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CHAPEL HILL — The old man won't go down without a fight.

With vultures flying overhead and Tar Heel voices screaming all around him, Bobby Bowden pulled off still another win over North Carolina on a strange Thursday night in strangely lighted Kenan Stadium.

With a yellow glow over the nationally televised field and Carolina wearing dark blue for some unknown reason, Florida State crawled out of a dark hole to steal a 30-27 victory from the jaws of chaos.

The first Thursday home game in Carolina's football history altered time and traffic, forced a hospital to adjust its work shifts and convinced ESPN to move its normal kickoff time for what from the outside looked like just another football game. Despite the build-up for what some insisted was a big-time event, it was apparent from the outset that the only way this would turn out to be important was if FSU lost.

Somehow, that didn't happen.

North Carolina all but handed Bowden a fourth-straight loss then outright handed him a 385th all-time win, give or take an NCAA ruling. A loss would've left him 2-5 and almost certainly would've hastened his exit from the program he built from scratch. They don't do 2-5 in Tallahassee.

This one had the look of a disaster from the outset for the Seminoles. That it turned into a disaster for Butch Davis was fitting. FSU piled up 121 yards in penalties and looked befuddled against Carolina, which came into the game third to last in the nation in total offense. The confused Seminoles, with a phalanx of head coaches on the sidelines, spent most of the evening screaming at players and into headphones as the Tar Heels streaked to a 24-6 lead against a school they had beaten one time in history.

In the end, it was Davis who looked out of his element in what he said was a big game for his budding program. Odd decisions throughout the second half kept the Seminoles in the game, and a refusal to put FSU away in the fourth quarter cost Carolina a win. Needing three more wins to become bowl eligible, it could yet cost the Heels a postseason bid.

Florida State might need four more wins to save Bowden's job.

The FSU sidelines have always been the greatest sideshow in college football with assistants arguing and players jawing and Bowden seemingly oblivious to it all. And this was when the Noles were the best program in America. Now the antics look like chaos.

The reports out of Tallahassee say practices and team meetings have been chaotic in recent years, too. National recruiting experts talk of FSU "losing traction" in the ongoing battle for the best high school players in the country. For years, Florida State picked among the very best. Now, the best players are skipping trips to Tallahassee, and two big-time prospects recently de-committed.

The uncertainty surrounding Bowden's future is at the root of everything. The 69-year-old hall of fame coach will be 70 before the season is over, and influential people from the chairman of the school's board of trustees to the local sports columnist have called for Bowden to retire at the end of the year.

The reasoning is not unreasonable. The downfall of the program has been steady, hardly a one-year event, and high school coaches and players alike noticed it long before anyone else. The school hasn't won a national title since 1999, has had one consensus All-American since 2000, one Associated Press first-team All-American since the national title and has been to one BCS Bowl in five years.

The best recruit the school has now is its coach in waiting, former LSU offensive mastermind Jimbo Fisher.

Of course, that's among the biggest points of controversy swirling around a program that already has a hall of fame head coach, an associate head coach, an executive head coach and an assistant head coach.

Bowden has always had a sideline filled with characters, many of whom are scattered across the country in charge of some of the best programs in the game.

Thursday night, against a team FSU has dominated for years, the Seminole coaches screamed at players and referees for much of the game, yelled into headphones and gestured to each other as North Carolina ran away with the game. And then suddenly, out of the disorder came a calming influence over a team that has long fed on pandemonium.

FSU, making foolish penalties to the very end, ran down squeamish North Carolina in the yellow glow of an odd night in Kenan. In winning a game it had no business winning, the Seminoles gave the old man another win and waved off the vultures for at least another week.

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