Temple sports: Winning means everything

Monica Malpass reports that Temple applications surged to an all-time high after the football team beat PSU.

Debated whether to do my usual two-hour bike ride on Sunday or watch the Temple men’s basketball game live.

Decided on going for the bike ride, listen to the game live, and watch the replay only if Temple won.

As a result, I watched my first Temple basketball game of the season and thoroughly enjoyed it because there wasn’t any angst involved in the end result.

The lesson of the day was winning means everything.

This blog started pretty much around the firing of Bobby Wallace (technically, his contract wasn’t renewed) and the hiring of Al Golden. In between there was an anti-football president (David Adamany) who tried to get the sport axed but cooler heads prevailed.

Hopefully, Stan Drayton is paying attention.

The result was a 20-game losing streak ended, the Owls made their first bowl game in 30 years (and won their next bowl game), beat Penn State, hosted College Game Day, had the highest-rated college football game ever in the Philadelphia market and won a championship.

Pretty good stuff.

Since then, though, it’s been a program swimming upstream in a river polluted by the NIL and the Transfer Portal. (I didn’t think Temple would win a championship every year but I thought it could at least remain in the top 80 of teams who made bowl games.)

Will Temple ever return to those heady days when it beats a Penn State, gets an ESPN Game Day and breaks its own TV ratings record in the largest market that currently doesn’t have a P5 team?

Doubtful since the gap between the G5 and the P5 will widen. Temple opens with Oklahoma in six months and plays Penn State in 2026 and, while Temple didn’t recruit in the same world with Penn State and Notre Dame in 2015, it doesn’t recruit in the same solar system with those schools now. By 2026, it might be a different galaxy.

Still, though, I’m convinced with the right schemes and coaching, the Owls can win an AAC championship in the next couple of years and that’s certainly a better outcome for the program than the Adamany Alternative floated in 2005.

The Owls better win soon, though, and by soon we mean this fall.

If they lose more than they win for the fifth-straight season, I don’t know if the BOT can hold off a purge of the program like they did in 2005. Already, the BOT has laid some clues in that direction by deciding to cut back on spending the money to paint the field over the last three seasons.

In women’s basketball, Temple now finds itself at the top of the league in the short tenure of Diane Richardson. Stan Drayton has had the same amount of time to improve his program.

He might not have to finish in first place this season like Richardson appears on the precipice of, but he will have to show the higher-ups that 3-9 is not the new Temple football Groundhog Day.

The Temple men’s basketball team showed the university how enjoyable winning was on the main ESPN network Sunday. The Temple football team will have 10x the urgency to do the same starting not on Aug. 31, but with the offseason workouts that are happening right now.

Friday: Some Projections

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