They Might Beat Feat of Bryant, but Not the Man

It’s not that Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden aren’t excellent football coaches, aren’t good men, aren’t funny and smart. To sit down and talk to Paterno and Bowden about football or about the world is an honor and a pleasure.

But when Penn State plays at Iowa on Saturday and when Florida State is playing host to Wake Forest, it will not be a bad thing if Paterno’s Nittany Lions or Bowden’s Seminoles lose.

And it won’t be a bad thing if they keep losing. Paterno, 74, and Bowden, 71, are aiming to become the winningest Division I-A college football coach, to pass Paul “Bear” Bryant and his 323 career coaching victories. Paterno needs two more wins to pass Bryant. Bowden needs seven.

This is not to wish Paterno and Bowden ill. Besides building a powerful program in State College, Paterno is a man of honor and character who paid for a new library to be built on campus, who isn’t afraid to cry when one of his players is injured.

Bowden will make you laugh, mostly at his expense, and how many football coaches do that?

But neither man is a legend. Bear Bryant is a legend. His growling, gravelly voice, houndstooth hat and the way he watched practices from a tower allow people in Tuscaloosa to be able to close their eyes and see, hear and feel this man.

Bryant won everywhere he coached--at Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M; and, most memorably, at Alabama. Yes, Bryant won football games at Kentucky. He won with big men and little men, by running the ball and by throwing it.

He won with big stars and anonymous players from small Southern towns who didn’t want to be big stars.

He won with white players, maybe for too long, but he became the first Southeastern Conference football coach to welcome African-American players, and won with them.

Bryant was no angel. He broke some rules. He coached hard, maybe too hard sometimes. But he behaved in ways more accepted in his time than in our time.

Bryant said memorable things. “What matters is not the size of the dog in the fight, but of the fight in the dog,” Bryant said. “When you win, there’s glory enough for everybody. When you lose, there’s glory for none.” That’s Bryant too.

Bryant didn’t have the benefit of 14-game schedules and so many bowl games that even bad teams can play in December. Remember that he was winning games in arguably the toughest football conference, the SEC, for a good part of his career.

Paterno won many games at Penn State when the Nittany Lions were an Eastern independent, able to pick and choose their schedule. He fashioned decades-long winning streaks against such teams as Temple and Rutgers.

Bowden has won many games by joining the Atlantic Coast Conference and beating up on schools that value basketball over football.

At the start of this season it seemed inevitable that Paterno and Bowden would pass Bryant this season. Penn State was coming off a 5-7 year and there appeared to be significant cracks in the foundation of Paterno’s program, but Paterno needed to win only two games.

Yet after Penn State has been badly outplayed by Miami and Wisconsin, and seeing how the offensive and defensive lines are getting manhandled, and seeing there is no competent quarterback, and reading what would have been blasphemous even a year ago--calls for Paterno’s retirement--it’s hard to figure where Penn State will pick up two wins.

After Iowa are games with Michigan, at Northwestern, Ohio State, Southern Mississippi, at Illinois, Indiana, at Michigan State and at Virginia. Only the Indiana home game seems a likely win, with Southern Miss a maybe.

And Bowden was nearly speechless after North Carolina, which had been 0-3, destroyed the Seminoles, 41-9, Saturday.

Other than Saturday against Wake Forest and Oct. 27 game against Maryland, it is possible to see Florida State losing to any of the other teams on the schedule--Miami, at Virginia, at Clemson, North Carolina State, at Florida and Georgia Tech.

Penn State’s fall has been precipitous. The Lions were 9-0 in 1999 and contending for a national championship until Minnesota stunned them at State College by winning, 24-23. The discouraged Lions lost their next two games and are 6-11 since that loss.

The school that had been called “Linebacker U” has taken a drastic defensive downturn since longtime coordinator Jerry Sandusky retired after the 1999 season.

Sandusky said he quit because he wanted to spend time with his family and to run a foundation for underprivileged children that he had founded. But he interviewed for the Virginia job last year, which makes it seem that, perhaps, he was just tired of assisting Paterno.

Bowden, too, has lost key assistant coaches. Longtime associate head coach Chuck Armato took over the North Carolina State program and innovative offensive coordinator Mark Richt is the new Georgia coach.

Paterno spoke this week about the challenges of rising academic standards at Penn State. Some players are complaining that other players don’t work hard enough.

Bowden is challenging his players to respond well to the North Carolina loss. But then he admits he’s not quite sure how to get the response he wants.

Records should be broken and will be broken. It was good to see Dean Smith break Adolph Rupp’s coaching record. Smith was already a basketball legend. Paterno and Bowden have earned the right to retire on their terms.

Neither is coaching only because he wants to pass Bryant. But neither has done as much for, or meant as much to, college football as Bryant.

It’s probably too much to hope that Paterno would win one more game, that Bowden would win six, tie Bryant and then say, “I’m done.”

Because, after all, it was Bryant who said once, when asked why he didn’t go for a field goal when trailing by three points, “Hell, no, a tie is like kissing your sister.”

This one time, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.