and Miami struggled to a 5-6 record including a loss to Florida A&M in Tallahassee. But the Seminoles were undefeated and headed for the Orange Bowl. The most important victory for us, the real hidden triumph of that season, came with a slim five-point win over LSU in Baton Rouge. That was the game that convinced Bobby Bowden to remain at Florida State and to decline the LSU coaching job which he'd been secretly offered.

I am a Florida State alumnus. Like you, my loyalty remains here no matter what. With the hiring of the new football coaches, the re-organization of recruiting and with re-energized leadership, all of us FSU fans once again dream of national championship games and winning the ACC and All-Americans and glamour and national television and the swaggering army of Seminoles who stood atop the college football pyramid for so long. It's the biggest of college football dreams.

Without a compelling vision as companion to the fourteen-year-long Dynasty, there would have been no grand University Center. It is reputedly the largest contiguous brick construction in the history of this country, and it never would have come to life except for the dreamers and builders who took advantage of Bobby Bowden's achievements upon the field it towers above.

Bowden's legacy will not be his record of the most wins, but rather the strength of the Seminole program he leaves behind.

Unhappiness motivates improvement.

Seminole Nation was unhappy to say the least.

My goodness, how quickly things can turn about when you're willing and able to pay the cost of doing business at the championship level.