It’s been said that there are two sides to every story, but the opinion of many is that Alabama bungled an opportunity to hire one of the greatest coaches in college football history in 1987.
Bobby Bowden grew up listening to the Alabama Crimson Tide on the radio when head coach Frank Thomas patrolled the sidelines in the 1930s and 40s. After graduating from Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Bowden attended Alabama for a semester and was a member of the football team. But since Alabama team rules prevented players from getting married and remaining on the team, Bowden, who had fallen in love with Ann Estock back home, transferred to Howard College in Birmingham. Ann and Bobby were married in April of 1949.
Bowden graduated from Howard in 1953 and became an assistant coach the next year. He coached at South Georgia State College for three seasons before returning to Howard (now Samford University) as the head coach in 1959. Bowden left Howard in 1962 to become the offensive coordinator at West Virginia under head coach Jim Carlen. After Carlen left for Texas Tech, Bowden replaced him as the Mountaineers head coach.
But all of that was a precursor to Bowden’s enduring legacy—and that is, being the head football coach at Florida State University.
Bowden arrived in Tallahassee in 1976 and quickly shocked new life into a program that had won only four games in three years from 1973-75. In 1977, the Seminoles went 10-2 and made it to the Tangerine Bowl. It was only the program’s second bowl opportunity in the decade of the 1970s.
Bowden’s team won 10 games in both ’79 and ’80, and also made two consecutive appearances in the Orange Bowl. Which brings us up to speed with the current conversation.
Over in the SEC, Auburn was a middling program at the time. The Tigers hadn’t participated in the postseason since 1974, and a 5-6 campaign in 1980 sounded the death knell for head coach Doug Barfield.
So, as Florida State was getting ready to face the Oklahoma Sooners in Miami, Bowden was entertaining overtures by the Auburn powers-that-be. Bowden relates the story in his book, Called to Coach with Mark Schlabach.
A few weeks before we played the Sooners in the 1981 Orange Bowl, I was contacted by Auburn officials about replacing Doug Barfield, who resigned after the 1980 season. My mother’s brother was the president of a bank in Childersburg, Alabama, and he was pretty close to some of the big Auburn boosters. They were working through my uncle to contact me, and I agreed to meet Auburn officials at my uncle’s home about a week before Christmas Day. I met with them for a couple of hours and listened to what they had to say. I drove to Tallahassee after the meeting unsure what I would do. Since we were going to the Orange Bowl to play in the biggest game in Florida State history, I wanted to make sure that no one found out I was talking to Auburn. I did not want my boys distracted while they were preparing to play the Sooners. A couple of days before Christmas, I received a telephone call from Harry Philpott, who was the president of Auburn University. He wanted me to come to Auburn and coach the football team.
“Look, I can’t take this job,” I told him. “I just signed a five-year contract extension, and I’ll have to pay Florida State $750,000 if I leave.”
“Well, resign from your job and we’ll fight it in court,” Philpott told me.
“I don’t think I can do that,” I told him. “Look, I’m getting ready to go play Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. I don’t want this situation distracting my team. Why don’t you just hire Pat Dye from Wyoming? He coached with Bear Bryant and he knows everything Bear does. If you want to beat Alabama, go hire somebody who knows how to beat Bear.”
They did.
Though in retrospect it would have been a monumental hire, it’s questionable whether Bowden could have achieved the same level of success at Auburn as Dye. Dye did for Auburn what Bowden did for Florida State: he completely reversed the fortunes of a decaying football program.
Consider this: from 1981-89, Auburn went 81-25-2 under Dye, while Florida State went 77-27-3 during the same span under Bowden. Pretty impressive numbers for the Blythe, Ga., native.
Both men have since passed away, Dye in June of 2020 and Bowden in August of 2021. And though Dye may not get as much national respect as Bowden, he was a great football coach and one who never backed down from a challenge—especially from Alabama.
The talks between Bowden and Alabama in 1987 have been widely discussed, and many are of the opinion that Alabama officials totally dropped the ball in the methodology used to vet Bowden—and the fact that he was not offered the job. According to Bowden’s book, Auburn was more aggressive in its desire to lure him away from FSU, but the timing wasn’t great and contract details created hurdles that Auburn simply could not overcome.
Bowden’s success in the late 1980’s propelled his teams to even greater heights in the decade of the 1990s, as FSU won national titles in 1993 and 1999, answering the question if Bowden could ever win the big one.
Later, in 1993, Bowden’s son, Terry, was hired as the head coach at Auburn. He stayed for six seasons and posted a 47-17-1 record on The Plains. TG
Cover photo by Al Blanton
