Class Warfare

offers

Without getting into names, this was a typical offer sheet for a Matt Rhule recruit a year ago.

Summing up Temple recruiting is pretty easy these days.

Matt Rhule had a bad year going out the door, Geoff Collins had a bad year (really, month) coming in and Collins seems to have rebounded with a nice crop if he’s able to water and harvest it by the new early signing day (Dec. 20).

Judging from a lot of the comments of the commits, that seems much more likely than not.

Collins was a recruiting coordinator at both Alabama and Georgia Tech and he’s learned a few tricks of the trade in addition to being an affable and amiable young man himself.

One of the Owls’ recent additions said what sold him on Temple was that when he got out of the car “the entire team was there waiting for me and shaking my hand and patting me on the back.”

People of any age like to be shown love, and that is a pretty innovative way of showing it.

Chalk that up to Collins’ experience.

That brings us to Matt Rhule.

Collins had an excuse for his first hastily put-together class.

Rhule, who hustled a pretty good class together even before he was head coach—for awhile, he was both Al Golden’s and Steve Addazio’s recruiting coordinator—showed signs of mailing in his final class.

While a lot of Rhule’s final class commits had offers from places like Old Dominion and Georgia State, a lot of Collins’ current ones have offers from Georgia Tech and Maryland.

It does make one pause.

Did Rhule have one eye on the door going into his final year at Temple?

All indications are that he was looking to get out.

When I saw this video posted by a guy called “Miami Mike” a year ago, I had one two-word reaction to his answer to the last couple questions here:

“He’s gone.”

He recruited with one eye on the door and he coached like it, too.

In addition to a final half-hearted recruiting haul, Rhule made no effort to get either of his backups, Frank Nutile and Logan Marchi, the kind of playing time they would need in order to be ready for this season. That point was made last week on this site by John Belli and it was a valid one. While P.J. Walker needed to play every down against teams like Penn State and UCF, he did not need to play nearly every down in games the Owls won 38-0, 48-20, 45-20, 31-0, 37-10 and 34-10. Those are the kind of games that big-time programs have the backups running the regular offense and throwing the ball in order to have guys ready. There was no excuse to sit Marchi or Nutile or have either of those guys handing off the rare snaps they had.

Add that to the recruiting, and Collins has a lot of catching up to do. He’s running pretty fast now. Let’s hope it’s fast enough.

Monday: House Money

Wednesday: Marketing Mayhem

Friday: The Mildcat

Advertisement

9 thoughts on “Class Warfare

  1. You may recall back when Collins first came on board and didn’t recruit anyone, just tried to hold onto Rhule’s recruits, there was a lot of criticism why he didn’t go after some of his own. At the time I posted that Rhule was the real culprit because his recruits were not very highly regarded (to say the least). But it is true that one would think Collnd just maybe he was contacting and working on the class he’s bringing in now. We’ll see if his evaluation was correct or not.
    What’s done is done. Right now I’m more concerned with his game-day coaching for the coming season and beating ND.

  2. Damn computer clitches: …one would think Collins just maybe thought Rhule’s recruits were good enough to coach up and therefore concentrated on getting the ship in order instead and just maybe he was contacting and working on the class he’s bringing in now.

  3. I’ve said it before, I don’t understand HC’s at the professional and college levels when it comes to getting the backup QB game experience should the need arise to start him. It typically happens because of an injury to a starter. And time after time, the backup makes his first start in some critical or postseason game with only cleanup appearances and a few dozen passes at most. With the exception of the kickers, no other position is as unprepared for putting in backups as typically happens at QB. As noted in this article, there were a half dozen games when PJ could’ve sat so a backup might have had a chance to play meaningful minutes. In short, I think HC’s are dumb in this respect no matter how well they do everything else. (In basketball, coaches are obsessed with calling timeout with 10 seconds on the clock so they can draw up a play that doesn’t work. In baseball, pitch counts result in managers bringing in mediocre relievers to lose one run games. And don’t even get me started with prevent defenses.) In short, I think what Coach Rhule did keeping in PJ was more dumb than anything else. It was just the norm. I’m a fan of Rhule. I guess I’d prefer to think he was just being conventional rather than calculating for his future job prospects when he stuck with PJ in meaningless games. But with respect to recruiting, it seems Rhule checked out and CC had to wait to regroup as noted in this article.

  4. A lot has been written and said about the weak recruiting class in Coach Collins first year. I’d like to reiterate we’ve gotten some very good kids in this class and the comments should not be construed as demeaning to these guys in any manner. The issue as I see it is the number of kids we got in this class and the loss of a few other players who may have been strong contributors. Welcome aboard all new 🦉!

  5. Dayowl: Just want you to know, I wasn’t demeaning the incoming kids. This program finds overlooked and under-evaluated HS kids and helps them to develop into major college competitors. Even pros. There’s probably a few of those in this class. And I’d like to see it happen to all 16 or whatever the number of incoming recruits is. My point is there were only about 12 kids that committed and stayed with it before the end of the year. CC was in a tough position and has rebounded since.

  6. Even when he’s gone, Mike never misses a chance 2 take a shot at Rhule!

    • Only when it’s warranted. He mailed in a terrible final recruiting year and played P.J. almost every down in games that were 31-0, 48-20, 45-20, 34-10, 34-17. He left the 2017 team without an experienced quarterback. Malfeasance, if not incompetence. Two pretty solid pieces of evidence that he knew this was his final year, even though he signed a new four-year contract before it started. Then, on top of that, he stole two Temple recruits, Sulin and Hand–a move that even the hated Steve Addazio said he would not pull (and kept his word). Daz probably could have had P.J. but walked away from trying to convince him to follow him to BC because he kept his word to Temple that he would not poach any of their (and, by extension, his) recruits.

      • And even with all that he still left as one of the most successful coaches in Temple history, put the program on the national map, left us stocked wit great players. And for that, I thank him.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s