CHARLOTTE, N.C. — None of this exists without Bobby Bowden.
Not the ACC as we know it, a conference that might not exist if Gene Corrigan hadn't had the vision to add the football powerhouse Bowden already built at Florida State, forever changing the balance of power in the ACC.
And certainly not the hundreds of people talking about football at ACC Kickoff this week, an event that took on an unexpectedly somber tone Wednesday when the 91-year-old ex-coach announced he was suffering from a terminal illness.
In the days when Florida State dominated the ACC like no one had before and no one has since — the Seminoles won the conference title their first nine years in the league — this annual preview/revival/convention orbited around the inexorable gravitational pull of Bowden's personality and the excellence of his teams.
He was the star of the show, bigger most years than any of the players. His every single utterance made news, intentionally or unintentionally. Perhaps more even than the sideline or a recruit's living room, this was the forum where he truly excelled, a man truly in his element.
The first year Florida State was in the league, kickoff attendance jumped from 250 to 350. The ACC had to expand and rethink the entire event solely to accommodate the massive demand for Bowden. There's a direct line from then to now, when about 500 people gathered in Charlotte this week and the entire show is carried live on the conference's own network. Bowden may not have built that with his own hands, but he certainly laid the foundation.
And it wasn't just raw personality: He always had the best team, at least on paper. It wasn't until the next expansion that anyone other than Florida State was picked to win the league. (Miami, in 2006. Oops.)
It's been 12 years since Bowden was here, and longer than that since his Florida State teams owned the ACC, but in the wake of Wednesday's news, he is missed here, already. Duke's David Cutcliffe choked up while talking about Bowden on Wednesday, and current Florida State coach Mike Norvell opened his comments Thursday morning with an emotional tribute to his predecessor.
"As he's at home, as he's resting, he talked about being at peace," Norvell said. "I think that even speaks to the legacy of who he is and what he's all about. That's what life is about. To be able to go through a journey, be in a challenging place, a challenging moment, be able to be at peace.
"Because of the impact that he's made, because of the man that he is, the coach that forever changed a university and a place, he's just a tremendous example."
He forever changed the ACC, too. The ACC won three national titles in football before Florida State joined the league. It won three more in the next 11 years. His coaching tree planted roots in the ACC, with Chuck Amato and Mark Richt.
Florida State kept the ACC nationally relevant in football for more than a decade at a time when the rest of the conference collectively struggled, while also raising the bar for everyone else. There was no separating Bowden from his program. He was Florida State, and Florida State was him. Heisman Trophy winners came and went, but there was always Bowden, and always the Seminoles.
"They were so good, but that's what was wrong," North Carolina coach Mack Brown said last fall. "At that time, Florida State was better and all the rest of us (in the ACC) were second or below because they were the best team in the country."
Eventually, expansion brought new competition into the ACC at the same time the Seminoles faded as Bowden aged. But the ACC without Bowden could easily have withered into irrelevance, just as the league was at risk of the same before adding Virginia Tech and Miami.
Bowden — his team, his magnetism, his stardom — arrived like a cortisone injection for ACC football. His absence is always felt at this time of year, and never more so than this week with this terrible news, but it's equally hard not to sense his lingering presence in all of this too.
