It all started with the coaches — Doyt Perry and his trusted assistants.
They showed the Bowling Green Falcons how to play football during the week and the team executed on
Saturdays.
The formula worked as the Falcons were 77-11-5 in 10 years under Perry, who is in the National College
Football Hall of Fame, highlighted by the 1959 team which went 9-0 and voted the No. 1 small college
team in the nation.
“I think that (the coaches) is what made everything so great when I was here, not the buildings and the
fancy weight rooms and all those things,” said Bob Colburn, who was the quarterback and team captain on
the 1959 team. “We had great people here in Bowling Green. It’s four years in my life that I remember
more than any other four consecutive years in my whole life.
“We never left anything in the locker room. If we weren’t ready to go when the ball was kicked off, then
we weren’t ready,” Colburn added. “That pretty much was his (Perry) philosophy, you save it until the
ball is kicked off and then we’ll raise hell and knock people down.”
The 1959 team was honored with a dinner Friday evening and will be recognized at halftime of today’s
Bowling Green-Ohio Homecoming game at Perry Stadium. Kickoff is at 4 p.m.
“I think it’s tremendous to have this kind of a turnout, really exceptional,” Colburn said before
Friday’s dinner. “I’m not in very good shape health-wise. Staying alive for this event, I had that No. 1
on my bucket list.”
Colburn said Perry didn’t tolerate any mistakes.
“Don’t fumble the ball, Doyt won’t allow you to fumble. If you fumbled you didn’t play,” Colburn said.
“If you were a defensive back and you got beat deep, you couldn’t play. Everybody knew that. You
couldn’t commit penalties and fouls because if you did … you sat on the bench and you didn’t get to
play.
“That’s the way it was. He was a no nonsense, no mistake type coach and everybody knew that,” he added.
“If you want to play don’t make mistakes and that’s pretty much what we did.”
A 30-8 win over then No. 1 Delaware in the eighth game of the season lifted the Falcons to the top of the
polls and Bowling Green finished things off with a hard-fought 13-9 win over Ohio in the season finale.

“I think we ended up No. 1 because of our schedule,” Colburn said. “It just happened to be that Delaware
had been for the last several years pretty strong in the small college and always high up there in the
rankings. It just worked out with a few weeks to go we got Delaware here at home and they had us ranked
No. 4, I think, and Delaware was ranked No. 1. That was kind of the fickle finger of fate that we
happened to have that kind of a schedule and beat Delaware as badly as we did. I think that’s what
catapulted us into getting all the No. 1 votes.
“We finished up by beating Ohio University. We were really fortunate to beat Ohio U.,” he added.
Colburn was a football official in the Big Ten for 20 years and worked all the major bowl games.
However, not even that compared to what happened at Bowling Green.
“I never ever had the feeling that they (the Big Ten teams) had what we had at that time when Doyt Perry
was here at Bowling Green,” Colburn said.
Colburn’s daughter and son-in-law are in the restaurant business in Bowling Green and his granddaughter
is a freshman at BGSU.