Winning Character

Tommy Bowden, Lawrence Kimbrough

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781433678608
• eBook ISBN: 9781433678615
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

While several college athletic programs have made national headlines coming under investigation for questionable practices, football coach Tommy Bowden has always led his teams with remarkable integrity on and off the field. In Winning Character, he plots a game plan for life that will make any man successful, from fellow coaches to family leaders and individual believers in Christ. Coach Bowden says it's all in the C.A.R.D.S.
C ommitment, A ccountability, R esponsibility, D iscipline, S acrifice
These attributes, or cards, are on every man's table. Bowden deals with each one of them here, boldly challenging readers to be consistent men of character and integrity.

PART I

Established Foundations

1

The Fine Line

They say there’s a fine line between winning and losing. Let me tell you just how “fine” the “fine line” can be.

When the smoke cleared on the last week of the 2005 college football regular season—my seventh as head coach at Clemson—we missed claiming the ACC Atlantic Division title by one win.

Make that one point.

Following hard, back-to-back home losses to #17 Boston College (in overtime) and #13 Miami (in triple overtime), we had just begun clawing our way back into contention before dropping a late October game at Georgia Tech.

Final score, 10–9.

We had been inside their 10-yard line with less than six minutes to play, first and goal, trailing by four. Freshman wide receiver Aaron Kelly had run back the first kickoff return of his career 81 yards to give us the short field. But when Charlie Whitehurst’s third-down pass was deflected at the line of scrimmage, incomplete, we decided to kick a chip-shot field goal to pull within one point.

Turned out to be a good call. Our defense held well enough to give us two more chances to score in the final minutes, one that died on a failed fourth-down attempt, less than ten yards out of reasonable field goal range, the other on a last-second interception. We were that close.

And even though we responded the next two weeks with blowout wins over Duke as well as my father’s eventual ACC champion Florida State to close out the conference schedule, we could never overcome that one-point loss in Atlanta from mid-season. When it was all said and done, when the games were all played out, we were one point away.

Then came 2006—when we not only missed clinching our division again by one point, but by one extra point.

We had come into our week two rematch with Boston College ranked #18 in the country, and we established the lead early, going up 10–0 by the end of the first quarter, only to be caught from behind when they returned the second-half kickoff for a touchdown to tie the score at 17. Unfortunately that wasn’t their only long kick return of the afternoon, including a thirty-yarder midway through the fourth period that gave quarterback Matt Ryan ample field position for a game-tying drive. (We certainly weren’t the first—and probably won’t be the last—to learn from that mistake with him.) Before we knew it, we were facing yet another overtime affair—our second straight against BC in two consecutive years.

The first overtime period ended with each of us trading field goals. 27–27. Then after getting the ball first to open the second overtime, we drove in for a go-ahead touchdown and were just about to turn the game over to our defense in hopes of finishing off a tough victory.

Only one problem. Our extra point was unexpectedly blocked.

I mean, how many times do you see that? Like, never? In overtime? Come on. But by giving our opponent such a late, sudden burst of momentum, it was no real surprise to see them close out their next scoring chance with a six-yard touchdown run, tying us momentarily at 33, followed by the deciding point-after to win the game.

And we ended up chasing that extra point all year long.

Five straight wins we reeled off next, including conference victories over Florida State (27–20), over North Carolina (52–7), over Wake Forest (27–17), and over Georgia Tech (31–7). Big wins. Strong performances. Our two tailbacks, James Davis and C. J. Spiller, combined to give us the top-scoring offense in all of college football.

But we stumbled hard at Virginia Tech on a Thursday night—again, the last week of October—losing 24–7. Then we dropped our second one-point heartbreaker of the season the following week, at home November 4 against Maryland, 13–12, a game we probably would’ve won if not for an illegal procedure penalty that nullified a late touchdown and left us settling for a field goal.

So, yeah, there’s a fine line between winning and losing. There’s an even finer line between winning games and winning championships. I should know. I won a lot of games in my twelve years as a head coach. Never had a losing season. Never failed to qualify for a bowl game. Even went undefeated one year in my second and final season at Tulane, 1998. Won our conference. Wound up seventh in the nation in the final polls—by far the highest ranking they’d achieved since their long-struggling football program had finished fifth overall way back in 1939. (That was the same year Riddell started experimenting with plastic helmets).

But I also know from tough, firsthand experience that you can be a really good team and still really lose. You can work hard all week and still fail to execute properly when the game is on the line. You can do a lot of things right and still be the one walking out of that stadium with your head down, crunching the ice underfoot on some other coach’s Gatorade bath.

Sometimes all it takes is one little point.

One mistake.

One dropped ball.

One botched play. That’s it.

And that doesn’t just go for football either.

A good man can slip up in one area of his life and lose relationship with his wife and kids forever. A guy who’s worked hard to build his business and advance his career can make one bad call, sign off on one questionable deal, agree to one unwise partnership, and watch everything disintegrate overnight—that is, if the fallout doesn’t drag on slowly for months and years, draining him dry, not leaving him hardly any time to recover once it all falls apart.

It doesn’t take much.

It’s a fine line.

And that’s why the daily, determined pursuit of character is so important to me—important enough for me to step out of my comfort zone here and risk putting a message down on paper like this, where everybody can read it and say anything about it (or about me) they want to.

I’m not a writer. I know that. But I’m a husband. And I’m a father. I’m a friend and a church member. I’ve got people I care about and a family worth fighting for. And, like you, I live in a world where the easy way is usually the most available way—and with few exceptions the most appealing way.

But I don’t like losing any more than you do. Especially not by one point. And if there’s anything I can say to help you and me realize just how diligent and resolved and immovable we must stay if we want to be successful in life—in all the most important ways—then I’m here to say it. And with God’s help I’m here to live it.

And I assume you’re here because you want the same thing.

The Fine Line Defined

I was a head coach for nearly twelve years at two major Division 1–A college football schools. For twenty years prior to that, I was an assistant coach at places like Alabama, Auburn, and Florida State. The pressure to win was enormous. The competition was intense. But as fierce as practice and game days can be when you’re working in those kinds of high-octane arenas, nowhere does a coach feel quite as much ongoing stress as he does in recruiting.

And the NCAA doesn’t help make that any easier.

The biggest thing they hate—the one dynamic they work the hardest to expunge from college athletics—is any activity that creates a recruiting advantage for one member institution over another. To this end (and because there’s no end of creative minds in college coaching who never met a loophole they wouldn’t like to exploit), the NCAA continues coming up with new ways to try keeping the playing field as fair as possible.

That’s why they have quiet periods and dead periods—parts of the year when you’re not allowed to watch practice, evaluate talent, or make face-to-face contact with a potential student athlete. That’s why they limit the times when your official visits can occur, how many of these visits can be made, which of your personnel can recruit off campus, how and when and how often you can communicate with possible signees. Similar to the IRS, the rules can grow so ambiguous and hard to interpret sometimes, you’re left to navigate a good bit of gray area. It may all sound right and reasonable on paper, but it’s a tricky walk when you’re actually out there on the recruiting trail, watching for land mines in real time.

One of the most awkward and uncomfortable situations to manage is when you’re visiting a high school during certain times of the year—times when you’re not allowed to talk to a player, when you’re just there to see his football coach, to inquire about the young man’s progress on the field and in class, to make enough of a splash to leave the impression that you’re interested in this guy. You’re hoping word gets back to him that you came out of your way to check on him, even though you couldn’t tell him yourself. But perhaps at some point as you’re walking into the gym on your way to the coach’s office—bam!—there he is, right in front of you—the prospect you’re not supposed to interact with.

What do you do?

Jump back from the door and hope he hasn’t seen you? Dart your eyes around like you’re just there to count the seating capacity in this place? The NCAA doesn’t mind if you say something like, “Hey there, son, you understand I can’t talk with you today. Sorry.” But that’s it. Comes under the heading “incidental contact,” which they graciously admit is just flat-out impossible to avoid sometimes.

Put yourself in that position, however—a coach standing eyeball-to-eyeball with a choice ballplayer you’d love to have on your team, a guy you’ve been working like crazy to develop a trusted relationship with, a young man who’s being wooed just as hard or harder by some of your top competition, and tell me you can’t feel your jaw muscles working, the pressure building, how easy it would be to step outside and spend just a few minutes in one-on-one, chemistry-building conversation—a thousand miles from home, and a long, long way from NCAA headquarters.

But it’s wrong. You know it.

And unless your moral compass is locked on true north, completely committed to living above every shortfall and suspicion, you will find yourself resorting to compromise—and figuring it’s the best play you’ve got at the moment. The endless tug of winning, of needing to fill those eighty thousand seats in the stadium every Saturday, of attra...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction: The Need to Win
• Part I: Established Foundations
• Part II: Character Building
• Epilogue: Final Call to Character