The 2003 Bowden Bowl and the modern Florida State-Clemson rivalry

I cannot read lips, so I will have to take former Clemson head coach Tommy Bowden’s word for it. In the aftermath of beating Florida State for the first time in his career, he and his father, FSU head coach Bobby Bowden, leaned in for an awkward hug and a brief mouth-to-ear exchange.

They were surrounded by a crushingly intimate audience that included at least four uniformed police officers, several dozen nosy television reporters, and many thousand Clemson fans in varied states of sobriety, who so thoroughly thrashed the uprights at Memorial Stadium that ESPN analyst Bill Curry had already worked through a self-righteous rant about goalpost safety.

In the midst of this scrum, the first question, posed from sideline reporter Heather Cox to Tommy Bowden, was the only natural one. What, she asked, did you just say to your dad?

And Tommy replied, “I asked him if he did that” -- lost this game, in other words -- “on purpose.”

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The Clemson-Florida State rivalry is a peculiar one, in that it does not carry any sort of primacy. Clemson’s biggest foe will always be South Carolina. Florida State’s historical top tier of hatred is rooted in years of clashes with Miami, back when Miami was a program that still struck fear into the hearts of the meek.

Clemson-Florida State was built upon necessity. In 1992, amid the first jumbles of conference reshuffling, the Seminoles joined the Atlantic Coast Conference, and one of the few programs that transcended the league’s basketball-first reputation at that point was Clemson.

It made sense as a rivalry because it was the ACC’s best bet at the time. It made sense as a rivalry in the way familial relationships often make sense, in that both programs shared just enough DNA to feel suspicious of each other’s motives.

The first series games were played in 1970 and 1975 and 1976, but those don’t count for much of anything, because the pre-Bobby Bowden era at Florida State is largely a wasteland of false starts and failures (the last of those games, a 15-12 Clemson win, took place during Bowden’s first season, when he finished 5-6, his only losing season with the Seminoles).

That coach was Corky Rogers, and according to a report in the Florida Times-Union, this is what happened: The night before the Clemson-FSU game, Rogers had people over to his house. One of those people was Wes Mann, a former Clemson player. One of Rogers’ other former players was LeRoy Butler, who was on the Florida State roster. According to Mann, Rogers said that Butler had mentioned Florida State was going to run a fake punt. Mann, goaded by his roommate, then placed a call to a Clemson student trainer and told him to warn Danny Ford that the Seminoles were going to run the fake.

After the game, Ford admitted he knew it was coming. But nobody knew when it was coming, and nobody knew how.

With the game tied at 21-21-thanks in part to an absurd punt return for a touchdown by Deion Sanders -- who actually mouthed the words “It’s going back” to Ford before the play -- and under two minutes on the clock, the Seminoles lined up to punt. For the only time in the game, Ford (who had one of the best kickers in the nation in Chris Gardocki) set up the return. Dayne Williams took the snap and dropped the ball under the legs of Butler, who essentially sat on it while the punter feigned a high snap and all the action around Butler moved to the right. Butler was supposed to count to three Mississippi and then sprint left, but he counted to one Mississippi, saw the lone Clemson defender who wasn’t fooled barreling toward him, and then took off down the left sideline, landing at the Clemson 1-yard line and setting up the game-winning field goal.

This was the Puntrooskie, a play that had apparently been borrowed from Bum Phillips (because, in the end, isn’t everything borrowed from Bum Phillips?). It was a moment defined by deception and rumor and supposition. This was how the familial roots of a rivalry were laid.

FSU’s Rock Preston breaks free during the Seminoles’ 17-0 win over the Tigers in 1994. Scott Halleran, Getty.

A decade later, when Tommy Bowden was hired as the coach at Clemson, the rivalry had gone sideways. From 1992-99, in the wake of Ford’s forced resignation, the Seminoles were either ACC champions or co-champions every season. They won national championships in 1992 1993 and again in 1999, when the first of the Bowden Bowls between Tommy and his father ended in a closer-than-expected 17-14 Florida State victory.That was the eighth straight Florida State win in the series, and the run would continue through Bowden Bowl II (a 54-7 Florida State victory against a Clemson team that had started the season 8-0) and Bowden Bowl III (41-27 Florida State) and Bowden Bowl IV (48-31 Florida State).

By the time of Bowden Bowl V, in early November 2003, there was a legitimate chance that, by beating Clemson again, Bobby Bowden could assure his son’s firing. The week before, during the Tigers 45-17 manhandling by Wake Forest, fans were chanting, “Fire Bowden.”

“It makes it very tough,” Bobby Bowden said in the days before the game, with his team ranked third, on the verge of clinching the ACC title and potentially advancing to another national-championship game.

What’s striking about Bowden Bowl V is that the game was never close. Clemson led 13-0 at halftime, and the Tigers cruised to a 26-10 win. Suddenly, things didn’t look so bad under Tommy Bowden, who was the first coach in Clemson history to lead his team to bowl games in each of his first four seasons, and whose record through his first 80 games as a head coach was actually better than his father’s.

Craig Jones, Getty

Bowden Bowl V shifted the storyline. Bowden Bowl V bought Tommy several more years at Clemson. All of which lends Tommy Bowden’s query to his father in the postgame a certain amount of conspiratorial weight: What if the father gave this one to the son on purpose?

It is, of course, a dubious notion, but it serves as an exemplar of a rivalry that’s rooted in an almost visceral deception. Besides, Tommy didn’t seem to have any better explanation. When Cox followed up by asking him about the pregame proclamation he’d made to her that this was Clemson’s best chance of victory in five tries, he shook his head.

“I was just making that up,” he said. And then he said it again, as if he were still trying to figure it out himself. He was just making that up.

Sometimes, you fabricate rivalries and they manage to stick. This is what happened with Florida State-Clemson, and what’s historically fascinating about Bowden Bowl V is that it also essentially marked the end of the Bobby Bowden dynasty. He coached six more years at FSU after 2003, and never again lost fewer than three games.

“Starting the next year, we won four out of five (against FSU),” Tommy Bowden told Sports Illustrated. “So they got rid of both of us.”

Tommy lasted until 2008, when he resigned after starting the season 3-3; Bobby lasted until 2009 before he was forced into retirement. They were both replaced by colorfully named assistants they’d hired (offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher at Florida State and assistant head coach Dabo Swinney at Clemson, both of whom still hold the jobs). And this helped maintain the familial feel of a series that, despite its relative newness, has always felt surprisingly intimate, a game of fathers and sons and high school teammates toying with each other’s emotions, in the way all good rivalries do.