FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The gimpy old men of college football, Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden, have been alive for 155 years and won 712 games between them.
"I'm Exhibit B. Joe is Exhibit A," said Bowden, 76, as he prepared his 8-4 Florida State team to play a once-beaten Penn State team coached by 79-year-old Paterno in the Orange Bowl on Tuesday.
They are relics in a way, men whose conversations are dotted with mentions of friends and contemporaries who have passed away.
They are also relevant. No other major college coach has won more games than Bowden's 359 or Paterno's 353.
Bowden is the gabby one, all Birmingham old-boy charm.
The Brooklyn-born Paterno is more the curmudgeon, fussing about media obligations and dismissing sentimental talk to discuss the game instead.
Yet the old friends share this: They have coached so long and so well at one place -- Paterno for 40 years at Penn State and Bowden for 30 at Florida State -- that they have outlived their own iconic status.
The calls for Paterno to be nudged aside were widespread after 3-9 and 4-7 seasons the last two years. Now he is back with a team that is only seconds from being undefeated, after losing to Michigan on the final play of an October game.
It has been Bowden's turn this season, with a three-game losing streak -- Florida State's first since 1981 -- that was halted only by the victory over Virginia Tech in the Atlantic Coast Conference championship game that landed the Seminoles in the Orange Bowl.
They are out of touch in their way, perhaps especially Paterno, whose success this season came in part because he opened up a staid offense.
In an age when coaches recruit by instant message and BlackBerry, Paterno is blissfully unwired.
"I got a call from the president's office one day. He was getting all these complaints I wasn't answering my e-mail," Paterno said. "I didn't know I had an e-mail."
One of them, Bowden or Paterno, will go out as the coach who has won more games than any other.
But far from being rivals in that nip-and-tuck race, they revel when the other comes back from the brink.
"We have both reached the age where when things go bad, the first thing is you're too old, you're over the hill," Bowden said. "I think Penn State did a smart thing staying with him."
Bowden took his share of criticism in Tallahassee this season, enough to make him recall the days he was hung in effigy early in his career at West Virginia.
