The luster eventually dimmed. When Bowden was forced into retirement by the Florida State administration — his last game was a Gator Bowl victory over West Virginia on Jan. 1, 2010, concluding a 7-6 season — he left behind a football program that was foundering and had been engulfed in scandal.

But his 377 victories, 129 losses and four ties in his 44 seasons, at Samford, West Virginia and Florida State, placed him No. 2 in career coaching wins behind Joe Paterno, the Penn State coach.

When Paterno was fired in November 2011 after his top assistant, Jerry Sandusky, was indicted on child sex abuse charges, the N.C.A.A. vacated all 111 of Paterno’s wins from the record book dating back to 1998, when the Sandusky inquiries were said to have begun.

With Paterno’s victory total of 409 reduced to 298, leaving him seventh in career wins, Bowden supplanted Paterno as No. 1 in July 2012. “There is no rejoicing in the Bowden household,” Bowden said at the time. “Nobody would want to have a title given to him this way.”

But in January 2015, as part of a settlement in a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania officials, the N.C.A.A. agreed to restore Paterno’s victories, returning him to the No. 1 spot.

Bowden had already seen his own victory total depleted in 2010, when Florida State was forced to vacate 12 football wins from the 2006 and 2007 seasons as part of an N.C.A.A. punishment for an academic cheating scandal involving dozens of athletes. (Bowden was not implicated in wrongdoing.)

When the N.C.A.A. restored the 111 victories taken away from Paterno, Bowden remarked in an A.P. interview, “By the way, am I going to get my 12 back now?”

Bowden was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame together with Paterno in 2006, when the National Football Foundation waived its rule requiring hall inductees to be retired. Bowden and Paterno each received the foundation’s Gold Medal, its highest award.

Bowden remained a celebrity on campus after his retirement, his teams having won 304 games, lost 97 and played four ties.

His likeness in bronze stands outside the university’s Moore Athletic Center and is re-created in a stained-glass window at the Seminoles’ football stadium, whose surface is named Bobby Bowden Field.

Bowden spoke often of his Christian faith; he didn’t smoke or drink, and “dadgummit” seemed the sharpest word in his vocabulary. He was also a showman who loved the microphone and was given to backslapping people he had just met. He appeared to be the prototype of the country boy, though: “Bobby’s never lived in the country in his life,” his wife, Ann, once wrote in The Tallahassee Democrat. “He was raised on concrete.”

And he could display a will of iron.

“The thing about Bobby is that he comes off as such a nice, sweet Southern boy that people underestimate him,” Vince Gibson, a childhood friend and Bowden’s assistant when he coached at South Georgia College, once said. “He’s a tough guy and can be a hard one when he wants.”

Robert Cleckler Bowden, known to everyone as Bobby, was born on Nov. 8, 1929, in Birmingham, Ala. His father, Bob, was a banker, and his mother, Sunset (Cleckler) Bowden, was a homemaker.

He was an all-state football player at Woodlawn High School, graduating in January 1949, and entered the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa hoping to play quarterback. He practiced with the freshman team, but left school after a few months and returned to Birmingham to marry his high-school girlfriend, Julia Ann Estock. He was 19; she was 16.

Bowden played quarterback for Howard College in Birmingham (now Samford University), from which he received a bachelor’s degree. He remained at Howard for the next two seasons as an assistant coach while earning a master’s degree in education from George Peabody College in Nashville, now a part of Vanderbilt University.

Bowden was head coach at South Georgia, a junior college, from 1956 to 1958. He became the head coach at Howard in 1959 and went 31-6 in four years there with an assist from the Alabama coach, Bear Bryant, who tipped him off to Crimson Tide substitute players he was willing to transfer to Howard. After stints as an assistant coach, Bowden became head coach at West Virginia in 1970, and posted a record of 42-26 for six seasons.

Then he embarked on his long run at Florida State.

Bowden was a brilliant recruiter, searching for players in Miami’s poorer neighborhoods and the rural parts of the Florida Panhandle. “I like people,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “I like meeting their daddies and grandmas and visiting with them. It’s not work at all.”

As for Bowden’s X’s and O’s: “He’s always been ahead of most people when it comes to being innovative,” Paterno once told ESPN. “You’d think the guy would run out of ideas, but, geez, he doesn’t.”

Bowden sent dozens of Seminole players to the National Football League, among them the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks Charlie Ward and Chris Weinke, defensive back Deion Sanders, running back Warrick Dunn and linebacker Derrick Brooks.