It’s No Trouble for Bowden

Well, now, dadgummit, Bobby Bowden does have standards.

A day before his Florida State football team was fixin’ to meet Virginia Tech for the national championship, the coach said so hisself.

“If I had a player commit murder, well, now, I would just have to let him go,” Bowden said.

There, you happy?

Now leave the nice old man alone. He’s got a football game to play, charm to sell, friends to make, a legend to fatten.

About them Florida State rascals who have been been busier than a can of Aquanet at a Miss Kudzu pageant? Cain’t be helped.

“We have a bunch of boys who have what I used to have,” Bowden said. “What is that? Hormones!”

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When Florida State’s football dynasty takes the field here for tonight’s Sugar Bowl, the heart of the nation will be with a man considered as sweet and harmless as, well, a sugar bowl.

That would be the drawling, cackling, preaching caretaker trying to win his second national title in 34 years of waddling the sideline.

A man who has lived 70 years and is still treated like the cute kid hanging out at the barber shop, still called Bobby.

“People are saying, ‘Ohhhh, he’s never won two national titles, it’s a shame a guy that old never won two,”’ Bowden explained Monday. “They’re saying, ‘Poor old guy . . . how much longer is he gonna live?’ ”

People cheer for Bowden the way they cheer for an old car to start, or an old hound to run.

They love how he drips sincerity, embraces self-deprecation, and embodies the old-fashioned Southern football coach better than anyone since the Bear.

It’s all true too.

Bowden is kind, loyal and generous. When he’s not coaching, he’s caring for a 50-year marriage and large family. He was found Sunday in a New Orleans area church. Not in a pew, in the pulpit.

Also true, however, is this:

Bowden will take the field tonight with a team that, off the field, has behaved with the same recklessness that once brought shame to the likes of Miami and Nebraska.

This program dressed like “Hee-Haw” sometimes behaves more like “NYPD Blue.”

As the coach rises higher in public esteem, it seems his players fall deeper into trouble.

Tom Osborne must be wondering how come he didn’t get a deal like this?

In the last 12 months, those Seminole “hormones” have been working overtime:

* Peter Warrick, starting wide receiver, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft after a celebrated discount shopping spree at a department store.

* Laveranues Coles, starting wide receiver, was kicked off the team after previous problems were compounded when he also took part in the shopping spree.

* Tay Cody, starting cornerback, was arrested for allegedly possessing marijuana.

* Todd Williams, a reserve tackle, was disciplined for smashing an ATM.

* Four student managers were confined to their hotel here after trying to steal a Sugar Bowl banner at a basketball game.

* Byrne Malone, backup defensive tackle, remains in jail for allegedly firing shots into an apartment.

* Chris Walker, backup defensive end, remains in Tallahassee after having been arrested Christmas Eve for drunken driving.

Not to mention the three players who have been benched just this week for curfew violations.

Actually, only two of the three--defenders Roland Seymour and Reggie Durden--will miss any playing time.

The third player who showed up late, kicker Sebastian Janikowski, is considered much too valuable to bench.

“I have a Warsaw rule,” said Bowden, explaining his double standard. “Unless [Janikowski, a native of Poland] has a heart attack, or unless I have a heart attack, he is going to be kicking the ball off.”

A roomful of reporters laughed while, back at Florida State’s hotel, about 100 young men were learning that being athletically gifted means you don’t always have to follow the rules. The most glaring double standard, of course, is that Bowden can get away with running the kind of program that would damage other coaches.

The Seminoles are so troubled, their program was recently ranked in a “Tarnished 20” poll concocted by a legal Web site to recognize football programs enduring off-field problems.

They’re No. 1.

And that ranking does not include the infamous agent-funded Foot Locker shopping trip by several players that accompanied their only national title in 1993.

State rivals started calling the school, “Free Shoes University.”

His peers shake their heads.

Bowden shrugs.

“The type of players we recruit are the same type of players we recruited when we won the Sunday school award,” he said. “It’s not bad guys being bad, it’s good guys being bad.

“They make mistakes, just like you did as a kid, just like I did as a kid.”

Bowden indeed punishes people. He approved a two-game suspension that probably cost Warrick the Heisman Trophy.

But he said that to set the sort of conduct standards that would deter such behavior in the future--more expulsions, for example--would not be fair to the players.

“So many of my players never had a daddy. . . . My question is, who’s going to help these doggone kids if the coaches don’t?” Bowden asked. “I’m not gonna let public opinion tell me how to discipline my players. I’m going to kick a kid off a team, and now he’s gonna burn out in life? I won’t do it.”

Bowden says the problem is not with the changing attitudes of players, but with the changing attitudes of the public.

“In the past, when you had trouble, the coach handled it, and nobody else knew it,” he said. “I can remember rifles going off in the dormitory automatically . . . but coach handled it and nobody knew. The coach and the police.”

Today, he implied, the scrutiny is as powerful as that rifle.

“Now something happens, the whole world knows,” he said. “And the whole world wants to tell you what to do about it. It makes you want to bite your tongue. You can’t hide anything anymore.”

Oh, but you can, and he does.

Beneath the hayseed exterior is a country-smart football man who understands what it takes to win.

And how you must sometimes compromise.

And how you must sometimes get people to look the other way.

So we know Bobby Bowden would cut a guy for murder. How about, say, theft?

“Now, if a player calls and says he’s gotten a good discount, I’ll ask, ‘Where did you get it?’ ” he said Monday.

A roomful of reporters howled.

Confronted with that crime last fall, Warrick defended himself by saying, “It wasn’t like I shot the president.”

Everybody wondered where he got such nerve.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.