I tried. I wanted to let it go by, but it gnawed at me all afternoon after reading this.
The problem with today’s college football players?
Too much motherly love and not enough discipline from daddy, according to Florida State coach Bobby Bowden.
“[A player] needs discipline from a male. Not a mama. They all want to wear earrings like their mama. They all want to look like their mama. Because their mama is raising them,” the outspoken Bowden said Monday at the Florida Sportswriters Association Media Days event.
Read it again. Read slowly the name of the person saying it. Repeat.
Bobby-freakin’-Bowden talking about the need for discipline? The man who’s idea of punishment when his players are arrested is to have them run stadium steps?
Well, maybe it was taken out of context? It did come from a wire report. Let’s see:
Coach Bobby Bowden often responds with a lenient hand in FSU disciplinary matters. In the most recent incident, lineman Bobby Meeks was charged with violently resisting arrest and with battery against a police officer after a bar fight. He pleaded guilty after the charges were reduced to misdemeanors and can now play.
Discussing the landscape last week, Bowden recounted a conversation with a former member of his West Virginia staff, Chuck Klausing, who concluded that kids haven’t changed much, but parents have. Bowden agreed.
“The parents have got to teach ’em,” Bowden said, “and it’s got to be done when they’re 2, 3, 4 years of age. Kids are not getting that any more because the daddies aren’t home. The daddies are gone. A boy needs discipline. He needs discipline from a father, not a mama. They all want to wear earrings like their mamas. They all want to look like their mama, because their mama raised them.
“People keep saying: ‘Bobby, when are you going to change those kids you’ve got?’ I say: ‘The parents have got ’em 17 years, I got ’em two, and they get in a little trouble.’ But when they are taught right from wrong and they are disciplined, that’s when our problems will cease.”
Oooookayyy.
So I’m guessing that’s what he tells the parents when he goes to a recruit’s house — you people screwed him up and didn’t punish him properly, and I’m not going to start.
It’s part of what I really hate about Bowden. There is some small nugget of truth in there; but you know it is surrounded by his blatant hypocrisy, “aw, shucksism” crap, and his self-serving pious born again junk. What it really comes down to, for Bowden is winning the game. At least Jackie Sherrill and Jimmie Johnson admit that much.
