Chad Bowden is his name. Building — and maintaining — college football rosters is his game.
It’s a game the former linebacker from Highlands High School is playing as well as anybody at the newest of all positions in the game right now. In the fast-paced, ever-changing world of college football, where players are allowed to be paid for their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) and via the transfer portal, can leave their current school and head off to another with instant eligibility — both of which were forbidden until the last couple of years — Bowden is a general manager.
Like in major league baseball, which his dad — Jim Bowden — was for the Cincinnati Reds, which is how the Bowden family ended up in Fort Thomas.
How good is Bowden, just 30, doing? Well, it took him all of three years at Notre Dame to build the Fighting Irish a roster good enough to get to the national championship game this past season against Ohio State. And he did so at the bargain basement price of an unofficial cost of $8 million for the Notre Dame roster compared to the more than $20 million it cost Ohio State.
So good was Bowden at doing what he did, Football Scoop named him National General Manager of the Year. And after saying no to the University of Michigan after the Wolverines made a run at hiring him away from Notre Dame last year, Bowden said yes to the University of Southern California when the Trojans made an offer to more than triple his salary to $1 million a year to help rebuild their historic program.
None of this is a surprise to people who know Bowden, whose first two years after college had him coaching high school football at Cincinnati Anderson and Western Brown before going back to his alma mater, the University of Cincinnati, as a recruiting specialist helping build those Bearcat programs into national powers. When Marcus Freeman left UC for Notre Dame, the one person he took with him as a defensive recruiting specialist was Bowden.
Certainly not a surprise to Dale Mueller, who coached Bowden his three seasons at Highlands where all the Bluebirds did was go 44-1, win three state championships with two perfect 15-0 seasons.
So we thought we’d check in with Mueller, a multiple hall of famer with an all-time high school coaching record of 309-67 with 250 of those wins – and 11 state titles with eight nationally ranked teams — at Highlands where after his final season in 2013, he was voted National High School Coach of the Year.
“Chad was the perfect guy to coach,” Mueller says of Bowden, who at 5-foot-11 and 175-180 pounds, was an outside linebacker at Highlands. “He was just all in, it’s why he’s so perfect for the role of general manager.”
Mueller, who attended Bowden’s wedding to fellow Highlands’ alum, Ava Abner, this past summer, says he realized what a special young man Bowden was when he arrived at Highlands at the end of August when his family moved to Ft. Thomas and he wasn’t sure if he should play right away.
”He didn’t really think it would be fair for him to play and take the spot of a player who’d been there all summer,” Mueller recalls. “He’s such a team-oriented guy.”
Mueller’s response: “You’ll be a much better player for us the next two years if you join us this season.” And so Bowden did. “If I said it, he’d do it. He was a perfect try-hard guy. He wasn’t a starter on that first team but when he came onto the field on special teams, it elevated all of us.” As a sophomore.
And no, it’s not a surprise to Mueller that his former player “in seven-eight years is the No. 1 guy (in the nation as a general manager) in college football. I think Chad will work well with Lincoln Riley . . . he wants to win a national championship.”
It’s something Chad told folks at Notre Dame that would give him a competitive edge over his dad, his “best friend,” who was just the Reds’ player personnel director for their last World Series championship in 1990, moving to the GM’s job two years later.
Now Chad wants to do it as a GM. “He absolutely has the competitive gene, the super-competitive gene,” Mueller says. “He’s so passionate about what he’s passionate about.”
It’s an interesting combination, Mueller says. For the passionately competitive Bowden, “If we had a reunion of our championship teams, everybody would want to talk to him about his fast rise in college football,” and the way he’s become a million-dollar-man at the age of 30 for a USC program in need of a master roster builder.
“But it would be Chad talking to the other guys about how they were doing,” Mueller says of someone so dedicated’ to do what he does and yet “he has both abilities – competing for his own success and genuinely caring about how they’re doing.
“He combines perfectly those two features, competitive as heck and really kind and caring.”
But getting to the top of the college football world at the age of 30 in a position he almost created for himself? “Not even remotely a surprise, not at all,” Mueller says.
And yes, Chad and NBC’s Jac Collinsworth, his former Highlands’ teammate and son of NFL player/broadcaster Cris, did share a tiny Hollywood apartment for a summer when they worked as sports interns in LA. But to call them “best friends” might not be describing it exactly, Mueller says.
“They were absolutely great friends, but with Chad, it’s hard to say ‘best’ friend. Everybody was his best friend.”