Monthly Archives: March 2019

03.07.19
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A New (Old) Twist to Single-Digit Tradition

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Tyler Matakevich was the ultimate single digit, a walk-on turned national POY

What do new Coke, Team Jeopardy and the Temple football single-digit tradition under Geoff Collins have in common?

All represent a failed attempt to improve a product that was already perfect.

Fortunately, we can say for all three traditions, sanity has been restored.

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The Temple football single-digit tradition was established by Al Golden with one purpose in mind: Have the players all work hard to achieve a goal and have them recognize other players who have stood out among their peers. Voting was limited to players only because Golden always felt that they know who the tough guys wearing the numbers 1-9 were. Matt Rhule, who coached under Golden, felt the same way.

Two carpetbaggers from Florida, Steve Addazio and Collins highjacked the process by picking the tough guys with only limited input from the players.

 

Much to his credit, new head coach Rod Carey has brought back the tradition the way it was intended.

“We’re going to let the players pick them,” Carey said. “From listening to some people here, that’s the way the deal was originally intended and I kind of like the players having control of that.”

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A question on Jeopardy last week.

There are a couple of things there that impress me about Carey. He’s willing to listen to the Temple guys–most likely we’re talking assistant coach Ed Foley here–and he wants full player participation in this endeavor.

I like it, too.

Players get in the meeting room, write the guy’s name on a piece of paper and drop it in a hat and the guys with the most votes get digits 1-9.

The only sad thing here is that offensive linemen are prohibited from NCAA rule from wearing the numbers 1-9. Otherwise, you know guys like Dion Dawkins, Kyle Friend and current center Matt Hennessy would be wearing them.

As a big Jeopardy fan, watching the show in the last two weeks was pure torture because there was much discussion about strategy than playing the game. We were back to the show the way it was originally intended and it was a good enough game to begin with that never needed tinkering. Alex Trebek, who is facing an uphill cancer battle, established a solid brand with a good formula that never needed to be tinkered with.

The same can be said of Temple’s single-digit brand.

Leaving the single-digit tradition at Temple to a players’ only deal falls into the same category. Kudos to Carey for recognizing that.

Saturday: Making That Money

03.04.19
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Tribute to a Legend: Al Shrier

This space was supposed to be occupied today by a discussion about a new twist to the Temple single-digit tradition.

We’ll get to that some other day because that seems so insignificant now.

Al Shrier, the Temple Sports Information Director before I was born and the school’s SID through my education at Temple and much of my subsequent career in the sports writing business, has taken his famous briefcase to the other side.

Legend is a word thrown around far too much these days, but Al Shrier was a legend in the way the word was meant to be used.

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“Bill, listen to me. Hire. Matt. Rhule.”

The news that Shrier passed away was incredibly sad for anyone at Temple and elsewhere who has ever had a positive interaction with him, in my case several hundred.

I wrote here several years ago that Skip Wilson, the long-time baseball coach, belongs on Temple’s Mount Rushmore with Wayne Hardin, John Chaney, Harry Litwack and Al Shrier.

People were somewhat taken aback that I put a SID on that mountain, but that’s where Shrier belonged. For a long time before Hardin or Chaney or even Wilson got there, Shrier was, if not the face, the mouthpiece of Temple sports.

Only Litwack, the basketball coach, pre-dated him.

Putting sports, the front porch of any university, out there in a positive light was Shrier’s job and he did it extraordinarily well.  He set the standard for all SIDs to follow. He was named the nation’s top SID four times and is a member of five Halls of Fame: the CoSIDA Hall of Fame:, the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame, the Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Fame, the Temple Athletics Hall of Fame and the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

That doesn’t even begin to tell his story because you would need a thick volume to do that.

As a former sports editor of the Temple News, Shrier had an especially soft spot for those who followed him in the same spot. Some of them included Ray Didinger, Phil Jasner, Dick Weiss, Joe Juliano, Craig Evans, Mike Ferretti and a host of accomplished journalists. Somewhere in there, I spent a stint on what was then a 7-day-a-week job to put out a daily from Monday through Friday that took up more of my time than my full course load.

Nobody helped me more than Al, who arranged interviews and trips for us with the teams. Later, as the Temple beat writer for Calkins Newspapers, Al made sure I had a seat on every football charter flight, often calling me before I called him.

As late as 2012, Shrier still had a hand in making decisions at Temple. He took then-athletic director Bill Bradshaw aside the second time Matt Rhule applied for the head football coaching job and said, “Bill, listen to me. Hire. Matt. Rhule.”

Bradshaw said it wasn’t until that moment he made the decision and he told that story at Matt Rhule’s opening press conference. Four years later, Temple was rewarded with its first-ever major football championship because of that decision.

Ironically, because he was reluctant to fly, Al only made the road games he could drive to but he still made sure the Temple story was told. Everywhere he went, he had his legendary briefcase. He never told anyone what he carried in that.

That was probably the first question St. Peter asked a few hours ago.

Thursday: Single-Digit Twists

03.02.19
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Pure Gold: Temple-Rutgers 1988

Prospectors made a dangerous trip across the continent in 1849 looking for a few nuggets of good near a mill owned by a guy named Sutter.

Different things have varying value to people but I found some real value in a Throwback Thursday post the other day from former Temple offensive lineman Ray Haynes (No. 71 in your program in the above video).

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To me, the value in this Temple vs. Rutgers game (1988) was that it only existed in my memory. I was in the press box that day and remembered a lot of detail but, in my searches on the internet, was not able to find it until Ray posted it. That’s the problem with a lot of past Temple games. You can get almost every game Alabama has played in the last 50 years, but it’s almost impossible to find any Temple game film in the 1980s or before.

I used to have the national broadcast of the Garden State Bowl but I lost that tape. I hope to see it again someday.

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I don’t know how Haynes got this Rutgers’ game  (maybe an old recording on a VCR) but I’m glad he did. It was a trip back into a simpler time when a road game meant not a trek across the country but a simple hour drive up Route 95 and 206. It also meant shorter trips to places like Syracuse, Penn State and West Virginia.

Maybe all of these Eastern Regional schools will one day see the logic in forming a football alliance again, but probably not in any of our lifetimes.

It also reminded me of the rivalry Temple and Rutgers used to have and how that Rutgers’ team was able to beat Penn State and Michigan State that year, but not Bruce Arians’ Owls.

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It was abundantly clear how hard-fought that game was and how Bruce Arians’ teams played with a purpose, especially on offense, that made a lot of sense. To me, Arians’ schemes were more sophisticated and effective in 1988 than any of the schemes we’ve seen from Al Golden, Steve Addazio, Matt Rhule and Geoff Collins since.

Hopefully, new Temple coach Rod Carey will bring that kind of gameday expertise back to the Owls and be able to raise the level already good talent here and that will create a domino effect that begets wins and more talent.

That’s the kind of Gold maybe Pat Kraft was prospecting for when he took a chance on Carey.

Meanwhile, finding this precious memory Pure Gold.

Tuesday: The 360 Single Digit Twist

Thursday: The Season Ticket Call

Saturday: Spring Practice To-Do List