Criminoles part of late Bowden’s legacy
— 33 years Florida State’s football coach (19762009) — died last month at 91. All over sports TV he was saluted as a legend, a fabulously folksy, charming man and great coach, winning two national championships and a dozen ACC titles.
Call me callous, but the cold truth — and one everyone who knows college football knows — is that Bowden’s success was in large part predicated on the recruitment of semiliterate young criminals. Florida State’s administration also knew it and allowed it. They still do.
Since April, two former FSU players, recruited post-Bowden, have been charged with separate murders.
In 1997, the Tampa Bay Times reported that in that offseason, on Bowden’s watch, seven of his recruits had been arrested on charges ranging from assault of a woman to theft to failure to appear in court.
In 1994, Bowden’s kicker pleaded no contest to having covertly recorded a sexual act with a date. Two weeks later, an FSU player was charged with rape.
In December 1993, former FSU running back Michael Gibson broke into a woman’s apartment, robbed her, raped her, twice shot her, then continued his sexual assault, before bolting with her family’s Christmas gifts, leaving her for dead. She survived. He was sentenced to life.
Bowden later outraged the woman’s family by writing the court in support of Gibson.
Florida State’s 1999 season wasn’t half done before four of Bowden’s players were arrested. His son, Steve, in 2003 was convicted of fraud in a $10 million investment scam.
A 1995 book, “Battle’s End,” was written by Caroline Alexander, hired to teach remedial English to FSU football recruits on the 1981 team. They were enrolled and playing football for Bowden despite profoundly deficient reading and writing abilities, borderline illiteracy. Catching up with them in 1994, she found one in the River Junction Correctional Institution.
By 2015, 19 FSU football recruits had been arrested since 2011.
Again, sorry for the cold truth, but Bowden’s other Florida State legacy lives on, too.