Author Archives: Mike Gibson

05.18.18
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Scoreboard Watching Could Get Interesting

guest

The scoreboard you can get building a $130 million stadium

In a perfect world, one of these days the little guy rises up to bite the big guy in the butt.

That seldom happens because the deck is always stacked against the little guy because the big guy usually makes the rules.

Nothing reflects that reality these days more than the monopoly called big-time college football.

Yet there is a miniscule chance the impossible happens so it’s nice on a late May day to dream.

bernie

The view Maryland defenders had of Bernard Pierce in a 5TD game in College Park

For Temple football, that boils down to two sports this season: Watching the Owls’ scoreboard and watching those of particularly two other guys: Boston College and Maryland.

You can only control what you can control and, if the Owls control things and win another AAC title, then the secondary sport of scoreboard watching comes into play.

Boston College is supposed to be good this season. If head coach Steve Addazio gets out of his own way and allows Scot (one t) Loeffler to call the plays, it could be very good.

Maryland is supposed to be better and any team that defensive coordinator Chuck Heater goes to usually gets a lot better during his first year on the job.

How much better will be determined if BC can beat Purdue and Wake Forest before getting to Temple and Maryland can beat a Texas team bent on revenge.


There’s nothing more
idiotic than a fan
saying, “Let’s beat UCF,
USF and Memphis first
before we start thinking
about Maryland and BC.”

Either way, the Owls should be underdogs in their two Power 5 games but I don’t see that number rising to double-digits so winning those games is a realistic goal.

Then it’s hoping that either BC wins the ACC or Maryland wins the Big 10. Not likely, but necessary if that miniscule chance of Temple ever making a big national splash is to occur.

As always while discussing these scenarios, we have to address the “let’s take one game at a time” of a lot of our fans. There’s nothing more idiotic than a fan saying, “Let’s beat UCF, USF and Memphis first before we start thinking about Maryland and BC.” Fans don’t have to take a game at a time. Fans can look ahead to any game they want to because fans looking ahead doesn’t cause the team to lose.

Taking one game at a time is the job of the paid professionals, the head coaches and their staffs, to pound that point home to the scholarship athletes under their guidance. It’s always good to remember that Buffalo, for instance, is taking the same approach to the Temple game that the Owls are taking to BC and Maryland.

As fans, it’s our job to get excited about all of the aspects of the season and, for this one at least, scoreboard watching is one of those pursuits.

Monday: Gambling on the G5

Wednesday: How The Tokyo Trip Helps

Friday: FBS Pecking Order and The Owls

05.16.18
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Another Sign of the G5 Apocalypse

aranda

Dave Aranda, a SEC coordinator, is now making considerably more than Geoff Collins.

Every offseason or so over the past five years, something has happened to illustrate the urgency of getting Temple out of the G5 and into the P5.

You can argue all you want about the window already being closed for that eventuality, but if there’s even a one percent chance of it happening, Temple should pry to prop up that window and force it upward.

Maybe building a 35,000-seat stadium is a step in that direction. Maybe it’s not. (I’m thinking a 40-45K stadium probably would work more than a 35K one in attracting interest.) Probably winning a NY6 bowl game would be the best way to do it and bringing along a top basketball program would not hurt as well.

Whatever, staying in the G5 for the next 20 or so years is not a sustainable business model. Worse, it could mean “an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome scale.” That’s the very definition of the word apocalypse. If the G5 is marginalized into pretty much what is now FCS football–without the distinguishing feature of a true championship–it will be damaged beyond repair.

Real football will be playing with the big boys in the P5. Anything else will be considered the minor leagues.

The latest evidence of that occurred when it was leaked that several schools at the top of the Power 5 food chain are now paying their top coordinators MORE than the $2 million Geoff Collins is being paid to be the Temple football CEO.

If so, the trickle down effect—the inability of G5 schools like Temple to attract top head coaches and therefore top assistants—probably assures that the ceiling will be made of cement, not glass.

LSU defensive coordinator Dave Aranda is now making $2.5 million per season—a hefty $500,000 more than Collins currently makes—for doing the same job at the same level Collins left Florida to do. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure that Aranda does half as much with about a quarter of the headaches of Collins these days. That’s not to say Collins doesn’t love his job; it’s just that it is his responsibility to keep 105 scholarship athletes on the straight and narrow in addition to the winning that is demanded of him.

If LSU puts together a good defense and loses, the head coach, not Aranda, gets the blame.

Aranda now makes more than 75 of FBS head coaches and there are only 127 of those jobs in the world.

It appears the Aranda contract and other seven-figure contracts signed by Power 5 coordinators this offseason further marginalizes the 63 schools who play non-Power 5 football.

Pretty close to an apocalypse.

Friday: Scoreboard Watching

05.14.18
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Bombs Over Where?

broadster

Insensitivity on a Global scale topped the news this week regarding certain comments made about a certain Senator, so it was with a deep sigh of relief that we learned that Temple wasn’t taking one of its many swag slogans this year over to Tokyo to test out.

“Bombs Over Broad.”

geoffcollins

Bombs Over Tokyo doesn’t quite translate the same way.

The Owls are expected to have what Steve Addazio only teased about on the day he was hired to be Temple’s head coach nearly eight years ago: “An explosive downfield passing game.”

That was just a promise then. It’s closer to reality now in that returning starter Frank Nutile had the No. 1 passer rating “while under a rush” of any quarterback in the country last year, including six of the top 10 NFL draft choices. He will have a bevy of talented receivers to throw to, including Ventell Bryant and Isaiah Wright.

So “explosive downfield passing game” sounds about right, although “Bombs Over Broad” is what the promotions people are going with these days.

japancampus

This week, a few key representatives of Temple—including head coach Geoff Collins and eight players—are in Tokyo to bring a little flavor of the game of football to Japan.

If, in the process, they pick up a few extra fans, it cannot be a bad thing.

Temple has a real level of popularity in Japan forged by having a satellite campus there since the 1970s, a decade in which the Owls played twice in Mirage Bowls there against Boston College in 1977 and Eddie Robinson’s Grambling team in 1978.

Now the Owls are back again, teaching the intricacies of the game to the local population and stirring up that country’s significant sports-crazed population.

Just be careful about explaining a few slogans and the week should go just fine.

 

05.11.18
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Dante’s Inferno: Temple TUFF and Temple SOFT

burkemayhem

 

Every time someone mentions that the Temple University football program should add a questionable character to the fold, I think of people like my new favorite incoming Temple player, Dante Burke, and one of my old favorites, Tyler Matakevich.

Burke befriended a few older people in an “old folks’ home” adjacent to his Virginia high school. He didn’t do it for fame or fortune, just did it to expand his horizons and become a better person.

Unbeknownst to Burke, one of the old folks he made a special bond with was a distant relative of a Virginia sportswriter who penned this remarkable story last week.

That brings us back to suggestions of the Owls grabbing a guy who allegedly (although there was damning video evidence) robbed a WAWA and dropped from the recruiting rolls at Penn State or a guy who had problems getting along with teammates at two Big 10 schools, the latest Rutgers, and is now looking elsewhere.

No thanks.

sweet

Geoff Collins not only has won more than he lost in his short time at Temple, but he has forged a special locker room. Good guys who are good players. Driven guys who want to succeed and are not going to let silly distractions get in the way.

Mixing in a bad apple here and there probably is not worth the effort.

Matakevich not only went from being unrecruited by everyone else to being the consensus national defensive player of the year in 2015. For all of the great tackles and five interceptions Tyler had that year, his most impressive move might have been the one he made to another old folks’ home when he gave then 97-year-old Temple grad James Woodhouse a few Temple items and exchanged war stories with the last player who was alive in a Temple win over Penn State.

“Tyler, that visit with Mr. Woodhouse was the greatest thing ever,” I told him at a post-game tailgate.

Mr. Woodhouse isn’t around anymore but the memories of that visit will last forever on You Tube.

“Thanks,” Tyler said. “It was an honor to have met him.”

“Tyler, he’s only saying that because we’re a lot closer to that guy’s age than we are to yours,” John Belli said.

All three of us had a good belly laugh that day.

Or a “Belli” laugh.

Now, at least one other player with a Tyler Matakevich mindset is joining the program. Temple TUFF mixed in with Temple SOFT is never a bad thing.

Pardon me if my favorite of the incoming class is selected already. I hope he has a million tackles on the field but he’s already a success off of it and, in the end, that’s more important.

Monday: Bombs Over Where?

Wednesday: The Latest Sign of the G5 Apocalypse 

Friday: Scoreboard Watching

 

05.09.18
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Settling The Greatest Team Debate

I honestly had never watched the great Dave Smuckler play until reviewing this today.

Sitting in the press box at the Meadowlands on a Saturday in December of 1979 and watching Temple dismantle a pretty good California team for the Garden State Bowl, I was pretty much convinced I was watching the greatest Temple football team to that point.

The other thing I remembered from that day was thinking I was freezing to death.

It would not be until 2009—almost 30 years later to the day—that I was convinced I was freezing to death standing outside tailgating before a late December game in Washington, D.C.

bright

Fullback Mark Bright was MVP of the GSB

That caused me to flip through the pages of the 1980 Philadelphia Bulletin Almanac. It said the temperature at kickoff at the Garden State Bowl was 40 degrees. The kickoff temperature at the Eagle Bank Bowl against another California team, UCLA, was 11 degrees with a wind chill of -11.

The point of this story is perspective. Even though I am partial to the 1979 team and still tailgate with many of them, feelings should never be confused with evidence.

My FEELINGS were that I was cold that day in 1979 but the evidence was of a much colder bowl game in 2009.

It’s all about perspective and solid evidence. The same can be said for being the best Temple team of all time. It’s not that the players of today are bigger, faster and stronger than those of the past (arguably, because it’s hard to imagine anyone stronger than, say, Joe Klecko). It’s what you do against the college football landscape as it existed and exists that determines a legacy.

The goal posts haven’t moved since 1934. If the 2018 team wants to be the best Temple team of all time, it will have to do something the other two teams haven’t done: Finish in the top 14 in the nation.

sugar

That said, after another look at the Bulletin Almanac (before Google, the greatest research tool ever), we’re going with the 1934 team as the best team in Temple history. Not only was it the first team to play in the Sugar Bowl (a better bowl than Eagle Bank, New Mexico and Gasparilla), the Owls of that day were unbeaten in the regular season. The Tulane team the Owls lost to in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day 1935 was better than the Cal team that the Owls beat in 1979 because the Green Wave finished 11th in the nation. In the only “poll” of that day, Temple finished 15th. In 1979, the Owls finished 17th in both major polls. The 1979 team was special in that it was 10-2, with losses to only Penn State (after leading at halftime) and Pitt (a 10-9 final). Had the Owls been able to win both, and also a more high-profile bowl game, they probably would have had a strong enough schedule to be declared national champions.

Pretty heady stuff.

In the 1934 season, Tulane was co-SEC champions and shared that title with Alabama, the co-National champions that year.

I would rank the 1979 team as No. 2 and the 2016 team, the AAC champs (a team in the top 25 for much of the second half of the season), as No. 3. No. 4 would be the 2011 Owls of Steve Addazio, who not only beat an 8-4 Wyoming team in the New Mexico Bowl but destroyed a Power 5 team, Maryland, on the road, 38-7. That was the same Maryland team that a week before had beaten Al Golden’s Miami team, 32-24.

No. 5 would be the 9-1 Owls of 1973 and they probably would have been higher if they had been able to beat Boston College that year.

They lost that game, 45-0, but redeemed themselves the next season with a 34-7 win over the Eagles before nearly 20,000 fans (capacity house) at Temple Stadium. The team the Owls thumped, 34-7, in 1974 finished 8-3 but did not beat a team with a winning record.

By then, though, it was too late. The Owls finished 8-2 in 1974 but immersed themselves into the Temple record books with a 14-game winning streak over two seasons (the longest in the nation at the time). Greatness might not quit, but it has standards much higher than a 6-6 regular season or 45-0 losses.

The benchmarks are set for these Owls of 2018. Finish ranked a consensus No. 14 or higher and they are the greatest Temple team of all time. It won’t be easy, but greatness never is.

No members of the 1934 team are still alive but I do know that nothing would please members of the 1979 team more than these Owls being able to forge that kind of legacy.

True greatness, not slogans, will be the reward.

Friday: Temple TUFF and SOFT

 

05.07.18
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Rodney Williams: The Help Owls Need

In all sports, plugging holes—real or perceived—is part of The Process that allows a good team to become a great team.

In basketball, it’s a lot easier than football.

There are only 10 guys on the floor at a time and five of them are the good guys.

It’s a lot simpler if you are a Sixers’ fan today because all you have to do to supplant Boston in the NBA East over the next five years is get rid of Robert Covington and replace him with LeBron James.

junior

For Temple football, it’s a little harder because there 11 good guys on the field at a time and more holes to plug.

Without a doubt, though, head coach Geoff Collins plugged the biggest defensive hole last week by getting a graduate transfer

The latest good guy is Rodney Williams, who not only started 21 games at the Power 5 level for Syracuse but is coming home to finish his career at Temple.

Safety, the position Williams plays, is area of need for the Owls. They have a projected first-round NFL draft selection in Delvon Randall holding down one spot and both other safeties, Benny Walls and Keyvone Bruton, have had outstanding springs.

Having a great spring is one thing.

Having a great career is another.

Williams has had a great career at Syracuse and he’s coming home to play for a guy in Collins who has an outstanding reputation of producing NFL-ready defensive backs.

Plus, Temple football has won a whole lot more games than Syracuse football has over the last three years and winning is more fun than losing.

The Owls were expected to have a good team this season. Williams and his play-making ability makes them significantly better.

Wednesday: Settling The Greatest Team Debate

Friday: Temple TUFF and Temple Soft

05.04.18
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Collins: Calling All Fans

 

 

One of the most revealing passages from the Temple position paper on reasons for building a new stadium is this:

“Overall, the trend is clear—stadiums built since 2000 have capacities that are sized to fit the institution’s market and football program’s success. The average recently built FBS stadium has a capacity of 37,561, similar to the intended 35,000 seats at Temple. Ninety-five percent of Temple football games over the past 10 years could have been accommodated in a 35,000-seat stadium.”

 

That doesn’t mean that in the last two years of its current contract with the Philadelphia Eagles to play in the cavernous Lincoln Financial Field that the Owls will not try to fill it.

Hence, the hashtag campaign of #filltheLinc and head coach Geoff Collins personally calling season-ticket holders who have not renewed and asking them to renew.

(I didn’t get a call because I renewed during the first week in February.)

A noble goal, but as has been stated here over the years and reiterated in Temple’s own new stadium reasoning somewhat misguided. Our theory is that there is a hardcore base of around 20,000 fans who will come to see the Owls, win, lose or draw. Then there is an additional “softcore” base of about 15,000 who will come out to see the Owls win, win or win.

That base gets cracked easily when the Owls lose an opener they should not have like Villanova in 2009 and Army in 2016.

Win an opener like Penn State in 2015 and the softcore crystallize into diehards the rest of the year.

There is a ceiling of Temple fan interest and it is right around the 35,000 Temple fans who attended the Tulane game for the 6-0 Owls in 2015. It is right around the 34,005 fans who saw the Owls lay an egg in the opener the next year against Army.

The attendance problem simply is not just a matter of wins and losses but of a larger economic driver, supply and demand.

Temple needs a stadium sized to fit its program.

In the American Athletic Conference, Temple currently plays in the largest-capacity stadium and draws below-average attendance, resulting in the lowest percentage of stadium seats filled for home games. Too much supply limits the ability to drive ticket sales and, as a result, gameday revenue.

If Collins calling fans personally leads to the hashtag #fillthelinc then that would be a miracle that would qualify him for Sainthood. It would also have the domino effect of causing the Power 5 to suspend its moratorium on expansion and immediately invite Temple into the conference of its choice. (Hell, if Temple averaged 70,000 fans over the 27 wins of last three years can you imagine a conference NOT inviting the Owls?)

More likely, shoot for a glass full and drink in half that and the Edberg-Olson phone calls will be well worth last month’s hefty Verizon bill.

Monday: Immediate Help

Wednesday: Mr. Softee A Welcome Addition

Friday: Ranking the 5 best Temple teams of All Time

05.02.18
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Temple: The Gold Standard of the AAC

northeast

When Jon Gruden took over the head coaching job of the Oakland Raiders, the first statement he made was that he wanted to “bring 1998 football back to Oakland.”

No one will help him do it more than Nick Sharga.

Sharga wasn’t drafted, but of the nine Temple Owls who signed for NFL teams, he might have the best chance to catch on because he and Gruden are kindred souls.

Gruden, more than anyone with the possible exception of Bill Belichick, believes in the fullback and the play-action passing game.

Simply put, it’s run the tailback behind a great blocking fullback who acts as an additional blocker and establish the run. Once the run game is established, the linebackers and safeties inch up to the line of scrimmage and become susceptible to ball fakes and passes off the fakes.

It’s a style of football that has succeeded in college and the pros for a long time and certainly was a staple of the Raiders’ offense circa 1998. It is probably the style of play Temple should have adopted in 2017 and certainly the style of play it should have going forward.

signed

After Sharga was selected as an UFA, Geoff Collins said something revealing: “Nick Sharga led the entire nation in special teams’ tackles last year.” So much for the claim that Sharga was so injured he could not play fullback. If he was healthy enough to lead the nation in ST tackles, he certainly was healthy enough to be the full-time fullback.

Sharga was just one of nine Owls to NFL teams, with Jacob Martin (Seahawks), Julian Taylor (49ers), Sharif Finch (Tennessee Titans), Sean Chandler (New York Giants), Keith Kirkwood (New Orleans Saints), Adonis Jennings (Cincinnati Bengals), Leon Johnson (Denver Broncos) and Cole Boozer (Tampa Bay) the rest.

Martin and Taylor were late-round draft choices.

That illustrates the fact that Temple is The Gold Standard of the AAC. Not only are the Owls one of only two schools to appear in the finals twice (joining Houston), it is the only school in the American Conference to have multiple picks in each of the last three drafts.

In fact, of all 127 FBS schools, Temple is one of only 26 schools to have multiple players drafted in the last three years. Only Penn State of the other schools in the traditional Northeast can make the same claim.

Arguably, Temple has been the top football program in the AAC using those benchmarks. Add another title this season and a few more drafted players, and there is no argument at all.

It is something recruits should consider when choosing between Temple and a Power 5 school.

Friday: Calling All Fans

04.30.18
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6 Grim Facts of Life In The AAC

footballs

No matter how Mike Aresco wants to look at it, there are at least six—maybe more—identifiable facts of life in the American Athletic Conference.

The sooner the member schools come to grips with them, the better:

power

There Is No Such Thing as a P6

Ideally, the way to get to the big boy table for the conference is for it to be added to the group of haves known as the Power 5 (SEC, ACC, Big 12, Big 10, Pac 12). That is not going to happen no matter how many down markers are labeled P6.

Everybody Wants Out

With the possible exception of Wichita State, just about every member school wants out. They are all working behind the scenes to impress the P5 in the unlikely event that one of the P5 members is kicked out. Everyone who is in is grandfathered in and no one will be kicked out.

Basketball Teams Will Continue to be Marginalized

As Temple hoop fans found out in 2010 when the Owls had a higher RPI, strength of schedule, more top 25, top 50 and top 100 wins than three Power 5 schools, the P5 got the benefit of the doubt. That’s because those schools have an inordinate number of representatives on the selection committee.

legit

An AAC Team Will Never Win The Football National Championship

If UCF did not win the NC last year, no AAC ever will. Central Florida did everything it was asked to do—win all of the games on its schedule, win a NY6 bowl game and beat the only two teams that handed the eventual champion, Alabama, its only loss. The system is so skewed that the AAC is so screwed. For Temple to get a Final Four slot this year, for instance, the Owls would have to win all 12 of their regular-season games, the championship game at Lincoln Financial Field and Boston College and Maryland would have to win the ACC and Big 12 titles respectively. Even after those unlikely scenarios are achieved, an invite is not a slam dunk and the haves will probably find an excuse to keep the Owls out.

Transfer Rule Will Make Things Worse

With the new transfer rule coming into effect for the 2019 season, things will get worse, not better, for AAC teams as some of the elite players who have proven themselves as freshmen and sophomores are lured to the larger conferences ostensibly for the purpose of positioning themselves better for the NFL Draft.

The Window Has Been Slammed Shut

For schools like UConn, Temple, Cincinnati and Houston—at one time seen to be attractive additions for a P5 school—the tiny window of opportunity to join the big club has been slammed shut. There is only so much of the TV pie to be sliced and the people about to be eating those 64 pieces want to get their mouthful and won’t be handing scrapes to the few pressing their noses against the window. There doesn’t seem to be any talk of expansion in the future.

Wednesday: The Temple Drafted Guys

Friday: Calling All Fans

Monday: Ranking The Greatest Temple Teams

 

04.27.18
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For TU fans, Love Should Be Better Second Time Around

timessquare

A real ad paid for by Temple on the marquee in Times Square 4/26/18.

If you are a Temple fan who did not fall in love with Geoff Collins in his first year, there are indications that love is better the second time around.

OK, I’ll admit it.

I wasn’t crazy about his trust in an offensive coordinator who recruited a guy for Coastal Carolina and gave that guy about the longest rope to hang himself of any Temple quarterback in my 41-year history of following the Owls.

Seven games with six putrid and one acceptable performance was six games too much for my taste and it almost put the Owls out of bowl contention.

Forgetting that Nick Sharga was the best pure football player on the team—on both offense and defense–was another major strike against Collins.

That was then and this is now.

Mayhem might not have been coming a year ago, but there are at least inclinations that it could be here in five months.

Collins made a couple of impressive CEO moves in the offseason, promoting Andrew Thacker to DC to replace Taver Johnson was the first. We did not see the defensive Mayhem we had been promised until the 13th game of the season and Collins was not a happy camper. Presumably seeing the handwriting on the wall, Johnson went back to the Big 10 and accepted the same job he had a Purdue before taking the Temple DC job (defensive backs’ coach) at Ohio State. Collins also made Temple lifer Ed Foley the “assistant head coach in charge of offense” presumably as a check and balance on Patenaude.

hearts

Those aren’t the only signs Year Two Can be better than Year One.

All you have to do is look around the American Athletic Conference (which probably should have kept the Big East name, but that’s a story for another day).

Look at what all of the other second-year coaches did.

Navy’s brilliant Ken Niumatalolo went 8-5 with a loss in the Eagle Bank Bowl his first year and then went 10-4 with a win in the Texas Bowl his second year.

Memphis’ Mike Norvell went 8-5 his first year, then 10-3 the second.

SMU’s Chad Morris went 2-10, 5-7 and 7-6 before he accepted a Power 5 job with Arkansas.

UCF’s Scott Frost went 6-7 his first year and then 13-0 the second.

Those are significant improvements in numbers across the board.

The numbers suggest that the bottom line for Collins will produce much better than the seven wins he was able to post while feeling his way around in the first season. If it’s Rhule and Frost good, that’s an improvement of anywhere from 4-7 wins. Even if it’s Norvell good, that’s a nine-win season.

Just split the difference between, say, Rhule and Frost and every Temple fan—even the skeptical ones—will be sending Valentines Collins’ way come Feb. 14, 2019.

The only question where be where to send the card with the Whitman’s chocolates.

Monday: Facts Of Life In AAC