Bobby Bowden funeral: Legendary FSU coordinator Mickey Andrews shares lessons learned under Bowden

knows how good a defensive back you could have been buddy let me uh do something i not plan to do this but i just got sitting there thinking how many of you guys out there coach for coach bowden would you stand please [Applause] how many former players are here today stand up please thank you and i'll tell you what i bet there's a few more that would have been here but just simply couldn't get away but i know one thing there are loves in that casket first of all let me thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this celebration and as you see that that's exactly what it's been i was with coach and when he got his i guess his last reward here on earth when he was given that lifetime achievement award by the governor and i couldn't finish it i got up to talk and my throat was in my heart or something and i prayed and i prayed lord let me get through this let me make it a celebration ms anne and bowden family uh i appreciate you asking me to be a part of this for some of those guys back there and it's truly an honor to be able to do that to say thank you my friend you know i was i was really blessed in my life too in my coaching profession and other parts of my life and i get didn't get to finish it with diane and i'm going to tell you when coach walked in that pearly gate diane was right there giving him a chop [Applause] as a player i got to go to the university of alabama and learn from one of the greatest of all time and as a coach i had the opportunity to coach with coach brad i only stayed four and a half years with coach bryant but i was 26 years here with coach and i'm going to tell you i've always thought the way to learn how to coach is take the good things and build on them find the bad things and eliminate them and i got to eliminate a lot of things with coach bell but coach bryant taught me how to win coach bound taught me how to care and i needed that i found out you could still coach tough you could demand great effort if the players trusted you and you cared about them and coach helped me do that and i really believe that that was one of the things that separated coach biden from the other coaches he cared but he shared too he like there was not a single player on the team they didn't care about i don't care if it was a star i don't care if it was a backup i don't care if it was a walk-on and the important thing was that he made it important he made made you know that you were important and the thing he didn't limit it to just football it was about everything you heard some of them talk about family mark talking about family and the importance and you know i thought so many times how important time is of course coach was most of you that know him he was an early riser that light would be on early in the morning he didn't hang around much and after practice was over he got home and i think he probably went to bed and maybe eight o'clock or whatever and i wondered what he did during that time that he was home and i think one of the things about coaching and it's not unique that's true in other professions too it's not about how much time you got it's about how important the quality of that time is and coach he knew how to do that too but uh i was thinking back when i was by myself on the back porch and i just got to thinking about coach and all the things that i remember them doing and i had one thought that popped up and it was actually when he was addressing the team after an early morning workout and most of you guys sitting back there knew what 45 45 men in the morning that's when we were in our mat program and that was important to him he always showed up in the first one and he was there at the last one of the off-season and i never did ask him what he was doing but i got a feeling he was looking at the starting point of that team and he wanted to see how far they came during that time and usually it was 12 14 days now you people wanting up that morning and went through the map program it was tough uh my son-in-law told me after he went through uh his basic training in the navy david david did and he said i said how was it he said coach it don't even start to the map to compare to the map program and it was tough it was meant to be tough because that was really the foundation that coach started his football team off and it was more mental developing mental toughness than anything well if you're if if you're not going to be mentally tough and these coaches sitting on the front row right here know you ain't going to be very mentally physically tough either and i was talking with jimbo before we started today and i said how's it going he said coach i don't know if you could coach today and i go to practice from time to time and i even go to the off-season program i wanted to see what they were doing there and uh they were trying to get there i'm talking about the coaches but when you start talking about developing mental and physical toughness you think about coach bowden and he's such an easy to go guy so common in most things something happens on the football field and i'm i'm doing flips and he's just over there with his arm folded and i know there had to be more going on inside than what he showed but those off-season program is what he built his team on it was mostly drills that involved more than one person three four whatever and if one person didn't do it bad enough guess what they got sent back and try to do it again and do it right this time well we had a little old thing there where we always graded them we graded them on film every day after that workout each individual got graded and if a guy got sent back three times in a drill he got the opportunity to make up for that the next day that we worked out he would come they would come in at five o'clock in the morning and they would go through hell again before they started their workout we gave them a 10-minute break and then they had to go through the drill again well that's a that's a tough way to learn how to do something right because you were you had other folks that were that you were accountable for well that's football it ain't about the 11 best players it's about 11 players that play the best and that was coach's way of getting it done we did it in alabama when i was a player there but i'm going to tell you it wasn't nowhere near like it was in florida state i mean it was tough i couldn't go through it right now i couldn't carry a bunch through it i couldn't last 55 minutes i'd go hard for a few minutes but and i see a lot of these former players and i think that's the same thing with them i kind of got carried off but this is what coach was doing he was talking to the team that morning after the workout and he had got word that a few of them were bellyaching about it one thing he didn't like if you weren't going to do your best you better not talk bad about it because you don't get to do it some more and we were going to try to get better doing what was right and so he told him this he said guys don't pray for a lighter load pray for a stronger back that was coach bowden it was all about perspective it was about a mindset and he lived it and i think back about a hot day in 1993 in the meadowlands where that team needed that on the goal line the offense needed it in order to go 99 i don't know that much less than 100 yards in 23 plays and scored the only points that we needed all day and i'm telling you if our defense had had to go back on if we'd have punted three downs in punt there was not a player on that defense could have got back in the game because we had a hard enough time getting them off the field we had an agreement with our defensive players that we weren't going to walk on the field and we weren't going to walk off you all remember that guys and they had a hard time getting off the field we had to meet them out there and drag some of them off because i didn't want to run them on monday for walking off the field but i think i think the thing that stood out and i think most of these other coaches will agree he stood for doing your best and he was going to hold you accountable to it and i think that's what's wrong with us as a nation today we don't have accountability not many of our people nowadays could get through that off-season program and i'd hate show hated to walk out there on that field with them on saturday but it's a challenge we still got in front of us and i think that same thing in the offseason program i think they told me i had three to five minutes i don't have a watch so run me off when you want me to sit down but that same thing speech that he gave them in the that day in our season program that helped that defense that helped that offense it helped that team become national champions because it started in that off-season program he always had a reason and he had a purpose you know coach was our leader he is our buddy and now he's our saint oh he'll be missed we won't forget him but try remembering the great things that he stood for and laid the groundwork for this program and one other thing you know he didn't have his biggest win on a saturday you think about all those wins that he had it wasn't in 93 it wasn't in 99 it wasn't in those other days to trying to to get to that point to compete but it's on sunday morning when he walked in and jesus said great job buddy thank you coach [Applause] you

Channel: Florida State Football - Warchant TV

Views: 43,678

Keywords: FSU football, Florida State football, Seminoles, Warchant, Noles, Florida State, Florida State football podcast, FSU, FSU schedule, FSU football schedule, FSU recruiting, fsu football recruiting, Florida State football recruiting, FSU football news, FSU recruiting news, Mike Norvell, McKenzie Milton, FSU 2021 football schedule, Florida State sports, Florida State Seminoles

Id: 7Od7UjGi85g

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021