Today is my birthday, and I’ve found that as you get older, you begin thinking about your own mortality. As a child, you don’t seem to recognize your own impending death, but as you get older and things start going wrong with your body, you seem to realize it a little bit more every day. We’re no spring chickens.
Thus, if this topic is weighing heavily on my mind at the tender age of 28, then I believe we have our excuse for the recent shoddy performance of the Florida State Seminoles. For indeed, if one my age thinks occasionally about death, then a man approximately fifty-two times older than me (give or take a couple of years) must have it on his mind constantly. Yeah, whenever Bobby sees those strapping young men out there practicing on the field named after him, a part of him must realize that he’s close to being part of the fertilizer that makes the beautiful grass on Bobby Bowden Field grow.
Damn kids, get off ma lawn!
So folks, give Bobby some slack. So he hired his criminally retarded son to destroy his football team for the past 12 years? So what? Who cares if he’s kept more guilty criminals out of jail than Johnnie Cochran? Does it really matter if he hasn’t changed his playbook since slavery was legal? So he’s had some beautiful quotes over the years, such as…..
“I don’t like offensive football the way it is nowadays. Offensive football today is a game of formations. When I used to work the offense, you lined up in one formation and you played that way the whole game. You could tell every thing the other team was doing. If they did this, you go there. If they did this, you go here. If they do this, you do that. But now it’s ‘put this formation in and they do this. Put this formation in and they do that.’ Try to always get some kind of a mismatch. But that’s the way the pros play it. Colleges are the same way.”
or
“When you hire your son, you know what’s going to happen. Unless you play great offense every week, he’s going to catch it and a lot of people are going to (complain) out of spite. A lot of people are directing (the criticism) at me. But they like me and don’t want to get on me, so they get on (my) boy.”
or my personal favorite
“Why should I punish my football team by having a key player not play in an important game with national implications because of something that one player did?”
Realize that the man has the Grim Reaper standing over his shoulder, and give him a break. After all, we’re only human.
Except Joe Paterno. And possibly Ed Orgeron. And land whale Charlie Weis.
March 27, 2007 at 10:07 am
Don’t forget about all the angry ebays. That stuff has the potential to ruin a man.
March 27, 2007 at 11:04 am
“Because you all ignited it,” he said to a small room of reporters. “You listen to eBay and e-mail and all that junk, and you all kept writing about it and that fans it and makes it grow and grow, and it becomes a cancer. That’s why.”
March 27, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Man, I totally forgot about the Ebay comments. Good call.