Fisher still takes pride in ‘being a Bowden’
Texas A&M coach flooded with emotions about mentor’s influence on career and life
COLLEGE STATION — Jimbo Fisher won a national title at Florida State in 2013. His predecessor Bobby Bowden won two at FSU late last century. Fisher never had any intention of being the next Bowden in Tallahassee,
Fla. — he knew that was happily impossible.
“I don’t mean this as any disrespect to anybody else,” Fisher said this week of Bowden, “but I don’t think anybody ever did more for a school than coach Bowden did for Florida State.”
Fisher, entering his fourth season at Texas A&M, attended Bowden’s funeral in Tallahassee on Saturday. Bowden, a celebrated and beloved coach from coast to coast, died Aug. 8 at the age of 91.
“I remembered why I started coaching,” Fisher said of the tide of recollections rising from the emotional reunion. “Sometimes … you have to get back to your roots — back to your foundation. The Bowden family was my roots.”
When A&M fans watch Fisher, 55, roam the sidelines at Kyle Field this fall during the most promising season in recent years for the sixth-ranked Aggies, they’ll recognize plenty of characteristics of the renowned Bowden — one more reason Fisher never minded anyone mixing him up for one of Bobby and Ann’s six offspring.
“People always accused me of being a Bowden,” Fisher said with a grin. “They took me everywhere; I did everything with them. I was around them all the time.”
Fisher played quarterback at Salem University for Terry Bowden, one of four Bowden sons, in the mid-1980s, and then wrapped up his college career at Samford University in Alabama when Terry took that job. Samford was also Bobby Bowden’s alma mater.
Fisher’s first college coaching job was under Terry Bowden in 1988 at Samford, and he was Terry’s quarterbacks coach at Auburn from 1993-98. Following non-Bowden stints as offensive coordinator at Cincinnati and then LSU, Fisher served as Bobby Bowden’s offensive coordinator at FSU from 2007-09.
The rising star succeeded the legend at FSU in 2010 and, in Fisher’s fourth season with the Seminoles, won the program’s third national title.
“You never know what kind of head coach a guy is going to be when he comes from being an assistant,” Bobby Bowden told the Associated Press of Fisher in 2014. “He’s passed the test in any arena he’s been in.”
Fisher often is associated with Alabama coach Nick Saban, for whom he served as offensive coordinator when the duo won a national title at LSU in 2003 and whom he now meets annually as an SEC West foe. But when Fisher, who led A&M to a No. 4 finish last season, was cutting his teeth in coaching? That’s all about the Bowdens.
“I go back to the early 1980s with them,” Fisher said. “To be exposed to Bobby and that family at an early age … to have them coach you as a player, coach with them, coach with Bobby, go to bowl games with them, go to practices, stay at their house … (Bowden’s funeral) reminded me of all those times.
“As much as I love everything I do, I also loved those (early) days when you didn’t have two nickels to rub together and you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to pay rent and you’re making $14,000 a year … but you were just as happy coaching then as you are now.”
Fisher said a favorite memory involves helping at the Bowden Academy — precursor to today’s Manning Academy. Fisher said young coaches would arrive from around the country, and Bobby Bowden would hold court for hours at night, his feet propped up poolside and the football fables rolling.
“He could make you feel like you knew him for 20 years in the first two minutes you talked to him,” said Fisher, who also repeatedly referenced Bowden’s devout Christian faith. “He was so genuine and honest. I was 22, 23 years old and would just sit there and listen over and over and over and over.”
In late December 1990, Bobby Bowden invited Fisher, then a Samford assistant, to sit in the press box at the Blockbuster Bowl in Miami and listen in on the headset to Bowden call FSU’s 24-17 victory over Penn State — quite a thrill for a 25-year-old who’d grown up enamored with Bowden’s accomplishments with the Seminoles.
Fisher, a relentless recruiter, said Bowden’s endless string of counsel included the persistent reminder that “players make a difference in games, not plays.” Fisher has strung together a school-record three consecutive top 10 classes at A&M since recruiting websites began tracking such weighty matters around the turn of the century.
“You have to make sure you have a certain list of guys that you get the ball to,” Bowden would tell Fisher, one reason Fisher often keeps a tight rotation of skill players.
Fisher added of his most indelible mentor: “The amount of information that used to come out of him that he didn’t even realize he was exerting …”
That appreciation for football knowledge sounds strikingly familiar to those who’ve spent even a little time around the fast-talking, data-packed Fisher. One more thing from last weekend’s remarkable Bowden celebration, which Fisher said could have lasted for days, involved one grateful protégé after another with their own cherished stories to share.
“You wonder,” Fisher said, “what are they going to say about you?”