Had four coaches make a big impact at various portions of my life and felt all four were among the greats.

Ran into Archbishop Ryan legendary coach John Quinn (RIP) at a reunion some 30 years after I graduated and he picked up where we left off like no time had passed when he walked up to me and said, “Hi, Gibbs.” (Hadn’t seen him in 30 years but talked to him on the phone from time to time.)

He was the only person who ever called me Gibbs. Got a lot of Gibbys and Gibmeisters but he was the only one who called me Gibbs. We picked up the conversation where we left off. When I heard “Hey, Gibbs!” behind my back, I knew it was him.

He won Ryan’s first-ever Philadelphia Catholic League football championship.

Before that, Wayne Hardin (RIP) took a liking to me when I covered his teams at The Temple News. Hardin didn’t like many reporters but his wife, Jane, later told me that he had an affinity for me because I had red hair like he did.

Mike Pettine Sr. (RIP) was the greatest high school coach I’ve ever known and he always said “you’re a Temple guy” and respected me for that even though he was a Villanova guy. Told me to write nice things about his Central Bucks West kids (Jeff Stempel, Tom Duff and Pat Carey) because he sent them to Temple. He won 364 games, lost only 24 and won three state championships with mostly 150, 170-pound kids. Three straight Pennsylvania High “real” championships and many more “mythical” championships before playoffs.

Lastly, I ran into a young coach named Bruce Arians when I covered Temple football in the 1980s and I liked the way he coached the game and he liked the way I wrote the game.

When he was fired, he had one last press conference at Mitten Hall. I was standing in the back shocked by the whole thing and on his way out he made a beeline to me to shake my hand and thank me for covering the team.

Nobody ever did that.

Now Bruce Arians is in the Temple Hall of Fame and rightly so.

To me, Arians’ biggest appeal was that he always attacked on both sides of the football and let the chips fall where they may. In a 35-30 win over a Rutgers team that beat Penn State, he ordered DC Nick Rapone to get out of a prevent defense and into three straight what he called “jailbreak” blitzes to end the game. “If I was going to go down, I was going to go down with my guns blazing,” Bruce told me at the time.

He didn’t go down. RU quarterback Scott Erney did, though, sacked three straight times to end the game.

As a Super Bowl champion, the chips fell where they should have more often than not.

Like coach Quinn, I picked up where I left off with Bruce Arians at the Saturday tailgate and it was like the conversation we had 40 years ago never stopped.

Told him he had the best two lines from Friday night’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

“What’s that?” Bruce asked.

“One, you told your players, ‘How’d you guys get so old?’ The second was the best hire you ever made was Nadia Harvin (currently K.C. Keeler’s executive assistant).

“The first line was so good because it’s what happens to all of us. The second line was so good because Nadia is pretty much the reason your players have stayed so tight over the years.”

“I meant it,” Bruce said. “She’s the Queen of Temple.”

To me, Bruce is one of the Kings of Temple because people didn’t appreciate what he did in his five years as head coach at Temple. Against a backdrop of two Top 10 schedules, Bruce went 6-5 both years.

He beat Pitt three of five times. He beat his alma mater, Virginia Tech, 29-13, in the Oyster Bowl. That Virginia Tech team made the Peach Bowl. He beat a MAC championship team, Toledo, 35-6, and that team went to the California Bowl. He beat Syracuse and West Virginia. He beat a Rutgers team that beat Penn State.

All the while practicing either on the largest astroturf field in the world (Geasey Field) or, when that field was being used by an Olympic sports team, a rock-strewn field that later became the tennis pavilion.

Facilities?

Temple’s weight room was in the basement of McGonigle Hall next to the old bowling alley and only a few feet away from John Chaney’s office.

Temple football now has state of the art weight rooms and a $17 million training facility that dwarfs anything Arians had.

“Tell me about it,” Bruce said Saturday.

It was a rhetorical question that didn’t need an answer.

Somehow, some way, Bruce figured out a way to be a winner despite that hard astroturf field and practicing on rocks and the bowling alley weight room and all the rest. That’s what puts him in my elite Final Four. It was great to tell him that while he’s still with us and I hope he will be for at least 30 more years.

Friday: Charlotte Weekend

Monday: How Good is Temple?