Author Archives: Mike Gibson

06.28.13
by

No. 2-rated player in state commits to Owls

One spring day in 1980, Wayne Hardin was standing on Geasey Field commenting about his strong stable of running backs at Temple University.
“And then we have Jim Brown at tailback,” he said. “Jim Brown. I like that name.”
That’s the same way I felt this morning when I heard the news that Temple landed someone named Anthony Davis.

Anthony Davis’ verbal to TU was all over the Pittsburgh papers.

The Anthony Davis I remember was robbed of a  Heisman Trophy at USC as a running back.
The Anthony Davis Temple got this morning is a cornerback at Gateway High in the WPIAL who is the No. 2-rated player in Pennsylvania, as determined by 247sports.com.
When I walk into a room for a purpose, I sometimes don’t remember what that purpose was but I have a pretty good long-term memory about Temple football recruiting and I don’t ever remember Temple landing a top 1-2 player from Pennsylvania.
Temple has landed top players from New Jersey, like Kevin Harvey (Paulsboro) and P.J. Walker (Elizabeth), but never someone this high from its own state.
Hardin was a rookie coach at Navy when Jim Brown, the greatest ever to have a ball in his hands, was snubbed for the Heisman Trophy.

No. 2-ranked in Pennsylvania.

Someone named Paul Hornung won it instead for a LOSING Notre Dame team. Brown’s omission will go down at the biggest Heisman snub ever.
Snubs apparently are a thing of the past for Temple, though. The recruits keep getting better.
The Owls currently have the No. 43-rated recruiting class in the country and Davis’ verbal can only move that ranking up a notch or two in the upcoming days.
Davis plays a position the Owls sorely need to upgrade.
No cornerback has ever won the Heisman Trophy, but there’s always a first for everything.
Who knows?
If the first Jim Brown and the first Anthony Davis can get snubbed for the Heisman, then maybe this Anthony   Davis can add one of those snubbed names to the trophy.

06.25.13
by

TU recruiting ranked ahead of USC, Stanford

Another great Temple football trailer by the TU video staff. Fran Duffy’s legacy lives.

In football recruiting, it’s one thing to say you are recruiting with the big boys and another thing to be actually doing it.

Judging by the company first-year Temple head coach Matt Rhule keeps, he’s doing it.
According to the latest recruiting rankings posted by Rivals.com, Temple is in the middle of a very impressive list of schools.
The Owls’ 2014 recruiting class is about half finished and they rank ahead of USC and Stanford and just behind Wisconsin and Arizona, currently ranked No. 43 in the country.
That’s about as impressive as these things get at Temple.

The hat is worth $150 alone. If it was a Temple ‘][‘ hat, it would
be worth $200.

In all of my years of covering the Owls, I don’t remember them ever recruiting at that level.

Sure, Bruce Arians was a great recruiter and, on the day he was fired in 1988, defensive end Alonzo Spellman (Rancocas Valley) and quarterback Glenn Foley (Cherry Hill East) de-committed from the Owls to sign with Ohio State and Boston College, respectively. Both became NFL players.
Who knows what would have happened to Temple football had Arians been retained, but my guess is that the Owls would not have entered a 20-year black hole.
Now, thanks to Al Golden, Rhule and, even Steve Addazio, the Owls have climbed out of that hole and show no signs of going back into it.

Addazio got up in front of the assembled press on Feb. 4, 2012 and said that the Owls’ No. 54 class was the highest-ranked ever.

France checking in. Thanks, France.

He was right.
For all of Al Golden’s No. 1 MAC recruiting classes, he never had a class rated as high as No. 54 nationally.
If Rhule keeps up at this present pace, the Owls could move up a tick or two or down a tick or two but I don’t see him falling as low as 54.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
Rhule had a month to recruit his first class.
He’s had a few months to recruit this one.
He’s a dynamic, young guy who the kids relate to well.
In assistant Terry Smith, he’s got a guy plugged into the fertile Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL).
The next step for Rhule is to sign one of these superstar Philadelphia kids who keep getting away. One of these days a Sharif Floyd won’t feel the need to go to Florida or David Williams would rather play in South Philadelphia instead of South Carolina or a Matt Ryan clone would like to chuck it around the pitch at LFF, rather than hand it off to a running back in Boston.
That’ll happen, too.
It’s just a matter of time.

06.21.13
by

Time marches on

Neil Young’s Heart of Gold (original studio verson).

Time marches on and, for me, I got another year older on Wednesday.
I must admit, I don’t feel any different.
Age is just a number until you find yourself in a wheelchair and, fortunately, that hasn’t happened for me.
Yet.

I keep active.
I jog every day and, this time of year, three hours a day, always rocking some sort of a Temple T-Shirt.
Heck, I even ran into a young Temple assistant when he was jogging the other way one spring afternoon at Mondauk Commons in Upper Dublin Township.
That assistant was a guy named Matt Rhule.
We were two Temple football T-Shirts passing in the middle of the afternoon, a couple of days before I thought Bruce Francis was going to get drafted.
I don’t think Matt does the Mondauk Commons trail anymore but, then again, neither do I.
He’s come a long way since then.
I’ve just gotten older.
Sometimes, though, things happen that make you wonder if someone is trying to send you a message.
True story: Jogging Wednesday around 5:45 listening to 98.1 (WOGL) and, out of nowhere, the second song comes on by the Beatles (or was it Paul by himself?), “I hear it’s your birthday.”
Usually when you hear that song, it’s preceded by an explanation about someone’s birthday and why they are playing it but not this time.
No dedication.
No request.
No explanation.
Nothing.
Then the next song is Neil Young’s Heart of Gold.
“Keep me searching and I’m growing old.”
Now I’m figuring out that some sort of crazy Poltergeist got into my old AM/FM radio (I don’t do the IPOD thing).
That had me REALLY down, but then I got home and read James Gandolfini died.
Not happy to hear that, but I had a better day than he did. RIP James, one of my favorite one-role actors of all time.
I’m sure Gandolfini would have been good in a number of roles, but he made Tony Soprano a cultural Icon in the same kind of way Jason Alexander made George Costanza, Carroll O’Connor for Archie Bunker and Henry Winkler for The Fonz.
So while birthdays now are far from my favorite days of the year, this one more than the last few taught me a good lesson in perspective.
That, and to stay away from eating too much rich Italian food.

Notes: As far as my Temple football birthday present, the Owls recruited their second consecutive lineman on June 19. … Last year, Steve Addazio gave me Matt Barone, who I think will have a very good career at Temple, and, this year, the June 19th signing was Kenny Randall of Mainland Regional (N.J.). Randall is 6-3, 290 and comes to Temple with the reputation of being a lock-down run-stopper.

Create your own Animation

06.18.13
by

Dogbe, Nutile a couple of good additions

Frank Nutile’s junior highlights at Don Bosco.

Like the guy in Moneyball, I like stats.
One of the reasons the Oakland A’s were able to build a team from low-budget to competitive was that Billy Bean never overthought things.
He’d rather draft guys who put up good numbers in competitive leagues (heck, he preferred top-level college baseball players over high schoolers) and roll the dice that past history is the best predictor of future history.
I’ve always been one of those people when it comes to recruiting Temple football players.
That’s why I particularly like the recent recruiting additions of defensive end Michael Dogbe and quarterback Frank Nutile.

Dogbe was a sack machine playing for Parsippany Hills, a school that produced one-time Temple quarterback Mike Gerardi.
Nutile threw 14 touchdown passes playing for Don Bosco, a program consistently rated in the USA Today’s  national Top 10.
To me, the most important stats for a quarterback are wins and touchdown passes.
Fourteen touchdown passes as a junior and an 8-3 mark for a storied program is a pretty good base upon which to build senior stats.
Contrast that to former Temple quarterback Vaughn Charlton, who was handed a scholarship even though he had only nine touchdown passes as a senior playing in a very weak and now defunct Southern Chester County League. On the other hand, Adam DiMichele had 36 touchdown passes as a senior at Sto-Rox.
You know how those two careers turned out.
Dogbe had eight quarterback sacks, which means he was disrupting a lot of offensive game plans.
I’ll be watching Nutile and hope he pushes the touchdown totals over 20 this year.
Hopefully, Dogbe will be in double-digits in sacks.
Either way, I think past performance dictates future success for both guys at Temple.

Michael Dogbe’s highlight reel. Would have used “who let the dogs out” as the musical track.

Create your own Animation

06.10.13
by

Temple Stadium upgrades

A very minor adjustment adds just 2,000 or so seats to Temple Stadium.

The big news this week for Temple football was that Temple Stadium was getting an upgrade.
OK, technically they call it Lincoln Financial Field but, if I had an extra $200 million or so laying around, instead of investing it in an on-campus stadium, I’d purchase the naming rights from the Lincoln Financial Group (they only paid $139.6 million for it for 20 years) and rename the place Temple Stadium.

If, by some miracle, Temple could attract just 1/3d
of its 130K living alumni and on-campus students to
home football games,
the AAC might put the Temple ‘][‘ in its logo.
Photo by John Van Wert

Not Temple Football Forever Stadium, not the Owls Nest, not even The Apollo of Temple, just Temple Stadium.
Could you imagine Brent Musburger or Al Michaels doing a Monday Night Football game there with this opening:
“YOU ARE LOOKING LIVE AT TEMPLE STADIUM, WHERE THE PHILADELPHIA EAGLES ARE HOSTING THE NEW YORK GIANTS.”
The school could spend $100 million in advertising and not get quite the bang for the buck as a few of those openings would deliver.
I’ve soured on the idea of an on-campus stadium after attending the Temple basketball game against UNC Charlotte.
I turned to three friends from my high school days and asked: “Where is everybody? This place is empty.”
The university has a nationally known basketball program but not a nationally known following.
Those who demand an on-campus stadium say that attendance would go up if the uni built one, say, at 15th and Norris between 16th on the West and Montgomery Avenue on the South.
I did not get that feeling in a half-empty state-of-art Liacouras Center back in February nor do I feel the fans who attended the home games against Canisius, St. Bonaventure or Duquesne got that feeling as well.
To me, the best upgrade for “Temple Stadium” would be fans putting down their remotes and getting off their couches and going to home games. TV ratings for Temple home games in the nation’s fourth-largest market are off the charts high, so you know there are enough Temple fans interested in watching. The challenge is getting them into cars and onto the subway.
It’s not like the place is in the middle of nowhere, ala UConn.
It’s a 10-minute subway ride for 12,500 students living on campus and a one-hour ride for 130,000 living alumni.
Winning will bring the fans, for sure.
Got to hope that winning, combined with an exciting brand of football the Owls will be playing for the next few years, will bring enough “Temple people” so that the nation is impressed.
The fans will get a chance to vote with their two feet.
THEN maybe we can talk about an on-campus stadium.
Not before.

Create your own Animation

06.03.13
by

Smith: Temple’s Gateway to the West

Our first attempt at Adobe InDesign. (OK, we’ll get better.)

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis represents the city known as the Gateway to the West.
Move that about 300 miles to the Northeast and put it in Pittsburgh for Temple’s purposes.
Former Gateway head coach Terry Smith is proving to be one of Matt Rhule’s most productive hires so far.
Look at the list of the six “hard” verbals so far and it is peppered with Smith’s Pittsburgh-area ties.
Today is a good day to talk about those ties for two reasons:
Scout.com is reporting today that Lenny Williams, Sto-Rox’s outstanding dual-purpose quarterback, is about to commit to Temple and the Owls are coming off their first-ever camp held in the Pittsburgh area this weekend..
That would be great news because Williams would be the Owls’ most high-profile recruit out of the Pittsburgh area since Victor Lay signed out of Aliquippa. (Adam DiMichele, also from Sto-Rox, would have qualified but he was technically a Penn State recruit and a transfer from a Florida JC.)

The website 247.com’s list of hard Temple verbals.

As a senior at Sto-Rox, DiMichele threw for nearly 3,000 yards and 36 touchdown passes.
Thirty-six TD passes.
By comparison, recent Temple recruits Chester Stewart (DeMatha, Md.) and Vaughn Charlton (Avon Grove, Pa.) had 17 and nine touchdown passes during their senior years.
We’ll see what kind of numbers Lenny Williams puts up in the TD-throwing department his senior year, but I’m willing to bet it’ll be closer to 36 than 17.
Williams would be the fourth Temple verbal from the Pittsburgh area this season, joining the Gateway duo of Delvon Randall (safety) and interior linebacker Brenon Thrift and Renaissance Christian Academy athlete Troy Simons.
Smith, DiMichele and Rhule all were in Pittsburgh this weekend, spreading the Temple gospel.
Evidently, they found a few believers and that can only be good news for Temple fans going forward.

Create your own Animation

05.24.13
by

Creedon’s Clear-thinking Revival

Believe it or not, the only shot of SP’s exterior on the internet.

Sometimes you have to think outside of the box.
Or, in the case of Temple’s new indoor football facility, inside a box that was already built.
Credit James Creedon, Temple’s vice-president for Construction, Facilities and Operations, with an out-of-the-box solution to Temple’s recurring problem of finding a place to practice on inclement days.

“We thought, ‘Are there any other options that might be out there?’” Creedon said. “We started talking about the Student Pavilion, and thought that there might be some lower cost, cost-effective options that would achieve the same result with the Pavilion.”

Sitting a few feet Southeast of the corner of 15th and Norris was an unused building with a perfectly good roof high enough to once house a golf driving range and waiting to be demolished for a library. Heck, I used to play pick-up basketball in there no more than seven years ago when I had a Temple Fitness Club Alumni Membership pass.
Did the library REALLY need to go there?
Could that perfectly good (and relatively new, compared to most buildings on campus) structure be used for another purpose?
The Student Pavilion, once a White Elephant, has been revived and reinvented.
Call it Creedon’s Clear-Thinking Revival.
We’re rolling, rolling, rolling on the West Side of Broad.
“We thought, ‘Are there any other options that might be out there?’” Creedon said. “We started talking about the Student Pavilion, and thought that there might be some lower cost, cost-effective options that would achieve the same result with the Pavilion.”

Sweden checking in for a five-minute visit. Thanks, Sweden.

Now, instead of waiting a year or two down the road for a bubble to be wedged into the already small space around the Edberg-Olson Football Complex, the Owls can walk the couple blocks to practice at 15th and Norris.
Remember Hurricane Hanna?
The Owls had to bus down to the Nova Care Complex to practice three days that week before a home game against UConn, an overtime loss.
Al Golden, the head coach at the time, had a good relationship with Andy Reid.
Now that Reid is gone and Chip Kelly doesn’t know Matt Rhule from Matt Damon, all bets are off for a similar continuing amicable relationship with the Eagles. No one wants to put 100 guys on a couple of buses and travel through downtown traffic for seven miles every time it rains. That’s small-time.
Remember Hurricane Sandy?
The Owls had to hastily reschedule an off-day Monday into a practice for Sunday and missed an entire Tuesday practice altogether.
Now, no more bus rides to Nova Care.
The best thing about the indoor bubble is that it has a roof and will be ready with a nice turf field by Aug. 1.
Give that Creedon guy a raise.
Or at least a shorter and more spiffy job title.

05.17.13
by

$600 million, World Hunger or Temple football?

I am playing responsibly … spending only four bucks.

World Hunger loses.
I know I’ll take heat from the press and other do-gooders for this, but I have big enough shoulders.
(Plus, the Somalis haven’t exactly shown a large amount of gratitude for the last food run Bill Clinton made for that country some 20 years ago.)
So I’m bringing back this “oldie but goodie” post for a day.
Not going to give the numbers I’m playing for the $600 million, but one line has significance for past Temple greats and another line plays to the strength of the current Temple team.
If I find the right needle in the right haystack and the right grain of sand on the Wildwood Beach, half of the $600 million goes to Temple FOOTBALL (not athletics) to benefit the Temple FOOTBALL program long after I’m gone.
Decisions to use that could be a stadium, could be an extended lease with signage rights to LFF.
Or maybe an eight-story practice bubble with an underground parking garage for athletes and coaches attached to the E-O.
It’s all up to Temple.

05.15.13
by

Two Owls who give a Hoot

Chris Coyer at last year’s Big East media day.

There have been times when no one wanted to see them leave the field, Chris Coyer and Kevin Newsome.
Coyer, upon accepting his MVP award at the New Mexico Bowl, and Newsome as arguably the nation’s top player coming out of high school.

Makes the move to tailback.

Now both are among the Temple Owls who swallowed their pride and accepting position changes this fall and, because of that, they exponentially increased their chances of getting onto the field.
Coyer will become an H-Back, more of a tight end than a fullback, ala Evan Rodriguez in his final year at Temple.
Newsome will take his considerable talents to the halfback position.
I root for anybody who puts on a Temple uniform, but I know two guys I’m rooting for more than anyone else this fall.
Chris Coyer and Kevin Newsome.
Because, in a team sport, they did it for the team.
The team.
That’s the most important thing.
Coyer showed that it’s going to work just fine in the spring game, catching a pair of touchdown passes.
Newsome did not get the chance in the spring because of a shoulder injury, but, just from the 44-yard run in the Louisville game last year, he showed top-level tailback instincts.
And if the Owls showed a need in the spring game, it’s for a top-level tailback. Maybe it is Zaire Williams coming into the school in the fall, maybe it’s Newsome, but it’s nice to have options.
When Kevin Newsome first reported to the Edberg-Olson facility last year, he proudly stated: “I’m a Temple Owl for life.”
When Matt Rhule approached Coyer about making the switch to H-back in the final week of spring ball, Coyer simply said: “I’m a Temple guy.”
How can you not root for guys like that?

At the 1:11 time stamp, a song written and performed by the multi-talented Kevin Newsome kicks in ...

05.12.13
by

Karma, Komen and Temple football

Temple football takes an active role this year at today’s Race for the Cure.

If Karma translates into support from the City of Philadelphia, season tickets might be moving at a brisk pace between now and August.
If you were at the Susan G. Komen Race for the cure this morning, you saw Temple football take an active role in the race.

For those of you who
want to donate to Nadia,
there is still time

I was there because my late mom was a survivor (she succumbed to another disease subsequently) and I don’t want to see any other woman go through what she did.
Some Owls were there because they had similar personal experiences, others were there because they are just good people.
We as fans are lucky them on OUR team.
Not that the Owls weren’t at past Komen races, they were, but this was just a little bit different.
This time the Owls were racing and walking for the cure for a disease that affects so many women and their families. Last year, they were “just” handing out water.
It’s all part of Temple being Philadelphia’s team.
The Owls have given the City of Philadelphia much in the past eight years.
In the past, the Owls have bowled for Big Brothers’/Big Sisters, visited the Children’s’ Hospital, handed out free turkeys for Thanksgiving and kept Diamond Street clean with regular sweeps from 10th all the way through 15th. This is not just a one-time deal. This happens every year.
The Owls do it not because they have to, but because they care.
I really did not see it at this level until Al Golden arrived in 2005 and it’s just evolved in a positive way every year since.
If Philadelphia gave back to them what they give to Philadelphia, Lincoln Financial Field would be packed every Saturday afternoon.
It hasn’t translated so far, but the Owls are winning hearts one person at a time.
Let’s hope Karma kicks in one day.


Football

Bernard Pierce & Darryl Pringle

Blast from the past: Bernard Pierce helps Darryl Pringle clean up.