BYU football: Bowden's FSU run hits some rocky road

PROVO — Given all of the success Florida State coach Bobby Bowden has enjoyed over the past three-plus decades in Tallahassee, it would seem he's impervious to criticism.

Not so.

Bowden, who turns 80 in November, is the second-winningest coach in college football history with 383 career victories. He has captured a pair of national championships (1993 and 1999). During one stretch, his teams won 11 consecutive bowl games and posted 14 straight 10-win seasons. He's been named the national coach of the year five times.

Keep in mind that before Bowden took the reins of Seminole football, way back in 1976, FSU was mired in mediocrity — or worse. In the five years before Bowden became the head coach, the Seminoles posted a 19-37 record and weren't even close to being considered a national power.

Bowden changed all that for Florida State, carrying the program to heights never before imagined — similar to what his longtime friend, LaVell Edwards, accomplished at BYU from 1972-2000.

On Saturday, Bowden brings his team to the stadium named after Edwards as the Seminoles visit the No. 7 Cougars (5 p.m., Versus). The pair of legendary coaches will be on hand at Edwards Stadium — one still on the sidelines, one in the stands.

"No question, there's going to be an electric feeling to have coach Bowden come in and to have coach Edwards there watching," said BYU safety Andrew Rich. "Having two of the best coaches to ever coach the game in the same stadium — it's exciting."

The trouble in Tallahassee is FSU has not had a 10-win season since 2003. Not since 2005 have the Seminoles won an Atlantic Coast Conference championship, a league that FSU used to dominate, with 12 titles in 14 years from the early 1990s through the mid-2000s.

Bowden admitted this week that the sky-high expectations surrounding his program have worn on him.

"If you ever won a national championship, or go through what we went through, people expect you to do it every year," he said. "It don't work that way. ... Football goes in cycles. You might put together five, six, seven, eight or nine pretty good years, but you're not going to put 20 or 25 years together. It's frustrating for me now. In the '90s, we were the winningest team of the decade. Nobody had ever won that many games, and we won two national championships. We won the conference championship every year. People expect you to do it all the time."