We All We Got But Not Exactly What We Need

This is what my car looked like two nights ago. RIP.

Sometimes you think you do all the right things and get a gut punch otherwise.

Fifty-plus years of being a defensive driver has kept me out of accidents. When someone is tailgating me, I pull over and let him by. When I see a teenage girl in the rearview mirror checking her phone and not the red light in front of her, I move over to the next lane. Not a single accident behind the wheel and I’ve driven five cars over 125,000 miles. (Four of them were purchased at Wilkie Buick when it was the Liacouras Center.) You couldn’t tell it by looking at my 19-year-old Chevy Cavalier, though, when I left the Giant in Huntingdon Valley the other night.

Of course, nobody left a note after leaving this damage to my car.

Great car, runs terrific but doesn’t fair well when I’m not at the wheel.

Two nights ago, I made a quick run to the Montgomery County Giant to avoid the Philly soda tax. Got a lottery ticket, some sodas, toilet bowl cleaner and some Pepto Bismol.

By the time I got out to the parking lot with my bag of goodies, my driver’s side door had a huge dent in it and I couldn’t open the door. Climbed through the passenger side and opened the door that way.

I got what I needed in the soda, Pepto, cleaning products and lottery ticket but not what I expected in a door that will probably cost me a thousand or two to fix. A thousand or two that I don’t have. Fortunately, he (or she) didn’t hit anything under the hood and the car drives just fine. (I asked the Giant manager to check the video and he said it was a pickup truck but couldn’t see the license plate.)

On the way home, I got to thinking that this offseason for Temple head football coach Stan Drayton might be like my run to the Giant supermarket on Wednesday night.

He got some of the things he wanted but not all he expected and, like me, might become poorer for it.

My blind spot probably was parking too close to the store where a lot of traffic is backing up without checking in the rear view mirror. His blind spot might be running back and the defensive coaching staff.

At the end of last season, I thought Drayton might make a late-night run and upgrade his running game with a portal transfer and improve the defensive side of the ball by adding a couple of big-time run-stoppers on the defensive line.

What happened instead was that he rolled the dice and decided to trust his returning starter, Edward Saydee, and a couple of true freshman running backs coming in (Joquez Smith and Kyle Williams). He added a couple of D-Line guys but nobody with a track record of stopping the run game. On top of all that, his defensive coordinator, D.J. Eliot, was hired away by the hometown Philadelphia Eagles as a LB coach. Eliot was known as the master of “simulated pressures” while the best way to describe the last five defenses the new hire, Everett Withers, had were “Matador defenses.”

No Philadelphia or Temple fan is expecting Bud Carson, Jimmy Johnson or even Chuck Heater to transform the Owls into a version of the 1990 Eagles or even the 2011 Owls.

What does this all mean?

Sometimes a late-night run to the nearby Giant Supermarket can resemble an offseason for a college football coach.

You come home with what you expected but not what you needed.

Our expectations for the Owls at the end of last season were 8-4 or better for 2023. Instead of Pepto, soda or a lottery ticket, I expected Stan’s off-season list to be a RB and a couple of run-stoppers on the the DL.

Stan never made it to the transfer portal store for those items.

Maybe his career will fair better than my driver’s side door but the truth is we’re seeing all we’ve got not all we need.

Monday: Temple 2023 Game-By-Game Predictions

Friday: Recap of AAC Media Day:

Monday (7/31): The Boss of Bosses

14 thoughts on “We All We Got But Not Exactly What We Need

  1. Mike – I’m so sorry to hear about your door. That’s horrible. It’s still odd to think of college football coaches going out and getting a player quickly to fill a need. It’s like the NFL and going out into free agency. Times change, and quickly at that. I’m rooting for our team and our coach, but I’m not optimistic at this point…I would run out and get some Pepto for the season, but after seeing your car door, I think I will just order some on Amazon. Good luck with the repairs!

    • Thanks. Second time it’s been hit like that. Parked outside the WAWA near the gym I work out at about 10 years ago and somebody hit the front bumper backing up. Also no note. I never hit anybody because I always slide into spots where I don’t have to back up. Nobody leaves a note anymore. Twenty years ago if someone hits you, they take responsibility. I guess those days are gone.

  2. As far as the season itself, I’m going into it with the nagging feeling that we didn’t get our offseason groceries but still optimistic for a much better dinner than the scraps we had for the last two seasons.

    • Mike, best of luck w/the car. smh, been to Japan and Scotland this year. Our country is f*#k+d, comparatively.

      our sense of “community” is lost to “individual entitlement”.., all the way from simple courtesy and acts of random kindness to hate delivered via AR-15.., enough said.

      unbelievable how many Japanese and Scots asked me if I owned a gun, or travel w/one!

      just made rez for the Miami game, may I join you guys w/a Kona coffee promise?

      • Absolutely. Wish John Belli would be there like he was with us that day we met prior to the UCF game. I might have a new car by then. He was so impressed by you (as I knew he would be). RIP.

  3. As far as the gun ownership thing, never understood why anyone needs an AR-15 for anything. If you go deer hunting in the woods, even a shotgun is a mismatch for the poor animal. AR-15s are for killing people plain and simple and we don’t need to be killing people or banging big pickup trucks into our neighbor’s side doors who are doing nothing more threatening than shopping.

    • Mike, very few people have an AR15. Those reported guns are called AR15 ‘style’ by the news. The word STYLE is the key, they look like AR15, they look like automatic weapons but they are not. It is marketing and design , shame that’s the way they go. Think of dune buggies and VWs with a Rolls Royce Grill, kinda the same thing. ALSO I am not NRA or a gun owner, just seeking some measure of truth in all this.
      BTW , please check out the OVERWHELMING percentage of who these street gun shooters are. Maybe ” You can’t handle the truth ” ???? HINT ; It’s not the hunters. hunters…..

  4. Sorry about the car Mike. A similar story: Within a month of being back from serving in Vietnam in 1970, my wife, our baby daughter and a friend and her baby daughter were side swiped by a young guy on a motorcycle while stopped at a stop sign, ripping a gash on our then new Toyota – luckily no injuries. Of course he had no insurance or money to pay for it so I did the body work, minus a paint job (no money for even Earl Schibe, $29.95 paint job!).
    Just a few years ago in a parking lot in Ireland our rental was side swiped while we were hiking to see the sites. Luckily, someone else saw it happen and left a note under our wipers with the license # which we could show to prove the incident to the rental company.
    I’m sure most have similar stories.
    Anyway, hope the coaches are ready for Akron and any possible side swipes!

    • Great story. It’s funny how life sideswipes you at times. Never saw that coming (because I was i the store when my car was getting killed). It’s funny. I always park in the far reaches of the lot away from traffic but this time I parked closer because it was a quick run. Lesson learned.

  5. Mike, very few people have an AR15. Those reported guns are called AR15 ‘style’ by the news. The word STYLE is the key, they look like AR15, they look like automatic weapons but they are not. It is marketing and design , shame that’s the way they go. Think of dune buggies and VWs with a Rolls Royce Grill, kinda the same thing. ALSO I am not NRA or a gun owner, just seeking some measure of truth in all this.
    BTW , please check out the OVERWHELMING percentage of who these street gun shooters are. Maybe ” You can’t handle the truth ” ???? HINT ; It’s not the hunters. hunters…..

    • Every single one of these mass shooters announces a few days or a couple of weeks earlier that they are either going to or consider doing a mass shooting. These are not your typical criminals. They go to Wal-Mart or a gun show to get their first guns and then commit mass mayhem. Shutting down the sources is the best way to dramatically reduce these mass shootings of innocent kids.

    • The truth is that a semi-automatic fires “automatically” every time the trigger is pulled, meaning mayhem can occur almost as badly as a true automatic – many rounds per minute! Maybe not like a machine gun but still can be very devastating. M-16s in Nam could be changed to automatic with the flip of a toggle switch. They may not be sold that way here but it’s my understanding that parts can be sold and easily put in to make them automatic. BTW, the NRA is nothing but a political entity now-a-days, being against any and all gun rules just to increase profits.

      • Yep. Every other country in the world has this under control. You would think the indiscriminate killing of kids at Sandy Hook would have moved one party off that do-nothing block and adopt the successful policies of other countries but apparently they’d rather see dead kids than rein in the second Amendment.

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