Inexperienced Seminoles visit Duke

As Bobby Bowden, now 25 years enmeshed in Seminole folklore, stands perched above the Florida State practice field on his custom-built shaded tower, he does not see the same players that hoisted his team on their shoulders to the national championship game last season.

Departed are a Heisman trophy winner, a four-year starting tailback and 12 other starters that had brought so much success to his storied program.

Arriving is a starting redshirt freshman quarterback, a backup true freshman quarterback, a receiving core devoid of explosiveness and seven new defensive starters who can only hope to recreate the success that their predecessors enjoyed.

Pundits and oddsmakers, sniffing weakness in arguably the most dominant program in college athletics over the last decade, have been feasting on all of the question marks swirling around Tallahassee this summer. They foresee a non-alliance bowl in the Seminoles' future, along with a fall from the apex of the ACC, on which they have firmly entrenched themselves since joining the conference nine years ago.

This is going to be the year the empire all comes crashing down, they prophesize, as Bobby Bowden and the boys fall from their tower above average ACC football to join the commoners on a seemingly level playing field.

The revolution starts Saturday at 6 p.m. in Wallace Wade Stadium against Duke; the first battle in the fifth-ranked Seminoles' most difficult war in years looks to be a mere formality until they play the heart of the conference.

"Anytime you play Florida State, even though they lose guys, you know they are just going to replace them," said Blue Devil's third-year coach Carl Franks. "However, I still think that this is a good time to be playing them. [In fact], it is probably the best time to play them because they don't have everything clicking yet, but on the reverse side, neither do we."

It appears as if the Blue Devils have not hit any type of stride in the last several years. 434 victories into the program's history, the last one seems almost as distant as the first.

On the other side of the football, given that Saturday's performance will serve as quarterback Chris Rix's first and that their receiving corps lacks any Peter Warrick-like dominance, the Seminoles will look to exhaust the Blue Devil defense with a steady running game, as opposed to a Chris Weinke-led high flyin' attack.

Bowden will probably also prefer to pound out the yardage because he respects Duke's defensive front line.

"I'm worried about those doggone blitzes giving us problems," the face of FSU football anxiously declared, in his good old boy drawl. "They threw everything at us last year, but we could throw and catch so well, it hurt them. This year they are going to test us and see if our quarterback can throw."

In previous years, if an opposing defense respected the Seminoles ability to run the ball, they would, with more of a yawn than a battle cry, simply air the football out over hapless defensive backs. Now, it remains to be seen if Rix can live up to the legacy that Weinke, Danny Kanell and Charlie Ward forged before him.

Almost everybody, not merely the Duke faithful, hopes that Rix will not be on this week, but somehow the feeling lurks that high up in his tower above the practice field in Tallahassee on the eve of a revolution, Bobby Bowden has already devised a plan that will confound not only Franks, but also the rest of the conference.