Jimbo Fisher reveals he had three head coaching offers he turned down to be Florida State assistant

Before Jimbo Fisher was the head coach at Florida State, he was one of the biggest offensive coordinators in the country. That, naturally, came with head coaching opportunities. However, he turned down three of those opportunities to go be a coordinator with the Seminoles.

Fisher wanted to look for long-term growth and the right opportunities as a coach. That meant the opportunity to work for Bobby Bowden, who, as Fisher explained on Trials to Triumph, was a mentor to him throughout his career.

“I’d been around Bobby,” Jimbo Fisher said. “Because I used to come down and watch practices. I used to come stay at his house and watch practices back in the day when I was at Samford, believe it or not. He let me come. They’d go to bowl games, and they would give me a room. I’d go sit in the back when I was a young OC at Samford. He’d be game planning with the staff… They’d treat me just like their son and family. In a couple of games, I’d sit in the press box and just listen to him call games. Just had a headset with no mouthpiece and listen. That’s when he called plays like I did as a head coach, and just listen to him set things up, structure things. I was very blessed to have that at a young age.”

Jimbo Fisher made a name for himself as the offensive coordinator at LSU under Nick Saban. There, he’d win a national championship. Seemingly, he was ready for a head coaching job. However, he wanted that opportunity to coach for Bobby Bowden first.

“When I left LSU to go from the OC at LSU to the OC at Florida State. People said, ‘Well, that’s a lateral move.’ And it wasn’t no more money. It wasn’t anything else. But I wanted to be under Coach Bowden before I became a head coach. At that time, I actually had three other head coaching offers that I turned down,” Fisher said.

“My object was, I always said, I didn’t want to be the youngest head coach. I wanted to be oldest. There were some things there. I wanted to be under Coach, specifically, because I wanted to really make sure I was ready to be a head coach, and there’s some things I wanted to learn under him. So, being his OC was one of the best things I ever did. The talks we had, not just the X and O talks — he mentored me like his own son. We would go in his office, have talks about things, the history of things. Why things were done? How he would do things.”

Ultimately, Jimbo Fisher would replace Bobby Bowden at Florida State. At the time, there was some thought that Fisher pushed his mentor out. However, that wasn’t the case according to Fisher.

“People always said when he left, ‘You took over for him. You pushed him out.’ That wasn’t true. We were extremely close, and we talked a lot after that. A ton after that, weekly, monthly, whenever you need something, give me a call,” Fisher said.

“And I would call and I still talk to Terry, Jeff, Tommy. Still like one of the family, but people thought there was a rift between us. That was not true because he told me back in the 80s. He said, ‘When I get out of coaching, whoever the next head coach is, I’m not going to be around him.’ I said, ‘Coach, why would you do that?’ He said, ‘Because it’s not fair. Guy did that to me earlier and it hurt me.’ He said because that guy can never take over the program if I’m still hanging around, and you watch a lot of coaches up to this day, they still hang around the old — for the coaches there, he can never take over that program. Because people still look at him. You didn’t do it like him.”

Bobby Bowden coached Florida State from 1976 to 2009. During that time, he’d go 304-97-4, won two national championships, and largely built the program from the ground up. Jimbo Fisher, in a much shorter tenure, would go 83-23 and win a national championship. That’s success he doesn’t think would be possible had Bowden not stepped away the way he did.

“I was one of the coaches who had success following a legend. We won 80 percent of our games and won a national championship… Want me to tell you the biggest reason? Because Coach Bowden wasn’t around. He taught me,” Fisher said. “But then he let me go do my thing without looking over my shoulder, and people going to him, saying, ‘Well, Bobby, would you have done it that way?’ He allowed me to coach, and I think that’s a big part of these programs.”

In 2017, Jimbo Fisher would leave for a 10-year and $75 million contract with Texas A&M. Bobby Bowden, meanwhile, passed away in 2021. In the past few years, Florida State has found mixed results without its legendary coaches in the program.

“Great, historical head coaches… for them to step away, sometimes, is hard… I think it’s really detrimental to the present coach at hand and for me to get under him and learn… I would call him on the phone, don’t get me wrong. Just nobody knew about it. But he allowed me to be me to put my own stamp on the program,” Fisher said. “Which was very similar to him, but just a little bit different.”