By Will Vandervort.

It’s no secret being the head coach at Clemson was the dream job for Tommy Bowden.

When he was the offensive coordinator at Duke back in the early to mid-1980s, he always thought to himself that’s a place he would like to be a head coach one day.

“It was a great job and it was one that I kind of always had my eye on – if I could just end up at a place like that,” Bowden recalled.

Bowden got his opportunity in December of 1998 when he was named the head coach at Clemson. The previous two years Bowden had won 18 games and lost only four at Tulane, including a perfect 11-0 season in the fall of ’98.

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After all those years of coaching as an assistant in the ACC and the SEC, he was finally in charge of one of those schools and it was the one he coveted the most. But at the time, Clemson wasn’t what it was all cracked up to be.

Yes, Clemson had the great traditions everyone loves about college football. It had a rich and storied history that made it unique to other programs, but neither what Bowden nor anyone else on the outside saw was how Clemson had fallen behind in things not seen by the naked eye.

“When I got up here, you could see how far behind we were,” he said. “Mack Brown at North Carolina just built this brand new building. Florida State had done a lot of work and had some new stuff, and NC State was building its new building up there. Even Duke was doing some major renovations. There was no doubt we were behind and I was surprised.”

Bowden said when it came to player amenities and coaches’ offices, Clemson was in the bottom third of the ACC at the time. After his first season, in which he guided the Tigers to a 6-6 record and berth in the Peach Bowl, he began to push the Board of Trustees about the facilities.

“I was not talking about the stadium,” he said. “They had a big stadium, but of the 365 days in a year, the players were only in the stadium six or seven times. Their locker room, training facilities and the personal space they used practically every day was below par.

“I didn’t want them to think they could just drop some paint off, hangs some fixtures and fix some doors. I suggested a free-standing building.”

Bowden envisioned what is currently the WestZone at Clemson. So in the winter of 2000, Bowden, along with then athletic director Bobby Robinson and an associate athletic director, went and visited schools such as Georgia, Auburn and others around the southeast to see what they were doing and how Clemson could incorporate those things into its plans.

“Clemson had a great tradition. It had a great history. It had a great stadium. I felt like with the new facilities, if we could update them just a touch, that would be enough to get us over the hump,” Bowden said. “I felt like the fan base was so supportive that once they realized it, because I don’t think they understood how far behind we were from a facility standpoint, they would come through and they did. I felt like that was the only missing ingredient in that program.”

Bowden was proven to be right. However, he was unable to hang around long enough to see the fruits of his labor.

After another five years of planning and raising funds, the WestZone project began in the winter of 2005. By the start of that football season, a structure was in place and Bowden and his coaches could finally show off a real physical building to recruits instead of just artist renderings.

On the field, things were going okay, but not the way Bowden or the Clemson faithful would have liked.

The Tigers were winning as Bowden produced nine-win seasons in 2000, 2003 and 2007 and won eight games in 2005 and 2006. But the natives were growing restless.

Clemson continuously fell short of winning a championship, always getting close, but losing to lesser programs such as Maryland and Wake Forest always cost the Tigers a chance to win or play of an ACC title. To make matters worse, Maryland (2001) and Wake Forest (2006) both won ACC Championships during the Bowden era at Clemson.

“Not being able to finish the job is my biggest disappointment,” Bowden said.

But what Bowden’s teams did accomplish cannot be overlooked either. His nine-and-a-half seasons rank as the third longest tenure by a head coach in Clemson history. Only Frank Howard (30 years) and Danny Ford (11 years) stayed longer.

His 72 wins also rank third all-time behind Howard and Ford. His teams never posted a losing record and they were always bowl eligible. In all, he coached teams to eight bowl games, tying Ford for the most in school history.

“We had a run where we were real successful against South Carolina. We were bowl eligible every year,” Bowden said. “We definitely showed some level of consistency.”

Bowden was 7-2 against archrival South Carolina and he beat his father’s Florida State teams in 2003, ’05, ’06 and ’07. During his time, Clemson became the first team since the Seminoles joined the ACC in 1992 to beat them in back-to-back years and the only school to do it three years in a row.

“It was really a great time for me,” he said. “I did not win as much as I wanted to win. I felt like we did well. When I left, single-season ticket sales were very good and strong, attendance was good and strong, discipline was pretty good, grade point average was good and we were setting records academically. We were beating South Carolina and we were getting to bowl games.

“When I look back we did some good things, but when we would beat South Carolina and beat Florida State, we would step back and lose to Wake Forest and step back and lose to Maryland. That would always cost me. As I look back, I look back more at the shortcomings than I do the accomplishments.”

Ironically, losing to Maryland and Wake Forest in back-to-back weeks in 2008 cost Bowden his job. That year, the Tigers entered the season as the No. 9-ranked team and the favorite to win the ACC, but by mid-October they were 3-3 with three embarrassing losses.

After the loss to Wake Forest on a Thursday night in Winston-Salem, Bowden was forced to resign the following Monday and Dabo Swinney was appointed to interim head coach.

Bowden says a legacy is what other people perceive it to be. It is more of a reality of what they see than what maybe it actually is. He says he does not know what his legacy at Clemson is, but he is thankful that he got the opportunity to leave one.

“My kids graduated from Clemson. My wife enjoyed living there, I enjoyed it,” he said. “I really enjoyed my 10 years there. Yeah, there were some hostile times or whatever it was, but that is the coaching profession. But everything about it, other than the fact I fell short in what I wanted to accomplish, it was a great experience.”