Right after the Cherry and White game was over, construction crews started working on a whole new Edberg-Olson Complex practice surface, laying the foundation the old-fashioned way.

"Rome wasn't built in a day,
but they were laying sections of field turf
every hour." #TempleTURF #KeepBuilding pic.twitter.com/8uSzXQ9YPG

— Adam Scheier (@CoachScheier) April 30, 2024

Ripping up the E-O field, putting the piling underneath and foam padding on top of that and finally the new turf.

It’s going to take six weeks to get it up and in shape for use.

Fortunately, fields can be built the old-fashioned way.

College football programs no longer are built the way Al Golden and Matt Rhule built Temple into a respected one. Golden and Rhule could recruit high school kids, put them through a rigorous weight program for a redshirt year, then work them slowly into the lineup by the second year.

Now you can’t afford to recruit high school guys. You need ready-made players.

That was pretty much illustrated perfectly in the CBS Sports article yesterday. In it, the author, Ryan McGrady, debunks the popular notion that the G5 is getting raided without getting anything in return. The first part of that last sentence is true; the second is not.

McGrady points out that, while the G5 lost 239 players to Power 4 schools, they got 325 incoming players from Power 4 schools.

What’s that mean?

The G5 schools who load up on P4 talent probably will be successful. The G5 schools who rely on JUCO transfers probably won’t.

There was a reason those P4 guys got scholarships at the highest level of college football in the first place and it was because they were at one time deemed good enough to play in the SECs and the Big 10s of the world. A G5 scholarship gives a P4 player something no amount of NIL money can give him: A chance to be a starter.

McGrady’s example of Peny Boone should be of particular interest to Temple. Boone was stuck as the second-team running back at Maryland two years ago, gaining 258 yards and scoring a pair of touchdowns in two seasons. His transfer to Toledo turned out to be a genius move on his part as he had 1,400 yards and 16 touchdowns. In Antwain Littleton, Temple has a backup from Maryland this year with better incoming credentials –with three times as many yards and seven more touchdowns at Maryland than Boone had.

If he duplicates at Temple what Boone did at Toledo, the Owls are going to win a lot of games.

Temple had the right idea to go out and get a productive Big 10 player but it might have dropped the ball, figuratively speaking, in putting the emphasis on JUCOs rather than productive P4 backups.

There is still time to get a P4 quarterback who actually was productive at that level and, unlike the field being installed at the E-O, the clear evidence is that from a personnel standpoint, laying a foundation really isn’t a priority.

In this new era of college football, fields are built from the ground up but programs are built from the top down. The sooner Temple recognizes that, the better the Owls will play on that field.