Monthly Archives: March 2017

03.08.17
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Reddick Taking It To Another Level

Coach Collins is using Reddick as an example for the rest of the squad.

To put into perspective what Haason Reddick did over the weekend, all you have to do is look what running back Bernard Pierce did in the same environment.

Reddick’s most impressive combine number was a 4.52 40-yard dash.

Coming out of the 2011 football season a year early, Pierce went into the combine and posted a 4.55 40-yard dash. This was considered good for a running back.

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This was the same Bernard Pierce who was the PIAA state indoor champion in the 100-meter dash (10.8) while a senior at Glen Mills and was Pennsylvania’s version of Usain Bolt as a high school senior. Except that Bolt didn’t have Pierce’s moves in the open field.

Reddick took the combine to another level.

Reddick’s number was literally off the charts and that’s why he will be drafted anywhere from nine to 30 in the upcoming NFL draft in Philadelphia. His 40 time was one-tenth of a second faster than the Owls’ Nate Hairston, who many considered the fastest Owl last season. (You could probably get an argument from reserve wide receiver Cortrelle Simpson, who will hopefully show some explosiveness this fall when he gets on the field for the first time.)

My guess is that the number Reddick is drafted will be closer to 20 than nine or 30 and that will represent the best Temple has ever had if it happens.

Muhammad Wilkerson was a 30th-round draft pick out of the 2010 college football season and he is now considered one of the top five defensive linemen in all of football.

While offensive lineman Dion Dawkins got rave reviews coming out of the senior bowl and had a very good combine, there is more talk of him going in the second round than the first round now.

However, Mel Kiper still ranks Dawkins as his No. 1 SENIOR defensive tackle, so there’s an outside shot that Dawkins could go in the first round as well.

If that happens in a draft held in Philadelphia, that is a value from the Eagle-and-NFL-centric fourth largest market that would yield dividends down the line in areas like attendance and recruiting.

Friday: The Spring Game

03.05.17
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Handicapping The QB Race

The mechanics were always impeccable for Anthony Russo.

When recruiting the top-rated class in the league mattered to Temple football, Al Golden would get the deep-pocketed donors—and a few guys like me—gathered into a film room on Signing Day to go over the highlights of the various recruits.

At the time, Golden was not shy about mentioning several times during his talk that Temple had the No. 1-ranked recruiting class in the league by two of the three major internet scouting services.

It was all part of his marketing plan to inject some juice into the fan base and needed regional confidence into the Temple football program.

Then the projector started to whiz and each kid’s highlights were shown. Between the oohhs and the ahhs coming from the darkened room, one voice in the back row exclaimed:

“My God, they all look like O.J. Simpson!!”

(He meant the football player, not the murderer.)

Everyone laughed, even Al.

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Logan Marchi: Poor man’s Johnny Manziel?

If you did not know it by then, you learned it later. Sometimes film lies, at least the kind where they splice the good plays in and leave the bad ones on the cutting room floor. If not lies, then fibs.

What doesn’t lie is numbers and that’s why I think Anthony Russo will emerge from this spring practice quarterback battle as No. 1 on the depth chart on Cherry and White Day. All we have to go on between Russo, Frank Nutile (pronounced New Tile, not Nut Ill), Logan Marchi and freshman Todd Centeio, who appears to be headed for a redshirt, are the numbers. Freshman transfer Tommy Wyatt is also in the mix.  During his senior year at Overbrook (N.J.), he threw for 2,163 yards and 17 touchdowns.

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                        Tommy Wyatt

Not Temple numbers, but their numbers against similar competition. Really, the level of high school football played by Russo and Nutile is at Archbishop Wood and Don Bosco is about as good as it gets. In their senior years at those places, Russo threw 35 touchdown passes and 2,452 yards against Nutile’s 13 and 1,458 in his best high school season. Russo was first-team All-State in Pennsylvania, and would join Adam DiMichele (Sto-Rox) and Steve Joachim (Haverford High) as the only first-team AP All-State Pennsylvania quarterbacks to start at Temple. One brought a program back from the dead; the other won the Maxwell Award as the best college football player in America.

That’s pretty good company.

The most important numbers are these: In his last two years as a starter, Russo was 26-1 with one state championship and one state final appearance. Nutile, by contrast, was 7-4 in his only complete high school season. Marchi, who has been called a poor man’s Johnny Manziel, has not played a full season since 2013, his senior year in high school.

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Some guy with a beard pats Frank Nutile on the head.

That doesn’t mean Russo will be handed the job, nor should he want it handed to him. It also doesn’t mean the other guys are chumps. No less an authority than new offensive coordinator Dave Patenaude has gone on record as saying that Temple fans should have confidence in all of the quarterbacks since he thinks they can all be effective at this level.

Nutile, a second-team All-State (non-Public), had his best season as a junior when he passed for 1,458 yards with 13 touchdown passes.

Marchi has Russo-like numbers playing at a smaller-enrollment high school (St. Paul’s, Bristol, Connecticut), throwing for 3,220 yards and 38 touchdowns as a senior. He is also an accomplished punter (hint:  trick play potential?), having had 1,077 yards on 32 punts as a sophomore.

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The one thing Marchi has going for him is his elusiveness and Temple might need him if the Owls’ offensive line played the way it did against Wake Forest, which, to be kind, was not good. A lot of that was some incredibly poor coaching as Jahad Thomas and Ryquell Armstead were asked to run behind NFL potential first-round pick Dion Dawkins only once.  Dawkins was twiddling his thumbs most of the night as the Owls ran to the wrong side. Stevie Wonder probably could have done a better job of coaching the Owls that night than the group of impostors who showed up.

Since that whole night seemed to be a misnomer, the guess here is that this is Anthony Russo’s job to lose and, knowing the kid’s make-up, he will not lose it.

Wednesday: Workout Warriors

Friday: The Spring Game

03.04.17
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Rhule of Settled Law

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Mark Bright accepting the MVP award

If you do a search for “settled law” on google most of the results revolve around the Roe v. Wade decision which gave women the right to abortion in certain cases. In a broader sense it is used to refer to decisions of the Supreme Court that have remained unchanged for a long time. Roe vs. Wade is not “in the constitution” as Whoopi Goldberg once moronically said, it’s just an interpretation of the constitution that can be changed.

In the court of public opinion, though, the results of the last two bowl games have resolved what might have been hotly contested cases among Temple football fans, maybe forever.

Which team is the greatest Temple team of all time, the 1979 Owls, who went 10-2 or the 2015 or 2016 Owls, who also won 10 games?

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Temple TUFF, 1979 style

It’s not his fault, really, but Matt Rhule himself is as responsible for the tarnished legacy of those teams as he was for their success. Rhule, by his own admission, took it “too easy” on the Owls prior to the loss to Toledo and his quick exit to find Acres of Diamonds in Waco led to a poorly prepared team in a 34-26 loss to Wake Forest.  There is no doubt that if Rhule had put the pedal to the metal one year and told Baylor he would talk to them after Christmas, the last two Owl teams would have finished in the top 25.

The legacy of the two most recent teams will always be as great ones, but it won’t be as the greatest. To me, it isn’t even close and it is “Settled Law” because the 1979 team did it against a more difficult schedule and beat a Power 5 team (before the Power 5 even existed) in California at the Garden State Bowl.

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Now, had the 2016 team won its bowl game and gone 11-3 and beaten a Power 5 team, they might have had a strong case but it would have been close. The Wake Forest team they would have beaten would not have been as good as the 1979 Cal Bears and they would have had to pummel them to enhance the case.

That 1979 team was also 16 points short of being unbeaten, losing only to No. 7 Pitt (10-9) and No. 20 Penn State (22-7).  Had the Owls pulled out those two winnable games, they would have been—hold on to your hats—national champions. Or at least they would have been placed into a better bowl, against the eventual national champion of that year.

Spoiler alert: Alabama.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

In those days, there was no discrimination between the haves and the have-nots in college football. If you won all of your games, you were national champions, period, end of story. It was college football in its purest form, not the corrupt form it now flaunts.

Does a future Owl team have a chance of finishing No. 17 or better? Sure, but what are the chances such a team loses its coach by bowl time? Probably very good. It’s not quite in the constitution, it’s settled law.

As it was, the Owls finished No. 17 in both major polls and, unless the rules change forbidding a coach from leaving—or even negotiating with another team—until after the bowl season is completed, it is hard to imagine any team ever matching what those Temple kids did in 1979.

Even if most of those kids are pushing 60 now.

Monday: Handicapping the 2017 QBs

Wednesday: The Spring Game

03.02.17
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Owl City Walkers

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Sometimes the memory can be a funny thing, brain teasers allowing recall in great detail of things that happen 40 years ago, but the same brain failing to tell you why you walked into a room five seconds ago.

It is with that in mind that we caution you to not take this list as the top walk-ons in Temple football history, just the top ones that we can recall at this moment.

Obviously, some are going to slip through the cracks but readers are welcome to include their own memories of Temple walk-ons below.

The subject of walk-ons comes up today simply because yesterday was the walk-on tryout date for Geoff Collins’ first team at Temple.

Here’s my list, with a heavy emphasis on the more recent ones. In a school of 39,000 students—presumably 20,000 young men—maybe at least one will turn out to be as good as these five.

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5–Matt Brown

Because of his size (5-5, 155 pounds), no Division I school showed an interest in Brown.  He walked on at Temple, where they tried to play him at a slot receiver, but Al Golden—perhaps intrigued by Brown’s open-field moves in the return game—moved him to tailback and the rest was history. He was the bug part of the “Bernie and the Bug” pair and had to fill as a starter on the numerous occasions where Bernard Pierce was injured.  Brown’s best game was his sophomore year against Army, where he gained 228 yards scored four touchdowns.

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4—Aaron Boumerhi

The kicker with the appropriate nickname of “Boom-Boom” walked on at Temple after making only four field goals his senior year at Phillipsburg-Osceola. He perhaps saved the season after starting kicker Austin Jones went down as a result of a cheap shot by a Memphis player on a kickoff.  At the time, Jones had made an NCAA-best 17-straight field goals.  Arguably, Boumerhi was just as good afterward.

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3—Will Hayes

Hayes returned a blocked extra point for two the other way and that was the key play in a 25-23 Temple win at Massachusetts.  The 5-9 defensive back drew interest only from Division III schools, but always dreamed of playing Division I. He took the advice of a former Howell (N.J.) teammate and played a year at Milford (N.Y.) Prep to bulk up for a possible chance.  He was a regular starting free safety on a 10-win Temple team.

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2—Bruce Francis

Francis joined the program as a true freshman in the fall of 2005 as a walk-on. He later earned a scholarship. Named the recipient of the team’s inaugural Gavin White, Jr., Walk-On Award in the spring of 2006, Francis earned All-MAC honors last fall by Phil Steele Publications after averaging a team-best 73.1 receiving yards per game and finished his senior year with 13 touchdown receptions.  He was the center of one of the most controversial plays in Temple history, with replays clearly showing him catching touchdown pass to beat UConn but the Big East replay official refusing to overturn the call. At the time, Temple was in the MAC and UConn was in the Big East. Francis is the Owls’ career leader in touchdown receptions (23) and tied with Gerald “Sweet Feet” Lucear in touchdown catches for a single season (13).

1—Haason Reddick

All indications point to Reddick being a late first-round NFL draft choice and it is pretty hard for any walk-on in Temple history to top that.  Reddick started as a linebacker in Temple’s 41-21 win at Memphis to close out the 2013 season, but later earned first-team All-AAC honors as a down defensive end.