Terry Bowden sat in Dick Vermeil's office and stared at the photos, marveling because Vermeil was either hugging a player or crying in every one.
It was 2007, and Bowden had come to Vermeil’s 114-acre ranch in Chester County, Pa., because he wanted to get back into football after eight years in broadcasting and didn’t quite know how. So Bowden sought out Vermeil, the coach he believed had done it best.
Citing burnout, Vermeil walked away from the Philadelphia Eagles in 1982 and went to work as a television analyst for CBS and ABC. Vermeil returned in 1997 with the St. Louis Rams and won the Super Bowl in his third season with undrafted quarterback Kurt Warner.
Bowden and Vermeil had met only a couple of times, but Bowden called and asked if he could visit, anyway. Vermeil had broadcast the biggest games Bowden coached during his six years at Auburn from 1993-98, and some of the biggest Bowden’s legendary father Bobby had coached at Florida State.
Vermeil and Bowden spent about eight hours together. Bowden was uplifted not only by what Vermeil said, but also by what he saw in the frames covering the walls of Vermeil’s football lair.
“He loved not so much the game, but his players. He loves them more than anything else,” Bowden said. “It refreshed my memory why I should be going back to this, too. Not just unfinished business.”
Bowden found the road back wasn’t easy. He said he was one of two people contacted by West Virginia in December 2007 after Rich Rodriguez left for Michigan. But when interim coach Bill Stewart led the Mountaineers to a Fiesta Bowl victory over Oklahoma, Stewart was retained, forcing Bowden to postpone his job search for another season. In 2009, he landed at Division II North Alabama, where he went 29-9 in three years.
Last month, Bowden’s energy and enthusiasm captivated officials at the University of Akron. Hired as its 27th football coach Dec. 22, Bowden, 55, will try to restore the Zips to prominence in the Mid-American Conference after they went 2-22 under Rob Ianello.
During a 40-minute conversation in his office last week, Bowden seemed refreshed and eager, just as he said he was after his broadcasting hiatus.
As good as that time was, Bowden thinks he’s back where he belongs.
During the five years he spent working in New York as ABC’s college football studio analyst alongside John Saunders, Bowden considered himself a spokesperson for the game. He told his dad, “You’ve never had your face on a Jumbotron in Times Square and I do,” he said.
Bowden acknowledged he needed time away after being forced out at Auburn in 1998.
“I got offered a job within three weeks at Texas Tech,” Bowden said. “Rich Rodriguez and I had the same agent so they went straight to him after they contacted me. Within a day I said, ‘I’m not ready. I won’t do a good job. I’m hurt right now. I don’t think I can give you what you want.’ ”
Bowden said he had prepared his whole life to be a college football coach. He took public speaking in high school. He majored in accounting at West Virginia because he knew “running an athletic program was like running a business.” He earned his law degree from Florida State because he hoped one day he would sit before trustees and presidents who would “want to see someone who had least been interested in academics.” Although not a Rhodes Scholar, he spent a summer studying abroad at Oxford because he thought it would look good on his resume.
All of those things did.
“But not one of them helped me prepare for that day when I didn’t feel I was wanted at Auburn,” Bowden said.
Bowden went 47-17-1 at Auburn, including an 11-0 season in 1993, when he was named national coach of the year despite the Tigers’ bowl ban because of NCAA sanctions from the Pat Dye era. Bowden was forced out after a 1-5 start in 1998.
“As much success as that [was], it was still awful hard being at Auburn and finding out there’s a trustee that doesn’t want you or a group of trustees that don’t want you and no matter what you do they’re going to replace you,” Bowden said. “That’s a whole ’nother story that I’m not sure you ever want … It’s like a John Grisham story; you don’t want to tell it all.”
As for the rumor of an alleged affair with a trustee’s daughter, Bowden implied it was part of a smear campaign.
“There was a lot going on at Auburn I signed agreements not to talk about,” he said. “The silence … If you can kill the messenger, the uglier you can make it, the better. ‘It wasn’t that, it was this.’
“I got offered a job at Texas Tech and turned it down. I got an offer from ABC to be in front of a million people every week on live television. If there was something nasty that was hidden out there, I don’t think ABC or Texas Tech ... When something bad happens, usually someone stands up and says, ‘Yes, that was me.’ That never happened. Although I’m divorced now, I was married 20 years after that and divorced a couple years ago.”
William Muse, president at Auburn from 1992-2001 and at UA from 1984-92, battled some of the same problems with the Auburn trustees that Bowden faced. According to his book The Seventh Muse, Muse was asked to resign after it was learned he had begun job hunting.
“Given all the mess at Auburn, he needed to get away from that for a while,” Cincinnati-resident Muse said of Bowden in a telephone interview last week. “It was so intense there. Getting away from it helps you appreciate the things you really enjoyed and prepared to do for most of your life.”
To heal from the painful split at Auburn, Bowden immersed himself in “the greatest job in the world,” his studio stint at ABC.
“I was studying games, I was analyzing football,” Bowden said. “It was 1998, my dad had already won one national championship, he won a second one, he was becoming the winningest coach. You have all these goals of being the best in coach in America and I said, ‘I’m not even going to be the best coach in my own family. Why don’t I do something for football that nobody else in my family is doing?’
“I made the commitment right there, I’m going to do talk radio, do television, be the guy that newspaper people call and say, ‘What you do you think about the bowl games? What do you think about a playoff?’ I became that writing for Yahoo. I did Sirius satellite radio with Jack Arute. I did a daily ESPN radio show in Florida. I never felt like I got out of college football because I was in a job a lot of people wanted and a lot of coaches had wished they had.”
After five years, Bowden decided he wanted to broadcast games and was partnered with Mike Tirico. But then came changes in upper management at ABC. The parent Walt Disney Co. decided to eliminate ABC and ESPN college football overlap. Bowden wasn’t getting the assignments he wanted, so he switched to Westwood One radio’s game of the week.
He had been with Westwood One for three years when he began contemplating a return to coaching.
“You look in the mirror at 50, a lot of men do, and say ‘Is this the way I want to end my career?’ ” Bowden said. “I didn’t know how difficult it was to get back in. There was no road map for being out 10 years. Nobody’s ever done it in college football.”
That led to the visit at Vermeil’s. Bowden looked at the Super Bowl trophy, fingerprints all over it from Vermeil letting his friends hold it. Vermeil assured Bowden he was doing the right thing and gave him confidence that he could succeed again.
“He knew exactly where I was in my profession,” Bowden said. “Dick is an uplifting person, so enthusiastic, so in love with the sport. He was perfect.
“I’d done nothing but study the top coordinators, interviewed them, studied film of the top teams. I’m not just an SEC guy, just a Southern guy. I’d been to the Big Ten, the Pac-10, interviewed everybody. He reassured me that I thought I’d become a better coach, a wiser coach and a more knowledgeable coach. When I left there it was clear. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get back in, but when I do I’ll be ready.’ ”
Marla Ridenour can be reached at mridenour@thebeaconjournal.com or on Twitter @MarlaRidenour.
