The celebration will take place in Morgantown, W.Va., more than 800 miles north of Tallahassee, but there will be a garnet-and-gold flair to the festivities.

Legendary Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden and one of his former FSU assistants, George Henshaw, will be honored this weekend along with a few dozen other surviving members of the Mountaineers' 1969 team that defeated South Carolina in the Peach Bowl.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the squad, which won 10 games for only the second time in school history. Bowden was West Virginia's offensive coordinator at the time, and Henshaw was one of three team captains.

As part of the celebration this weekend, Henshaw will be on the field in pregame as an honorary captain for the Mountaineers' battle against No. 11 Texas (3:30 p.m., ABC). The whole 1969 squad will be recognized during the first quarter.

"Fifty years later, you walk out there ... how about that now?" Henshaw said with amazement in his voice. "It's a great honor. That's what it is."

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Henshaw and Bowden both have vivid memories of that season, their historic bowl victory, and how the events after that game shaped their respective coaching careers.

For Bowden, the 1969 Peach Bowl would provide a glimpse of the ingenuity that would make him a legend in the sport. With his receiving corps depleted by injury, Bowden stealthily switched his offense from the split-back veer to the wishbone to take advantage of a deep stable of running backs.

Bowden had never coached the wishbone before or after that game, but the move worked to perfection as the Mountaineers caught South Carolina by surprise and rushed for about 350 yards in a 14-3 victory. West Virginia attempted just two passes in the game.

When asked about the wishbone experiment this week, Bowden said the element of surprise was essential. He also gave a tip of the cap to college coaching icon Darrell Royal for giving him pointers on how to run it effectively.

Coincidentally, Royal was head coach at Texas at the time -- the same team the Mountaineers will be facing this Saturday.

"I called Darrell Royal at Texas; they were running the wishbone," Bowden remembered. "It is very easy to put in if you are an option team, and we were. It’s very easy to add a third back. You just make it a triple-option. So I did. We worked with it all week and kept it a secret. We’d go work out in front of the press, and I [would] only have two backs back there. I disguised it until we played them. ...

"It worked perfectly."

Before the Mountaineers were finished celebrating, Bowden's and Henshaw's futures would take dramatic turns.

Shortly after the game, then-head coach Jim Carlen called his staff together and broke the news that he was leaving Morgantown to be the next head coach at Texas Tech. There had been rumors that Carlen was being courted in the days leading up to the Peach Bowl, but Bowden said it still was a major surprise.

"After the game was over," Bowden recalled, "he called us all back into the dressing room and closed the door and told us he was leaving: ‘I am going to take the job at Texas Tech.' He said, ‘All of you are welcome to go with me if you want to.’ He left it at that."

Bowden wasn't sure what he would do in the long term, but his immediate plan was to head back home to Birmingham, Ala., to be with his ailing father.

Looking back, Bowden says he probably should have gone immediately to the university president and athletics director and made a pitch for the Mountaineers' head coaching position. But he knew that his father was near death, and the timing wasn't right to start politicking for a new job.

"I got Ann and six kids; we took off," Bowden recalled. "I said, ‘Well, there goes that job. Somebody else will get that one.’ Red Brown, the athletic director, called me the next morning and said, ‘Hey, we met last night and we want you to be the head coach.’ So that’s how it happened. I was named the head coach."

Not long after that, Bowden received a visit from Henshaw.

The two had grown close over the previous four years. Bowden actually recruited Henshaw out of Midlothian High School in Virginia, and back then, the assistant coach who recruited a player was primarily responsible for making sure he followed through on his responsibilities outside of football.

Bowden would sit down with Henshaw once a week and check on how his family was doing back home, and also make sure the star lineman was attending all of his classes.

"He always had one question: 'George, have you been to every class?'" Henshaw remembered. "That motivated me to go to class. You were not gonna lie to Coach Bowden, and you knew he was going to ask that question. So when I didn't feel like going, I still went to class because I knew I was gonna get that question."

With his degree in sight and his football career coming to an end, Henshaw approached Bowden and asked if he could join his new coaching staff as a graduate assistant while earning his master's degree.

Bowden didn't say yes right away. He told Henshaw he could start out by working in the weight room during the offseason, then help the assistant coaches during spring practice. Then after the spring, Bowden told him, he would decide whether he could officially join the staff.

"What he was finding out was if I really wanted to coach or not," Henshaw said.

After passing that test over the coming months, Henshaw ended up earning that G.A. position. He later would move up to Freshman Team coach, then defensive line coach for three years before going with Bowden to Florida State in 1976.

Henshaw stayed on Bowden's staff in Tallahassee through 1982 -- first as defensive line coach, then as offensive line coach and offensive coordinator. He later would become offensive coordinator at Alabama and head coach at Tulsa before embarking on an assistant coaching career in the NFL that would span 25 years.

Bowden, of course, would go on to be one of the most successful coaches in college football history during his 34 years at Florida State, winning two national championships and 22 bowl games.

This weekend, they'll celebrate the last bowl game Bowden helped win as an assistant coach -- the 1969 Peach.

"There weren't that many bowl games back then," Henshaw said. "So to get to go to a bowl game, that was a big deal."

Bowden and Henshaw, both of whom are members of the West Virginia Sports Hall of Fame, have already made their way from Tallahassee to Morgantown for the festivities, which begin today and run throughout the weekend. Another Tallahassee resident who was on that team, defensive end John Hale, is making trip as well.

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