Bobby Bowden: Why he’s the greatest college football coach of all time

Consistency

Bobby Bowden was a head coach before arriving in Tallahassee, compiling a career record of 73-32 at Howard and West Virginia.

Florida State Seminoles Football

However, he inherited a program at FSU that had gone 4-29 the previous three seasons. After going 5-6 in his inaugural season, Bowden never finished below .500 over the next 33 years.

He won nine or more games 23 times in his career while winning 74.5 percent of the games coached. Nobody will ever equal the streak of top-four finishes from 1987-2000. What about the bowl streak that began under his leadership? Not to mention FSU has an outstanding record in bowl games at 28-17-3, with most of those games taking place against excellent football programs.

Here’s some perspective. Michigan has more college football wins than any other program and has been around nearly double the number of years as FSU.

The Wolverines have only been to one more bowl game than FSU, and that’s mostly because of the greatness of Bobby Bowden.

What I think most people forget is FSU football was an independent school at the time, while playing against much more established programs. We’ll get into how Bobby Bowden made FSU a premier college football program later.

However, when we talk about Nick Saban, his first head coaching job was at Michigan State, where he wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire with a 34-24-1 record.

It wasn’t until his third season at LSU that Saban would begin to operate on an elite level, and that was with two football programs with solid football history.