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WINSTON-SALEM -- No sooner had Tommy Bowden been ushered out as football coach at Clemson than the experts down that way had a list of potential successors. At the top of that list was a name that appears at the top of every college coaching list in America.

Jim Grobe.

The two are good friends, as are more college coaches than you might expect, and the news that Bowden was out at Clemson, only a few days after Wake's 12-7 win over the Tigers, didn't sit well with Grobe. He knew what would come next.

Grobe set the record straight Tuesday. His wife, Holly, has not been contacted by Clemson.

"That's a true statement right there," he said.

Grobe answered all the questions and went through the motions he goes through every time a college coaching job opens somewhere in America.

"On one hand it's good," he said. "When you're winning, when you're being successful, other people are interested and that's great, but it can be a distraction. I think -- I hope -- our players are used to it by now."

Nebraska and Arkansas came calling last year, and who knows who will come this year, and if there's a next year here they'll line up and come at him again. That's the respect he has in the coaching community and also the nature of the business.

"It's a good profession," Grobe said. "It's cutthroat, though. You have to win."

He jokingly said he would be interested in returning to his old junior high program and taking over the Mack Blue Streaks in Huntington, W.Va. But he knows that would only start another chain of events that would be pushing out junior high coaches all over the country.

"I don't know if the Blue Streaks are on a roll or not," he said, sending a warning to the poor guys back in his old hometown.

Bowden got the warning signals long ago and managed to keep his job in the face of mounting opposition from his own fans. For 10 years he kept them away and even signed an extension last season when Arkansas came after him, too. The contract Arkansas officials claimed had been completed for Grobe had actually been structured for Bowden already.

Midway through Bowden's 10th season, however, the administrators and the IPTAYs and the howling masses of Tiger fans got him. Like his two predecessors, losing to Wake Forest did him in. Bowden was the third straight Clemson coach to lose to Wake in his final season. For the son of legendary Bobby Bowden, it came in his last game.

After the Thursday night loss, made more bitter because it got so much exposure as an ESPN game, Bowden stayed in the stadium long after the loss to tape his weekly coach's show. It was a strange sight, Bowden and the show's host sitting on a mock set with lights shining in the darkness of Wake's stadium, clean-up crews all around them blowing trash from the seats and walking in and out of the camera's view.

The end was bitter for Bowden, sitting there in a coat and tie, his hair done just for the show as the bus carrying his team to the airport pulled away without him. When the taping finally ended, he walked off the field with ACC associate commissioner Mike Finn and a South Carolina state trooper behind him.

They walked to the darkened field house at the end of the stadium, where Bowden's wife, Linda, dressed in gaudy orange, put an arm around her husband. They walked out together with no idea that he'd coached his last game.

Grobe, who often jokes that his wife is the closest thing he has to an agent, isn't so assured of his standing here that he won't have to do the same thing one day. Coaches, he knows, are hired to be fired.

"It can be brutal at times," he said last year. "You have to have thick skin in this business."

Grobe has thicker skin than most. He turned around a program at Ohio University that had won all of 17 games in the 10 years before his hiring. He won 33 games in six years and still heard fans booing because his teams ran the ball so much. Grobe came to Wake Forest in 2001, taking over what was arguably the worst program in Division I history and taking the Deacs to the Orange Bowl in his sixth year.

Thursday night, with his team struggling to run the ball inside the Clemson 5-yard line, he was booed again. About three hours later, he walked off the field with Wake 2-0 in the ACC for the first time in more than 20 years. Tommy Bowden walked off a little while afterward, never to coach Clemson again.

The coach's show taped Thursday is airing all week in the Clemson market.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com