Aug. 17th: College football’s rain delay

In this space usually, on this date, there would be speculation of who looks good in summer camp and who is winning the battle of positions.

Not this year.

The Temple football Owls are practicing but not in the usual sense of intense hitting and contact so nobody is really standing out.

walt

Walter Washington probably knocked more defenders out of games than any quarterback in Temple history.

This basically is Temple’s–and the rest of the roughly half of college football deciding to play as of now–rain delay, waiting for the go-ahead for full-contact practices and a return to normalcy and maybe even an imminent announcement of a  replacement game for Miami (Sept. 5).

When the Phillies went to rain delay, the broadcast jumped to past highlights and this is what we’re going to do today.

Last week, photographer extraordinaire Zamani Feelings found this tape on the 2004 Temple-Syracuse game and send me a message with the link. Zamani is slowly but surely building the kind of video library Temple football needs on Youtube so please support his page by subscribing and liking here. Also, if anyone has any Temple film or tapes of games please forward them to him so this can be a one-stop source for Temple fans. He has more games on another Youtube site.

I sat down on the first rainy afternoon I could find and watched the entire thing.

Plenty of thoughts on this game but these came to mind off the top of my head:

1) Walter Washington breaks Paul Palmer’s record for season TDs in this game with 16; if you want to see what “beast mode” really means, check out this tape. Washington, who turned down a solid offer from Nebraska to come to Temple, could not be stopped and, at times, it looked like Syracuse defenders wanted no part of him.

2) The 16-touchdown record made me really appreciate what Bernard Pierce did seven years later (27 TDs in a single season);

3) Great job by ESPN’s Dave Sims on the play-by-play and one of the reasons why I think Dave is the best to ever call a Temple game (he even threw in the fact that Washington’s bench press
of 475 was the 6th-highest on the team). Sims was the Owls’ radio play-by-play guy in the 1990 season when the team went 7-4 and won at Wisconsin. He is now the Seattle Mariners’ play-by-play guy and does NFL games on Westwood One radio.

4) Even in a “down” season, Temple football provides great memories.

5) Syracuse could have tied for first place in the old Big East by winning this game because West Virginia lost to Boston College on the same day.

6) Sad that Washington, who could have used that extra year at Temple to hone the passing portion of his game, decided to leave early for the pros.

Rain delay over and now all we’re waiting on is to see if the radar to the West has cleared up or the umpires have called the game.

Let’s hope it’s the former or Zamani will be working extra hard on that Wayback machine.

Friday: Possible replacements

Monday: Projected Defensive starters

Advertisement

11 thoughts on “Aug. 17th: College football’s rain delay

  1. One thing the virus may hasten is an increase in conference games in the P-5. The only thing I can see to stop the trend is the fact that non-conference games against G-5 teams make it easier for the P-5 teams to make a bowl game. If future conference schedules among the P-5 require ten games against conference foes, many teams that now make a bowl will be shut out of the bowls under the current rules. I think coaches of the teams that usually play .500 ball under the pre-covid schedule will object to two extra conference games. If they do go to 10 conference games, G-5 schools might as well give up football because that scheme essentially makes them 1-AA.

  2. Inky still hasn’t reported the PSU news. There is no doubt that had they been TU kids, it would have been front page news. They deserve to fail.

    • Hey, so this week I cancelled my AC Press paper after 30 years. 5 years ago I cancelled my Philly Inq paper after at least 18 years subscription. Need I really explain why ?
      Politics, and shitty sports pages.
      Even AC Press did more Penn State than Temple,, with their Temple stories like 80% negative of shaded wording.

      It was sad calling them and saying ” NO More “, I did not give them an editorial, no reason.
      No wonder Papers fail now, they are not even smart enough to write for the people who actually BUY it.
      Looks like papers are now produced by the social club clique , having no idea of who or what their actual subscribers want ???

    • I sent the Pennlive link to the Inquirer sports editor. We’ll see if he does anything about it. If not, we’ll know for sure that there’s something fishy going on with their coverage of PSU. One thing I will say about Marc Narducci is that he reports all of the good and bad about Temple football. If it’s news, it’s in there. The same standard should apply to PSU.

  3. Seems like those PSU players are bordering on having a real problem with their drug stuff. Pot is so prevalent that it shows the “war on drugs” has done nothing but waste time and billions of dollars of taxpayer monies. They might as well just legalize it like what happened with failed alcohol prohibition. But these players apparently are using regularly and the LSD use shows this is not a good thing for them. It will be interesting to see if they screw up their football futures.

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