Never Forget

endlosing

This is what ending a 20-game losing streak looks like.

The phrase “Bowling Green Massacre” jolted me out of my seat a couple of weeks ago, probably not for the same reason it jolted the nation.

How could Kellyanne Conway, the President’s Media Director, know about a football massacre involving Bowling Green and Temple in the mid-2000s?

That’s the only Bowling Green massacre I knew about but it turned out that she was talking about something entirely different.

In a little over a decade, though, that’s how far Temple football has come. From not just one, but two, Bowling Green Massacres (70-7 and 70-16) in consecutive seasons to flirting with the Top 25 in the last two seasons.

For those of us who were there then and are here now, it would be wise to Never Forget.

patience

I  thought about that when I heard that Geoff Collins was heavy on the Daz-like slogans while giving a halftime pep talk to the assembled—it would be a stretch to call them a crowd—group at the UCF vs. Temple basketball game on Wednesday night.

So far, Collins has been light on the recruiting and heavy on the slogans in his two months on the job.

We won’t really know about him until after the first two games, but so far he comes up a little short in comparing him to the guy who avenged the Bowling Green Massacres.

Al Golden in a little over a month to work in his first year (December, 2005 was his hiring date), Golden signed 29 players including future NFL players like Junior Galette, Andre Neblett, Alex Joseph and Steve Manieri.  That was without the benefit of signing a single target of the former coach, Bobby Wallace, WHILE hiring a staff. There was a method to Golden’s madness, too, as he said it was his intent to recruit captains of winning high school teams so they could bring that same mindset to a poisoned well at 10th and Diamond. In that first class of 29, he signed 18 team captains and all had winning seasons in their final years. Ten of the captains won league championships.

Collins has catching up to do to get to that standard, but Golden did all this on the tail end of a 20-game losing streak and helped turn this thing around.

After two months, we really don’t know if Collins will be as good as Golden, Matt Rhule, Steve Addazio or better than all three or somewhere in between.

Right now, the start is not as good as the Golden one but maybe because the culture is in place  it does not need to be. All that matters is the finish.

We should know a lot more after the Notre Dame and Villanova games.

Sunday: Fake News

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8 thoughts on “Never Forget

  1. Oh boy, yeah I remember that game. That was the beginning of where we are now. Done while scrapping our heels on rock bottom.

    We didn’t climb out of that hole based on slogans either. I get your point Mike and am inclined to agree. Where is the continued recruiting? Where is the focus on the future? Things are a bit quieter on that front than I would have expected coming from a big deal with the Gators.

  2. Those BG teams were machines. They ran the spread in a way Satterfield could only dream about. They could have scored 100 on the Owls had they wanted to. As far as Collins is concerned, he’s been given a team Al Golden would have killed for. If Collins doesn’t have a winning season and then bombs again at recruiting, Owls better get rid of him and not let the mistake fester like they did with Wallace.

  3. Mike, according to Pravda, the coaches have been out recruiting and have made offers for 2018. We all know how offers don’t mean a lot until we have recruits in hand. Nevertheless, they have been working. We will have to wait and see if they are successful in that direction. I am still optimistic about the coming season, given the talent that Coach Rhule left behind.

  4. Might want to be looking at flights to Memphis and driving down to Oxford if Ole Miss gets two years on a post-season ban. Players can transfer then and immediately play elsewhere. Not to base recruiting efforts on that, but be ready if and when. Has to be some Fla players there he contacted while in Gainesville.

    • Temple needed the Klock kid from Georgia Tech to replace Dawkins and the fact that Collins hasn’t closed out that recruiting deal on the heels of a poor recruiting effort is troubling. So far, the guy has not shown he can close any big time recruiting deals. Maybe today’s 80-degree February weather will convince a four-star that Temple is Gainesville North.

      • FWIW I’ve read that Klock really likes Temple and was also receiving interest from Northwestern and Rutgers. TU seems to have the inside track due to being the ‘home school’ (think he wanted to be closer to home) and Rhule leaving you fellas in good shape though I’m also a bit surprised its not ‘closed out’ yet.

        …in terms of your new coach and recruiting, still too early IMO to pass judgement one way or another though early indicators seem concerning. I can tell you from experience that it usually takes 3-4 seasons for you to really feel the effects of weak recruiting (IMO Flood was able to coast off of Schiano’s infrastructure until 2015 when the bottom started giving out).

        Joe P.

  5. Hard to argue that Golden was more “gung-ho” than Collins because Al’s future really depended upon his completely changing the organization from top to bottom. Collins’ knowledge of what was in place here may have caused him to “coast” the first recruiting year, but I hope there’s not more to it than that. He’s really set up well for the next two seasons (2018 figures to be a much better Temple year) and I hope the “coasting” is not because it is in the back of his mind he could be gone by then. That would leave Temple in terrible shape for 2019 and 2020.

  6. One might say he shouldn’t have done as well as he did in the SEC because the SEC draws a higher level of recruits across the board than the AAC. But on the other hand there’s plenty of competition for recruits in the SEC, so the question is how well did he do recruiting while at Florida? If he was good there he should be good at Temple but at a lower AAC level – hopefully at a Houston-type level. Why he bombed out here his first year is anybody’s guess. All we can do is hope he picks it up in future years.

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