That's really a great story. The one thing Bowden has always done so far is give credit to the guys who stuck around from the Coach I years. They do deserve a lot of credit for their efforts and for him to recognize it must have created some sort of emotional lift for those guys. Those two years must have been absolutely brutal.
It would have been easier but inaccurate. What I originally stated was correct in that it conveyed a general conversational idea to all but the odd outlier obsessed with parsing and challenging every word that could possibly be taken out of context and misconstrued.