Several months before he passed away last summer, Bobby Bowden was on the phone reminiscing about the heyday of college football in Florida.
I asked him about a quote I’ve used many times over the years in which Bobby bragged about the dynastic dominance of Miami, Florida State and Florida in the 1980s and 1990s.
“You can forget about the Big Ten, the Big 12, the big this and the big that,” Bobby said. “The toughest conference in the country is the Big Florida. If you can win that one, you’re going to be in the running for the national championship.”
A quarter-century later, Bobby was, to use one of his own words, “bumfuzzled” with what had happened to the perennial powers in our once-prodigious pigskin peninsula. The name “Florida” was once synonymous with college football supremacy, but the Sunshine State’s sparkling Cathedral of Gridiron Greatness has developed massive cracks in its foundation and rampant rust on its girders. The paint on the pillars is fading and chipped and the church steeple is bent and drooping.
“I don’t know what happened,” Bobby said back in 2020, “but it starts with recruiting. I’ve always believed that great recruiting makes great coaches.”
It was Bowden who nearly 50 years ago rescued a Florida State program that was on the verge of being shut down, captivated the state’s recruits with his country-fried, fish-and-grits charm and turned the Seminoles into a dynasty in the 1980s and ‘90s.
At about the same time, Howard Schnellenberger, the pipe-smoking, establishment-provoking head coach of the Miami Hurricanes, put a recruiting fence around South Florida, called it “The State of Miami” and won the state’s first national championship in 1983.
In 1990, Steve Spurrier accepted the job at the University of Florida, took over his perennially underachieving alma mater and transformed the Gators into the most funning, gunning, cunning offense the Southeastern Conference had ever seen.
Other great coaches such as Jimmy Johnson, Urban Meyer and Jimbo Fisher followed Schnellenberger, Spurrier and Bowden, and they too won national championships. In all, the state of Florida won 11 (more than one-third) of the national championships in the 30 years from 1983-2013 but hasn’t won one since FSU’s last championship season nearly a decade ago.
“Florida, Florida State and Miami had three of the top five winningest programs in the 1990s [the other two were Nebraska and Tennessee],” Spurrier says. “And last year none of our state teams even finished in the top 25. I don’t know exactly why [the downfalls] happened, but it certainly happened.”
In the 1990s, every game between Florida and Florida State had both teams ranked in the top 10, and six times they were ranked in the top 5. Last year, both teams had losing records when they faced off in the season finale, UF had already canned head coach Dan Mullen and the Florida-Florida State game featured an interim coach (Greg Knox, remember him?) for the third time in the last four meetings.
The gleaming luster of the Miami-Florida State rivalry has become even more tarnished. For eight straight years starting in 1990, one or both of the teams were ranked among the top four in the country when the Hurricanes played the Seminoles. In three of the last five years, UCF has finished higher in the final polls than FSU and Miami.
In fact, UCF won the mythical state championship last fall with a victory over the Gators in the Gasparilla Bowl in a season when the state’s “Big Three” went 18-19 — the worst combined record since Bowden arrived at Florida State in 1976.
While UCF’s back-to-back undefeated regular seasons in 2017 and 2018 put the Knights on the national radar and played a major role in getting them invited to the Big 12 (beginning next season), their emergence still can’t cover up the massive stain on our state’s college football reputation. While UCF coach Gus Malzahn likes to call the Knights “the future of college football,” the lingering question remains: What happened to our state’s proud past?
Path of decline
Where did we go wrong? How did Florida’s Big Three become the Tiny Trio? How did our powerful pigskin peninsula turn into the island of misfit football?
The answers are complex and feature a variety of factors, including the advent of other FBS programs in the state such as UCF and USF, complacency in building facilities, a transient population in which recruits aren’t nearly as loyal to state teams, and a national TV landscape that allows the top recruits to leave the state and still have their families watch them every week.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to interview Johnson at his oceanfront enclave in the Florida Keys and I asked him a very simple question: What happened to the ‘Canes? Johnson, sitting at the computer in his home office, quickly Googled the schedules of the UM teams he coached when the Hurricanes were an independent in the mid-1980s. He then, one by one, recited the names of some of his opponents.
“Florida … Florida State … Oklahoma … Notre Dame … Michigan,” Johnson said. “We had a half-a-dozen games every year against marquee-type teams — and you only played 11 games back then. So half of our games were on prime-time national TV every year, and that’s when it meant something to be on TV. Hell, these days, everybody’s on TV every week.”
Manny Diaz, another former Miami coach who was fired after last season, grew up in Miami, attended Florida State and has seen the dilapidation of state Big Three up close and personal. He told me early in his tenure at UM that recruiting has changed in Florida — locally and nationally. Schnellenberger’s “State of Miami” now belongs to the entire country.
Programs such as UCF, USF, FIU and FAU are siphoning off some of the undervalued 3-star recruits that provided the Big Three with the quality depth they needed to compete for championships. Nationally, recruiting has changed with the Internet, the proliferation of social media and 24/7 wall-to-wall coverage by the recruiting websites.
“Recruiting is different now,” Diaz told me. “Miami had some inherent advantages back in the 1980s and 1990s that don’t exist anymore. South Florida prospects back then were criminally underranked, and a lot of guys would slide under the radar. That’s not the way it is now with the Internet. Now everybody flies a plane [South Florida] to recruit.”
And recruits are much more savvy now than they were back then. They know which schools are investing money in football and which ones aren’t. And, quite frankly, the Big Three got fat and happy. While schools such as Clemson, Alabama and LSU — even Kentucky and South Carolina — were building beautiful new facilities, the Big Three thought they could keep winning national championships on the cheap.
“We never even thought about facilities or worried about facilities when I was coaching at Florida,” Spurrier says.
What does it say about Florida’s Big Three that UCF was the first program in the state to build an indoor practice facility — a full decade ahead of the Gators, Seminoles and ‘Canes?
“It’s been an issue at Florida, Florida and Miami,” Diaz told me early in his UM tenure. “We all had such success without [upgrading facilities] that we became very arrogant to a point where the world passed us by. ... The world is a smaller place now. Kids are taking more unofficial visits, they get exposed to more programs and it’s important to stay current. It’s hard to say, ‘We want to be a first-class program and compete for championships,’ and then the recruits look around and say, ‘Well, your actions don’t match your intentions.’ "
Facilities faded
Investment in infrastructure — or lack thereof — is one of the main reasons Fisher bolted Florida State for the palatial facilities at Texas A&M. In fact, former FSU quarterback Drew Weatherford, a successful businessman who is a member of the school’s Board of Trustees, says FSU’s facilities are now even worse than when he played 15 years ago.
“There was some lipstick put on [the facilities],” Weatherford said during February’s board meeting, “but to a certain degree, it had actually regressed from when I was here.”
In fairness, there are other factors for the Big Three’s downfall — such as demographics and population migration — which they simply cannot control. It’s no secret that Florida has, in many ways, become a rootless state with an ever-growing transient population.
Almost four-fifths of Florida’s 200% population growth since 1970 has been from new residents moving into the state. Florida has the second-lowest rate of population made up by native-born residents in the entire nation.
There was a time when many of the kids who grew up in Florida dreamed of playing for Florida, Florida State and Miami, but those players seem to be fewer and farther between.
“It seems like high school players just don’t have as much loyalty to schools in their state,” Spurrier says. “It used to be that they grew up rooting for one of the state schools and wanted to play close to home, but now it seems like that’s not very important anymore. Times are changing and we have to adjust with the times.”
At long last, it seems like that might finally be happening. Florida’s Big Three are realizing it’s not 1995 anymore and they can’t just rely on hiring a coach without investing in their programs.
Florida State doesn’t yet have a standalone football building but has reportedly raised more than $60 million for the facility and hopes to break ground soon. The Gators opened an $85 million standalone facility and have dramatically increased the salaries for assistant coaches while giving new head coach Billy Napier $5 million to hire an army of support staff.
“I think timing is important in every job,” Napier says. “I have been impressed with the leadership at Florida in terms of their awareness and what is required to be competitive at this level. They [UF’s administration] have been committed to our vision, our plan and a more modernized approach.”
The most drastic example in the level of institutional commitment is happening down in South Florida, where the Hurricanes, perhaps spurred on by ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit saying last fall “football doesn’t matter” to Miami’s leadership, are quickly trying to change their image.
They fired Diaz, opened their wallets and lured former Oregon coach Mario Cristobal back to his alma mater with a 10-year, $80 million contract. They also enticed athletic director Dan Radakovich to leave Clemson by offering him a contract that reportedly paid him up to $3 million a year and made him the highest paid AD in the nation. To get Cristobal and Radakovich to leave their previous marquee jobs, UM’s administration and influential boosters had to promise to invest big money in facilities and infrastructure.
“I guess the best way to put it in perspective is that when everything was even, Miami was dominating the college football world,” Cristobal told ESPN. “Then other places started investing a lot, and Miami had fallen away behind. So that’s where there became a gap.
“Now that the gap is being closed completely, and we’re now going to jump ahead and create our own gap, that to me speaks very strongly. Miami, with better resources than just about everybody, will place itself in a very unique place in college football once again.”
We have once before seen this reverent place of which Cristobal speaks; the once-proud Cathedral of Gridiron Greatness with its pews filled by adoring worshipers; its altar occupied by iconic coaches and legendary players; its steeple standing tall and proud like a giant index finger telling the whole world that “We’re No. 1!”
Somewhere up there in football heaven, Bobby Bowden is having a conversation with Bear Bryant, telling him of a resurrection and a second coming.
Let us all bow our heads and pray that the Big Florida will rise once again.
