If SMSC leaves …

Only on Pravda would you read a serious comment about the Philadelphia Eagles being interested in St. Matt of State College.

I kid you not, that’s what I red on the Red (Cherry) Square website on Tuesday night.

Just in case I’m the one who is delusional and not the SMSC fans, we offer this primer to Temple athletic director Pat Kraft.  If, in the unlikely event Matt Rhule leaves to coach the Philadelphia Eagles, Temple would do very well to follow the guidelines that led to these great five hirings of 2015. The next Temple head coach should be a guy who has done it someplace else before multiple times in the same position. It would help if that place was a harder place to win than Temple, but Kraft should not consider another assistant coach who would be learning on the job.

Here are the top five college hires of 2015. These guys are gone, but the next Temple coach should be a guy like four of these guys (Toledo is the exception here):

Matt Campbell

5. Matt Campbell, Iowa State

Campbell turned 36 on Nov. 29th, and his present on that day was a six-year contract as new head coach in Ames for $2 million-a-year. The investment will prove to be worthwhile, because Campbell crammed a lot of accomplishments into his short time as a head coach at Toledo.  He went 35-15 in four years, including wins over Iowa State and Arkansas this year.

Jason Candle

4. Jason Candle, Toledo

Candle was the offensive coordinator under Matt Campbell before being promoted to head coach. Hiring from within proved to be a wise move because Candle led the Rockets to a 32-17 win over favored Temple in the Boca Raton Bowl. While Temple tried to balance fun and preparation, Toledo was focused on football and the businesslike approach paid off now and probably will in the future, too.

Dino  Babers

3. Dino Babers, Syracuse

Some might make the comparison between Babers and former Kent State coach Darrell Hazell, who has flopped at Purdue, because Hazell went 11-1 at another MAC school, Kent State, before being hired. The comparison ends there because Hazell was a one-year wonder while Babers has won at two places as a head coach over four years, Eastern Illinois and Bowling Green, capturing first-place finishes in all four years.

Bronco Mendenhall

2. Bronco Mendenhall, Virginia

As the head coach at Brigham Young, Mendenhall guided the Cougars to 11-straight bowl invitations—an amazing feat considering the school has played an independent schedule for the past five seasons. He was able to recruit enough talent to win 10 or more games in five seasons despite dealing with severe admission standards. That ability should serve him well with the Cavaliers.

Willie Fritz

1. Willie Fritz, Tulane

Until recently, Fritz was the best head coach in America virtually no one knew about because he was toiling in relative obscurity at Georgia Southern. Pretty soon everyone will know Fritz because what he did there should be able to translate into success at Tulane. In two years at Georgia Southern, Fritz ran the ball 83 percent of the time out of a triple-option and finished 9-3 and 8-4.

If this had been a G5 playoff, maybe the emphasis would have been more on football and less on bowling alleys, boating and volleyball.

There is a pretty slick ad running on national TV regularly that mixes traditional New Year’s Eve music with the message that the four-team playoff is not to be missed.

The only thing missing from the promotion is a Group of Five team in the Final Four playoff and that’s why the Group of Five schools need their own. Sure, the BCS throws the G5 a bone and allows one of its teams into a New Year’s Six game, and this year that team is American Athletic Conference champion Houston, which will be playing Florida State in the Peach Bowl. Yet that bowl has no impact on the national championship and the AAC representative will be the only G5 team among the dozen in the featured bowls.

Would have been a nice G5 Final Four game.

The process by which the college football playoff committee is rigged so that a G5 team will never get into the championship picture, so the G5 participating in a process that gives them only a crumb slot in a non-championship game like the Peach Bowl should be unacceptable.

As it was, even if Houston went 13-0, it would not have made the final four teams because its most impressive out of conference victories were against middle-of-the-pack Power 5 schools like Vanderbilt (34-0) and Louisville (34-31).  Had Temple run  the table, it would have been a different story because the Owls had a team which made a NY6 bowl, Notre Dame, on the schedule. The same can be said for Memphis, which beat a Mississippi team (37-24) that handled Alabama. Those two G5 teams, though, ran out of gas late.

Still, to ask one group of schools to go unbeaten and still not guarantee a spot in playoffs is an unreasonable requirement when three of the four P5 teams in the playoff currently have one loss. That’s why the G5 needs to break off and hold its own championship and surely can get some of the middle bowls to sponsor their own final four.

The reward of claiming a G5 national championship trophy surely outweighs the risk of giving up the one NY6 crumb the group currently receives.

These Sun Belt officials should be ashamed. 

It’s a good thing bowl games are being played for nothing other than pride, because any pride credits the AAC built up in an impressive regular season are being used up in the postseason.

A couple of years ago, MLB put a tangible reward in the outcome of another meaningless sports endeavor, the all-star game, with home advantage in the World Series going to the league that won. Fortunately, the BCS is too pre-occupied with creating artificial advantages for its Power 5 teams to care about how Group of 5 teams do in bowl games. Otherwise, we might see something tangible go to a less-deserving conference like the Mid-American.

Frustrating night for next year’s leaders.

The AAC has lost three games so far but, really, only one team, Temple, entered its Boca Raton Bowl game favored and that was just by one point. The other two AAC teams which have lost, Cincinnati and South Florida, were underdogs and rightly so. In the Temple game, the Owls drew to within 25-17 with 2:50 left and replays showed they recovered an onsides’ kick that was awarded to Toledo, but, as North Carolina found out in the ACC title game against Clemson, onsides’ kicks are not reviewable.

Pretty good when you get a retweet from both the Philly and Pa player of the year.

South Florida, the second-place team in the AAC East, lost to the Conference USA champion, Western Kentucky, while the Mountain West Conference champion, San Diego State, pummeled the third-place finisher from the AAC East in Cincinnati.

Toledo was a curious underdog because the 10-2 Rockets were coming off a regular season that saw them win all their road games, including those at Iowa State and Arkansas. Iowa State was so impressed by Toledo that it went out and hired its head coach, Matt Campbell, after the season.

Now, the really meaningful games for the reputation of the conference are the Military Bowl and the Peach Bowl and the AAC looks to be in good shape in both.

Houston is a touchdown underdog to Florida State in the Peach Bowl, and Navy is a slight favorite against Pittsburgh in the Military Bowl. A pair of wins against established Power 5 teams could give the AAC the good news it so desperately needs now.

First of a great series of photos by Coach and Player Magazine’s Zamani Feelings. The Steve Harvey reaction Meme is mine. 🙂

Everyone will always talk about “The Call” in the 32-17 loss to Toledo, but there was also “the call” and that was a tipped interception that Tyler Matakevich appeared to control earlier in the game. You could see Tyler frantically waving his wrist for the Temple sideline to throw a challenge flag, but the challenge never came. I just watched the DVR, hit rewind three times and it showed Matakevich controlling the ball before it hit the ground.

Had those two plays gone the other way, who knows what would have happened? The Owls scored to make it 25-17, and Tyler Mayes recovered an onsides’ kick, but the Sun Belt officials blew that one and here is the visual evidence, courtesy of Coach and Player Magazine photographer Zamani Feelings, who looked like he was close enough to it to fall on the ball himself.

These two photos show Mayes on top of the ball and the ball on the ground and, at that point, the whistle should have blown and the ball should have been called dead.  Who knows what would have happened after that? Sure, the Owls played like crap for most of the game but it still would have been fun if Mayes was rewarded for his great play.  People say the Owls had trouble scoring, but maybe momentum would have allowed them to tie it at 25-25 in the last two minutes. People also say that since Kareem Hunt scored, he would have scored again. I don’t buy that either, because the Owls were going for the ball and not the tackle at that point.

We will never know.

What we do know is that the team will need a new slogan.  Leave No Doubt was a great slogan, but it was all because the 6-6 Owls were bowl eligible a year ago and the “leave no doubt” referred to getting a bowl bid, not winning one.

Matakevich himself suggested one in an emotional post-game interview where he said he mentioned to the juniors: “Don’t Let This Happen Again.” It might be tough to fit on a Tifo.

This year’s Tifo.

Until someone comes up with a more concise version, I like it because we play to win championships or at least hoist bowl trophies at Temple and, because of a 3-4 finish, neither one of those things happened.

So “don’t let this happen again” will stand until a better 2016 slogan comes along.