5 Former TU Coaches Who Are Doing Great Jobs

Not for a hot minute do I think any of the five guys I mention below will ever take the Temple football head coaching job if it became free tomorrow.
I started following Curt Cignetti at the beginning of the year and found it interesting that at least two newer followers are current Temple Owls.

Not for a hot minute do I think any of the five guys I mention below will ever take the Temple football head coaching job if it became free tomorrow.

That’s a shame because for more than a minute anyone of them would have in a yesterday not that long ago. It was a primo G5 once. It is not that anymore.

Desai when at TU

You’ve got to wonder might have been. Temple football’s recent head coaching hires, including this current one, have no history with the school. In the not-so-distant past, Temple could have hired a number of guys who did but, for some reason, looked elsewhere.

Temple’s football history is replete with near-misses and what can’t be argued is the five guys below who once sought the Temple head coaching position are doing great jobs now.

What also can’t be argued is that the current job-holder is not. Stan Drayton’s closest connection to Temple is that he once coached at Villanova and Penn.

Not close enough.

Only a guy who coached at Villanova and Penn could regress the Temple program behind those two at a salary of $2.5 million a year.

Right now, they look like the third-best team in the city and I would take FCS members Penn and Villanova in a head-to-head matchup with the Owls.

I’m serious. It’s that bad. I’m kinda glad I don’t have to make that bet. I would not plunk a penny on Temple and that’s my favorite sports team, way more than the Eagles and Phillies who are distant second and thirds.

The team has regressed this year and it’s pretty much his fault. Depending upon which game participation chart you believe in, the Owls returned anywhere from 15-19 starters from a team that finished 3-9 last year and teased their fans by losing in the last second to a pair of bowl teams at the end of last year.

They haven’t delivered. These five guys have:

Curt Cignetti _ The JMU head coach and former Temple assistant has James Madison 7-0 with wins over Virginia (which won at North Carolina yesterday) and Marshall (which won at Notre Dame last year). Nobody is doing a better job in college football. A quarterbacks’ coach for four years at Temple, Cignetti, 62, went for the Owls’ head job in 2005, 2010 and when Geoff Collins got it in 2016. A compelling argument can be made that no one in college football is doing a worse job than Drayton so with Cignetti and Drayton we have opposite ends of the spectrum. Salary: $425,000 a year.

Scot Loeffler as a TU OC.

Sean Desai _ the 40-year-old former Temple special teams coach applied for the Temple job twice and was turned down twice. He now has the Eagles’ defense as one of the best in the NFL as their coordinator. He has a Temple degree and was a Temple professor as well as a football coach. Sunday night, he held a Miami team that scored 70 points on Denver to just one offensive touchdown. Salary: $1.5 million-a-year.

Mike MacIntyre _ Two years ago, Florida International didn’t even have money for uniforms. Now the Panthers who are led by Macintyre won at UConn and are 4-4 compared to Temple’s 2-5. At Temple, he was the DC when the Owls won at No. 14 Virginia Tech, 28-24. In 2012, as head coach at San Jose State, the Spartans finished No. 23 in the final AP poll. Macintyre beat a North Texas team that embarrassed Drayton. Nobody has less NIL or transfer portal money than FIU. Mcintrye didn’t look for excuses he just found a way to win. He applied for the Temple job in both 2005 and 2010. Salary: $750,000-a-year.

Scot Loeffler _ The former Temple offensive coordinator applied for the Owls’ job immediately after Steve Addazio left for BC and, when it became apparent Temple was going in another direction, decided to join Daz as BC’s offensive coordinator. This year, Loeffler has led Bowling Green–with significantly less resources than Temple–to a win at Georgia Tech. On Saturday, his team pummeled an Akron team, 41-14, that Drayton was only able to beat by the skin of his teeth. Salary: $525,000-a-year.

Al Golden _ Currently Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator, he was “consulted” for his input by Temple athletic director Arthur Johnson before Johnson decided to hire his Texas football buddy Drayton. Hard to believe that Golden would have recommended Drayton considering he never worked with him. Something tells me that if Johnson had asked, “How about you, Al?” he would have said yes. We will never know. I do know this: A secretary that worked with Al Golden was there when Al turned out the lights of his office at Temple for the last time and told me Al shook his head and said, “I love this place.” Those were Al’s final words at Temple before he was inducted into the Hall of Fame there a year ago. I think he would have loved it enough to return if he had been convinced by the powers-that-be that only he could save it. Salary: $1.5 million-a-year.

It only makes sense that someone who knows the 10th and Diamond landscape would do better than the carpetbaggers Temple has brought in since Matt Rhule.

Five forks in the road for Temple football. Making the wrong turn at least a couple times might prove to be its downfall.

Friday: Numbers Comparison

17 thoughts on “5 Former TU Coaches Who Are Doing Great Jobs

  1. The “drums” are beating . If this continues the progr

    • I hear the drums. Reminds me of Temple baseball 15 years ago.

      • Not getting a good feeling about the future of TUFB especially with no place to play after 2024 at this point

      • That’s the third year of Stan’s contract. I think they extend the Linc to coincide and if they see no progress, they go for the nuclear option. That’s what we keep saying here WE DON’T HAVE TIME to recruit high school guys and develop them for other programs. We need to take great players away from teams like South Carolina State, Furman, Southern Illinois, and South Dakota State and form an all-star team along with the few P5 portal players we are able to get to compete and win right away.

  2. Hi Mike, Oh Boy!!

  3. So, tell me , ‘o-wise-one -) ‘ , why would the current AD, with creds from U of TEXAS stoop down to come to Temple ? Was it possible his creds were then un-remarkable and no other Higher Level School was interested in him for the price ? Yet Temple entices him with a nice contract ? Really? The entire process here stunk.

    • Going from Director of Football Operations to Director of an entire athletic department is a step up. I like the guy. I get it that he wanted to hire his buddy rather than conduct a real national search. Temple is different. Hiring buddies here (Bradshaw/Dunphy; Kraft/Carey; Johnson/Drayton; Drayton/Withers) does not work here. Our founder, Russell Conwell, was right. “Acres of Diamonds in Your Own Backyard.” We had Diamonds in Desai, MacIntryre, Loeffler, Cignetti. We looked at them and said “that’s pretty shiny but I like that jagged rock from the moon instead so I’ll hire him.”

  4. You are what your history says you are. Temple University is a commuter school. The BOT cemented the commuter school status when they abandoned plans for an on campus stadium. That decision was monumental and foreboding.

    Temple hired an ardent NIL denier as the AD to reinforce their intentions.

  5. Mike, I cry for you. You are one of the greatest fans, of any sport, that I have ever encountered. I hope the Owls can turn the program around although this year it will not happen.

    • I’ve been to the Mountaintop, as MLK said. What I saw was a blowout of Penn State before a packed Linc (with way more Temple fans than PSU fans), ESPN Game Day, and a school (Temple) that was the greatest driver of the largest prime time TV college football audience in the nation’s fourth-largest market. Even then, I didn’t think it could be sustained but I never thought we would return to the Ron Dickerson Days and we have. You can blame the transfer portal and the NIL all you want, but the real reason is all of these carpetbagger hirings starting with the Indiana Unholy Trinity (Theobold, Clark and Kraft).

  6. Agree with Greg. This has to be agony for you, Mike. You bleed cherry (not gray or black), and you could use a powerful coagulant.

    At the least, Temple should give you an honorary single digit jersey.

    The alums in the NFL need to huddle and deliver a message to the AD and BOT to put the program back on track and indicate that until that happens, there will be no contributions to NIL from them.

    Interesting Sam Pittman (Arkansas) axed his OC the other day who has been generating results equivalent to the Temple DC.

    • I would be interested to know if Pitman had a past history of working with that OC like Drayton has a past history of working with Withers. Stan, if you are thinking about it, pull the trigger (figuratively, of course). This guy is taking you down like he took Butch Davis down. This should be a business decision. Football coaching is not rocket science. Go find a guy with a history of stopping these read/option offenses and a leader of men. Go look at his points allowed per game. If you can’t find one at the FBS level, go to FCS. If you can’t find one at the FCS level, go to Division II. Hell, Kansas football was reborn because they went with a guy who was a legend at the Division III level. You don’t always have to hire a “friend.”

      • Regarding Pittman/Enos history, this from Wiki:
        Pittman and Enos had previously coached together at Arkansas during the 2015 season under then-head coach Bret Bielema when Enos was in his first year as the Razorbacks OC and Pittman was in his last year as the offensive line coach.
        So, despite a previous relationship with the boss, Enos was given his walking papers.

    • Good to know. Drayton knows what he has to do: Man up and admit that Withers is the mistake every single other college football expert (and more importantly, his record) screams that he is. It was a hasty hiring brought about by an unexpected departure at an inopportune time. Don’t compound it by stubbornly standing by the guy.

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