Legendary head coach Bobby Bowden was at the peak of his power when the 2000 season began. His Florida State program was on an amazing run of 13 consecutive seasons finishing in the national top five. They had won or shared the ACC title every year since joining the league in 1992. What’s more, Bowden […]
Florida State was the program perpetually knocking on the door in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Between 1987 and 1992, the Seminoles finished in the national top 5 and won a major bowl game each and every year. The downside? They never finished #1. The bigger downside? Their in-state rival Miami was even better […]
The era of football excellence in Tallahassee began in earnest in 1987 when Bobby Bowden took Florida State to a #2 national finish. From 1987-89, the Seminoles did two things—they finished in the national top five and they won major bowl games. The downside was they always found themselves chasing archrival Miami, who won the […]
Read about the 1989 Miami-Florida State game, where the Seminoles continued their red-hot play and temporarily derailed the Hurricanes run to a national title.
Bobby Bowden’s Florida State program made their first national splash in the seasons of 1979 and 1980. They went to the Orange Bowl both years and finished in the final Top 10 each time. The five years since then had seen FSU drift off the national radar. They were going to bowls and winning them—a […]
Bobby Bowden put his up-and-coming program on the map in 1979 with a run to the Orange Bowl. The 1980 Florida State football team was ready to demonstrate it was no fluke. They had All-American nose tackle Ron Simmons back to anchor the defense, along with fellow All-American Bobby Butler in the secondary. READ GREAT […]
Florida State’s floundering football program had been taken over in 1976 by a guy named Bobby Bowden, and he immediately got the Seminoles respectable at 5-6. The next two years saw FSU win a combined 18 regular season games. Bowden’s program was coming and 1979 Florida State football produced the breakthrough year. READ GREAT 1980s […]
Bobby Bowden had the Florida State football program established as a national power by 1992. The Seminoles had won major bowl games in each of the previous five years and finished in the Top 5 nationally each time. But they were coming off a particularly heartbreaking end to the 1991 season. A year that looked […]
Bobby Bowden had been knocking on the national championship door for several years at Florida State. He reached Orange Bowls following the 1979 and 1980 seasons. He came within one play of the title in 1987. He delivered contenders in 1988, 1989 and 1990. The most common theme of his inability to get over the […]
The Georgia Bulldogs have been a pretty consistent winner over the years, but only once have they won the national championship. That came in the 1980 college football season, when a freshman running back named Herschel Walker came blazing onto the scene and transformed Georgia and the entire SEC for the three years he was in Athens.
The 1981 Orange Bowl offered a rematch, as Oklahoma met Florida State in Miami for the second straight season. And this time the sequel was much better than the original—after OU won decisively the prior year, this time the Sooners had to go down to the bitter end to win a classic game. Let’s look back on how OU and FSU came to arrive in South Beach on New Year’s Day of 1981.
One traditional powerhouse program and another up-and-comer on their way to becoming a powerhouse program crossed paths at the 1980 Orange Bowl. Oklahoma and Florida State arrived in Miami each having completed the 1979 college football regular season ranked in the top five and ready for what would prove to be the first of two consecutive New Year’s Day battles on South Beach.