ORANGE BOWL : ‘The Battle for No. 2’ Doesn’t Have Right Sound to Florida State

Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden has heard all the jokes about the Seminoles’ inability to win a national championship:

What does FSU stand for?

Finishes Second Usually.

Florida State, which has finished second behind Miami in the coaches’ poll twice in the last five seasons, is 10-1 and ranked third behind Miami and Alabama going into tonight’s Orange Bowl game against No. 11 Nebraska (9-2) and will probably finish second behind the winner of the Miami-Alabama national championship showdown in the Sugar Bowl if it beats the Big Eight champion Cornhuskers.

“You get tired of being No. 2, but a lot of teams would like to be in our position,” Florida State quarterback Charlie Ward said. “We just can’t beat one team (Miami), and that’s the team that usually wins the national championship.”

Florida State has won six in a row since a 19-16 loss to Miami, which has handed the Seminoles five of their nine setbacks since 1987.

“I don’t think so much (of not winning the national championship) as I do of Miami being there and not us,” Bowden said. “It’s funny. The national championship thing doesn’t come to me that much. The thing that comes to me is, ‘Why did you lose to Miami?’ Other than a couple of wide rights (missed field goals), we’d be down in New Orleans (playing for the national championship). That’s the thing I do wake up thinking about.”

Although Bowden hasn’t had much success against Miami, he has been successful in bowl games. He has the second-best bowl winning percentage, behind UCLA’s Terry Donahue, and has led Florida State to a 9-0-1 mark in its last 10 bowl games, including seven consecutive victories.

Nebraska’ Tom Osborne, college football’s winningest active coach, has had no such success in bowl games, as his 8-11 bowl record shows. The Cornhuskers have lost five consecutive bowl games, including a 31-28 loss to Florida State in the 1988 Fiesta Bowl and a 41-17 loss to the Seminoles in the 1990 Fiesta Bowl.

“Certainly it’s frustrating and I wish it was different,” Osborne said of his bowl record. “But I don’t look back on it with regret because we prepared as hard as we could and we played as well as we could, but we just didn’t win. It’s nothing I lose any sleep over.”

Led by Ward, who passed for 2,647 yards and 22 touchdowns en route to being named the Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year, Florida State averaged 61 points in its last three games after switching to a no-huddle shotgun offense.

Ward, who threw 13 touchdown passes and 15 interceptions in the first eight games of the season, threw for 946 yards with nine touchdowns and only two interceptions in the final three games.

His favorite targets are freshman wide receiver Tamarick Vanover and wide receivers Kez McCorvey and Kevin Knox. The ACC rookie of the year, Vanover caught 42 passes for 581 yards and four touchdowns. He also averaged 51.6 yards on eight kickoff returns, returning his first two college kickoffs for touchdowns of 96 yards against Wake Forest and 94 yards against Miami.

McCorvey caught 34 passes for 521 yards and a team-high six touchdowns, and Knox caught 35 passes for 396 yards and three touchdowns.

Tailback Tiger McMillon rushed for a team-high 579 yards and three touchdowns while sharing time with Sean Jackson, who rushed for 489 yards and four touchdowns despite missing three games because of a knee injury.

Nebraska, which averaged 328.2 yards on the ground to lead the nation in rushing for the fourth time in the last five seasons, is led by tailbacks Calvin Jones and Derek Brown. The leading rusher in the Big Eight, Jones ran for 1,210 yards and 14 touchdowns, and Brown, a former star at Servite High in Anaheim, ran for 1,011 yards and four touchdowns.

Florida State’s defense, led by All-American linebacker Marvin Jones, ranked sixth in the nation against the run, giving up only 100.3 yards per game and three rushing touchdowns all season.

Tommie Frazier, the first true freshman to start at quarterback for Nebraska, led the Cornhuskers to five victories in his six starts after replacing Mike Grant midway through the season.

Frazier passed for 727 yards and 10 touchdowns and threw one interception, and ran for 399 yards and seven touchdowns.

A prep All-American from Manatee High in Bradenton, Fla., Frazier was recruited by Florida State, but considered Notre Dame and Clemson more strongly before signing with Nebraska.

“He’s like Charlie Ward because he can be totally unpredictable, and that drives a coach crazy,” Bowden said.

Orange Bowl Notes

Game organizers said that 65,000 tickets have been sold for tonight’s game at the 77,224-seat Orange Bowl. There may be a lot of no-shows, though, because many who purchased tickets may stay home to watch the Sugar Bowl telecast. . . . Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden said Florida State and Nebraska have scheduled a home-and-home series for the late 1990s.

“It will be the first time they’ve been to Tallahassee and I hope they come out to the cemetery to see how I look because that’s about 10 years from now,” Bowden quipped. “Tell ‘em to pay their respects when they come out there.”