The AntiBowden

This article is full of nice tidbits.

“Yeah, it would make life a lot easier for me if this was the old days, but again if this were the ‘80s we would have been champions three times the last 10 years and that would have been pretty good,”

Wow. I really don't even know what to say to that. Is he admitting that he's inferior to the coaching staff that we actually had during the 80's? Is he saying that with our records over the previous years we would have automatically won the title? Is he saying that if you took out certain specific teams from the conference (namely FSU) that we could have won the title? Is he saying that if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle?

This is pure lunacy folks. This guy gets millions of dollars a year to beat up on D1-AA teams and choke in every single game against a top 25 opponent and he thinks that he would have automatically won the ACC 3 times during the 80's? What?

“Three times in the nine years I have been here, and every third year win the conference championship that would be pretty acceptable, but none in the 17 years is obviously not very good,”

Is that English or retarded? Seriously though, even if you accept his erroneous position that the ACC without FSU would be a cakewalk every year, it would not be acceptable to just stumble your way into a conference championship and then crap out in whatever bowl we went to because we finally faced good competition. The problem with Bowden is not a statistical issue, it's a matter of principle. Bowden's strategies over the years have been idiotic, his game management has been purely terrible, and every time we've faced a team that finished in the top 25, we've lost. That's the issue. Sure, we can roll over the crap teams, but when the chips are down we fold.

Yet, he continues:

“It used to be Clemson won it every year until Florida State came and then you add the Virginia Techs, Miamis and Boston Colleges, which if they weren’t in it we would have been the champions the last three years so it has been a factor,” Bowden said. “If you take those three teams out of the conference then we win it the last three years, I think.”

Is he honestly trying to compare himself to Danny Ford here? I mean is he so arrogant as to say that if he was competing against the same teams that Danny Ford went against he would win the conference championship all the time? Sure, the ACC had less teams in the 80's, but they weren't all crap like Bowden is suggesting. It was still a tough conference, and Danny Ford's teams absolutely dominated it. Add to that the fact that instead of playing 3 cupcakes a year for OOC games (two of our games this year are D1-AA SC teams) we used to play the likes of Georgia, Virginia Tech, Florida State, Oklahoma, Penn State, etc AND WIN. (Granted, Georgia had our number, but we at least fought them well, as opposed to 0-30 in the valley.)

“If I were younger, maybe it would bother me more, but after 31 years of coaching and seeing other coaches going through that and finally you know Mack Brown doing poorly, poorly, poorly and finally winning that, and my father going through it and finally winning it, I think there is a little bit of comfort, not much, knowing we don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Bowden said. “We are close and eventually it is going to happen if we can just hang on.

“I think it is going to happen where we will get to the championship game and will get in the BCS.”

I swear, that is Bowden's favorite thing to say. 'We don't have to reinvent the wheel.' Well then, why in the hell do we always run some stupid gimmick offense every year with some new "twist" in it that never, ever works in big games? Why is it that every time we play against a decent defensive coordinator we get absolutely shut down because of our latest gadget offense? Insanity is when you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results, yet every year, be it 10-2 or 6-6, Bowden says "we don't have to reinvent the wheel" ... and yet we just keep increasing his salary. Insane.

+newsvine   +digg   +del.icio.us   +reddit
Posted by Tom on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 | Permalink