One more day.

As a big fan of summer and long days, Monday is a sad day for me.

The sunset has been 8:33 p.m. since June 22 and will be for one more day until Tuesday, when it’s 8:32. Means it really didn’t get dark until 9 for more than a week now.

Loved these last three months because I was looking forward to the days getting longer. The good news is that we really won’t notice it until the middle of July because we only lose three or so minutes until then but it’s sad nonetheless. The other good news is that hope springs eternal every year.

Worse news is that the sun seems to be setting on Temple football with the apparent hiring of John Fry as the new President and there might not be a spring, if not by 2025, certainly by 2026.

Temple football is blued, screwed and tattooed.

Screwed, we’ve known about for a while. That means “cheated” and the Owls–along with the other 63 fellow G5 members–have been cheated out of the big boys’ club by NCAA rulings favoring the larger P5 schools.

Blued, means lost or being robbed and that certainly applies to all the players Temple developed over the last half-decade or so only to see them move to other schools.

Tattooed refers here to a beating with very rapid blows, in the same sense as a military tattoo, which is a rapid pattern on a drum. That interpretation is correct in the sense that this pattern has repeated itself over the last few years with no remedy in sight.

So the phrase literally means cheated, robbed and beaten.

Does Temple continue to go down this dark alley year after year to get its figurative wallet stolen or lumps on the head or does it go in another direction?

The Temple BOT seems to have made its decision by hiring an anti-football guy in Fry, who wrote a noted editorial decrying schools who try to succeed in big-time football.

Contrast that with their last hire, a Stanford tight end who was a teammate with U.S. Senator (D-New Jersey) Cory Booker at that school.

The BOT seemed to put the football bus in drive with the Jason Wingard hire and back to neutral by going to old standby Dick Englert. With Fry, it’s in reverse.

The BOT micro-manages Temple and this is sending a clear signal to the fans that it prefers a David Adamany-type over a Jason Wingard-type given the current state of college football.

Otherwise, they would not have signed off on a football-hater.

One more day until the sun sets a little later is sad but nowhere near as sad as one, maybe two, years before the sun sets on Temple football for good.

July 4: Business as Usual

Monday: Roster Additions