It's time to update the website and break out the good bourbon, boys: Terry Bowden is breaking back into the big time!
In other words, he's just landed a new job in the MAC. From CantonRep.com:
AKRON — The University of Akron may have found a fit better than a native son to breathe life back into its football program. According to a source with knowledge of contract talks, Akron will hire Terry Bowden to be the Zips next football coach. Bowden, who is reviving his coaching career, may need the Zips as much as the Zips need him.
Key administrators from the university met with Bowden Wednesday near Cleveland Hopkins Airport and later offered him the job. Bowden, who has been the head coach at Division II North Alabama, flew back Thursday morning to inform his players of the move.
[…]
According to the source, Bowden reached out to Akron. His hiring is subject to board of trustee approval.
That's close enough.
This won't be Bowden's first go-round in the Rubber City: He spent a year at Akron under former Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust in 1986, the only season in a 20-year coaching career in which Bowden has served as an assistant. (His first full-time job after receiving a law degree from Florida State — of course Terry Bowden has a law degree, in addition to his post-graduate work in Oxford, England — was as head coach of Salem International University in West Virginia, where he was the youngest head coach in college football at age 26. He was succeeded at Salem by a fellow West Virginia alum, Rich Rodriguez.) So it's like a homecoming, really.
In fact, until roughly October 1998, Bowden was on one of the brightest trajectories in the country: After winning a pair of conference titles at Salem, he went on to guide his daddy's alma mater (Samford University in Alabama) from the non-scholarship backwaters of Division III to back-to-back appearances in the Division I-AA playoffs, then won his first 20 games as head coach at Auburn. Over his first five seasons on the Plains, the Tigers were 46-12-1 with three top-10 finishes and came within one point of the SEC title in 1997.
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Then came 1998, and with it a rash of injuries, academic casualties and arrests that forced Bowden's abrupt "resignation" the night before a game against Louisiana Tech, on the heels of a 1-5 start.
That was Bowden's first losing season at Auburn and only his third losing season in two decades, but the stigma of "skipping town in the middle of the night" still managed to relegate Bowden to assorted broadcasting and speaking gigs for the next decade, until he landed at Division II power North Alabama in 2009. There, he established a kind of halfway home for SEC refugees, fielding a lineup this year that — according to the current roster — featured 21 players who started their careers at I-A/FBS programs, including multiple transfers from Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Florida State and Georgia. Somehow, the Lions still got whomped by Delta State last month in the Division II playoffs for the second year in a row.
In Akron, he inherits a desperate program off back-to-back 1-11 campaigns under Rob Ianello, who got the axe last month en route to his mother's funeral. The Zips aren't always that cold: Before Ianello, J.D. Brookhart was there for six years, Lee Owens for nine and Gerry Faust for eight. All three tenures produced two winning seasons. This year, Akron went 0-8 in the MAC, failed to defeat a I-A/FBS opponent and finished dead last in the league in both scoring offense and scoring defense, dropping conference games alone by an average of four touchdowns per game. Obviously an experienced hand is not going to make things any worse.
He wants an FBS-level job. They want an FBS-level coach. What could possibly go wrong?
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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