Category Archives: Stan Drayton

04.12.24
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Three stages of Cherry and White

Bruce Arians reminds all of us how young we were once.

Cherry and White are the two most glorious colors in the college football prism but the Cherry and White Day itself has manifested itself into three stages:

For me, it’s pretty much this:

LAST CENTURY–“We look so good we’re going to win a natty.” That might have been fueled by a fuel Rolling Rocks pre-game, but the Owls always looked good against the Owls. Some terrific performances by running back Ventres Stevenson (Bruce Arians’ Era) and a guy named Gibson (no relation, also Bruce Era) got us pumped for the next season. Interestingly enough, Temple’s GOAT (Paul Palmer) never played in a Cherry and White game due to injuries and what they refer to today as “load management.” In all my years of following Temple football, though, this was key: I never saw a 5-9, 190-pound player who was tougher than Paul and pretty much played almost every game of his three seasons when it counted (in the fall).

This 2015 Cherry and White Game was the prelude to the 27-10 win over Penn State four months later.

EARLY PART OF THIS CENTURY–With the arrival of Al Golden, Temple football fans saw a binder (not like Mitt Romney, of women) but a binder of great players up and down the East Coast who were going to take the Owls to prominence. Golden and Matt Rhule, his Lieutenant, followed that plan to a Temple T and did exactly that.

AFTER MATT RHULE–A collection of suspects and wannabes stayed only long enough to keep Temple relevant. Plenty of terrific moments for me at Steve Addazio’s first Cherry and White game when I talked to John Palumbo’s dad and he said: “Mike, my son said it was the difference between night and day between the Al Golden staff and this one because this is pretty much the staff that led Florida to the national championship last year.” Mr. Palumbo (and John) were right. Temple had the OC of the national championship Florida team as HC and the DC of the National Championship team (Chuck Heater) the VERY year after they won it. As a result, those guys took Golden’s recruits to Temple’s first bowl win in 30 years.

The 2012 Cherry and White Game was played at LFF.

TRANSFER PORTAL ERA–Rod Carey was a “my-way-or-the-highway” guy at the very time the most highways were built for the players. That turned out to be a disaster. Stan Drayton was able to plug a few holes in a sinking ship and point the program (“progrim” as pronounced by Bobby Wallace) in the right direction before taking a couple of torpedoes in his second year by hiring a completely incompetent DC (Everett Withers) to take over for a relatively competent one (D.J. Eliot). Loyalty to Withers surfaced its ugly head this season and the Owls handed over a defense that gave up 38.7 ppg to the same guy. If you think that bodes well for the 2024 prospects, Exhibit B was Withers being a worse DC for FIU only three years ago (39.7 ppg).

If Withers takes his buddy Stan down with the ship like he did Butch Davis and FIU in 2021, all that hole-plugging would have been for naught.

Ugh.

The Owls won’t improve as a team until AFTER Cherry and White Day and ONLY if they are able to grab a proven playmaking quarterback in the portal. Plenty will be available but Drayton telling OwlsDaily.com “we have four great quarterbacks” proves that he should take a day off next week and make an appointment with an Optometrist.

Song by Kevin Newsome, one of two 4* QBs to ever play in a C&W game (Dwan Mathis was the other).

So whatever you see tomorrow at Cherry and White, take with a grain of salt.

Make that a bolder.

The good news is that there are enough bodies for a real game for a change.

The bad news is that the Oklahoma game is one day sooner (pun intended) than it should be and the Owls don’t appear to be closer to making that a real competition today than they were at the end of last season.

Advice: Drink a lot of Rolling Rocks or brewski of choice and bring those Cherry and White colored glasses. The Owls added a lot of JUCOs but, if they are going to get better, they need a few more great players once that transfer portal explodes as expected on Monday.

Monday: Cherry and White Recap

Friday (April 19): Five Guys

Monday (April 22): A Possible Hail Mary For Temple

Friday (April 26): Special Qualities

04.08.24
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Philly Eclipse Means a winning season for Temple

Temple’s band prior to football game against St. Joe in 1925. (photo courtesy Temple archives)

Depending upon which conspiracy theory you believe circulating around the internet, at about 3 this afternoon, all of us are going to be raptured into Heaven or sent to a hotter place. Hell (pun intended), one member of Congress floated that possibility on her twitter account.

Since I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and there is really no good way to predict the 2024 final Temple football record without knowing which big-time quarterback Owls can attract here on or around April 15, I decided to do some research on what the Owls did in prior Philadelphia eclipse years.

Good news.

While the Owls have had more losing seasons in their history than winning ones, some of their best seasons have come when solar eclipses visited Philadelphia. In fact, they have not had a single losing season in the past 100 years during an eclipse year.

No quotes in this story but an interesting lede nonetheless.

1925–Under head coach “Heinie” Miller, the Owls finished 5-2-2, beating Upsala, 19-0, at the “old” Northeast High, 8th and Lehigh. They also moved a couple of blocks West to beat St. Joseph’s College (now University), 32-0, at Baker Bowl, Broad and Lehigh, that year. The Philadelphia eclipse occurred on Jan. 25.

1932–The 5-1-2 Owls played all home games at the then new Temple Stadium including a 14-0 win against Denver (Colo.). Their only road game was a 7-7 tie against Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. Carnegie Tech, which played NYU at Yankee Stadium that year, also finished with a winning season. The Owls also beat Penn State, 13-12, at Temple Stadium. They also beat West Virginia, 14-13. The eclipse in Philadelphia occurred on Aug. 31.

1963–After the July 20th eclipse, the Owls of George Makris finished 5-3-1 and likely would have finished 6-3-1 if they had been able to play their final game of the season. That game was originally scheduled to be played on Saturday, November 23, at Temple Stadium but was canceled due to the tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy the prior day.

2017–On Aug. 21, the Owls were wrapping up their first camp under new coach Geoff Collins and got off the field during the eclipse that day (1:21-4 p.m.). They finished 7-6 that season with a 28-3 bowl win over FIU. QB Frank Nutile was the MVP.

2024–Maybe the Owls pick up a big-name quarterback in the portal post the Cherry and White game who leads them to a winning season. Of course, there was no transfer portal in prior eclipse years so the Owls had to settle on whoever was enrolled in the school at the time. They need an upgrade so the transfer portal could provide good news soon.

We can only hope so. They have an eclipse tradition to uphold.

Friday: Cherry and White Preview

Monday: Cherry and White Recap

Friday (April 19): Five Guys

Monday (April 22): A Possible Hail Mary For Temple

04.01.24
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Biggest victims of portal and NIL? The players

Every day you learn something new about both the NIL and the transfer portal.

For me, I didn’t think quarterback Clifton McDowell leaving Temple football in the middle of spring practice would have been a thing.

Would have at least expected he’d wait until the end of spring practice, give himself a chance to shine in the Cherry and White game, and then move on if the handwriting was on the wall.

This isn’t about the Clifton McDowells, though. It’s about the other kids.

The great majority of them.

Gary Segars, who does one of the best college football podcasts out there (Winning Cures Everything), said that since December 23 alone, 2,332 college football players have entered the portal and, as of last week’s show, only 1,116 have found a new home.

That’s less than half.

Tickets for Temple’s road opener going for as low as $36

What happened to those 1,216?

They not only have no place to go, but also lost their scholarships at the prior schools and the cost-of-attendance stipend (at an AAC school like Temple) of roughly between $3-5,000-per-year. This whole NIL Transfer Portal system has left the majority of the players homeless.

So this is pretty much a Ponzi scheme. Former Oklahoma head coach Barry Switzer, who lives 100 yards from the stadium (Gaylord Family Stadium) where Temple opens the season, described it perfectly: “You know what NIL stands for?” Switzer told Dan Sileo last week. “Now it’s legal.”

What got SMU the death penalty in 1986 is standard operating procedure in 2024.

Only the top 1 percent of the players are getting head-turning deals and a large portion of the other 99 percent think they should get those kinds of deals, too.

The hard reality is beginning to set in for the majority of those players.

The Oakland basketball coach said his star player is getting offers between $250K and $300K per year and there is no way Oakland can match that. The player was called “Mr. Oakland” for his loyalty to the school but that apparently is out the window.

The real smart football players at Temple are the ones who are staying because, after a trifecta of consecutive 3-9 seasons, there’s not a lot of value a Owl can offer a big-time school like Georgia or Alabama and those are the types of schools that can offer that kind of money.

They can increase their value by being a part of a winning Temple program.

The good news for Temple is that this transfer portal works both ways. Among the 1,216 players currently available in the portal are a lot of good players who can help Temple, if not against Oklahoma on Aug. 31, win against a similar skill pool of AAC players later. Five players left the Miami Hurricanes last week, including the team’s leading rusher. It’s getting late for those players to find a place and it’s likely the Owls won’t have to offer a bag of cash. Just an opportunity to play should be enough.

The coaching staff that identifies those players will win the AAC. Temple has to scour the portal and find players who can help it in areas of need and a lot of those players will need Temple as well.

The ones who don’t find a home will have a sad story to tell 60 Minutes once this sordid chapter of college sports history is over.

03.25.24
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Temple’s path to winning: A unique style

“You guys hang in there because one of our alums is going to win the MegaMillions Tuesday.”

Failing me winning the Powerball tonight or the Mega tomorrow, there are a couple of other pathways to respectability for Temple football that were apparent over the last few days both in the basketball tournament and the football scrimmage.

One, that probably can’t happen.

What we saw is that, after the first round, the teams who paid the piper (i.e., NIL) largely won and the brackets settled into favorite mode.

So Temple or any G5 team winning the national championship until this current financial landscape probably cannot happen in either major sport.

One, that could happen.

The teams who pulled off the upsets in the first round (Grand Canyon, Yale, Oakland, Duquesne) all had a unique style of play that other high-seeded teams were not ready for. Grand Canyon pressed and had line-change substitutions. Yale slowed it down. Oakland ran an offense that accentuated its strength (the three) by an entry pass into the paint followed kicking out to a shooter. Duquesne played a 1-3-1 zone that confused BYU.

All exceeded any national expectations.

Temple football could carve out that same niche in the G5 college football world if only it would embrace its recent past.

Fullback, two tight ends, establish the running game, chew up the clock with 7-8 minute drives each quarter and occasionally hit an explosive downfield play in the passing game by faking it into the belly of one of their talented running backs, and throwing over the heads of a defense whose linebackers and safeties were forced to inch up to the line of scrimmage to stop the run.

That’s how Al Golden turned Temple from a 20-game losing streak to a first bowl appearance in 30 years. That’s how Matt Rhule progressed from the morass of his first two seasons to double-digit wins in his final two.

That’s how Temple won an AAC championship, appeared on College Football Gameday, and posted the highest-ever prime time TV rating for a national college football game in the Philadelphia market.

After Temple beat Navy, 34-10, for the AAC title, Middies coach Ken Niumatalolo made a great comment about Temple being just as hard to prepare for everyone in the league as his team was because Temple didn’t do the same thing any other team did from a scheme standpoint.

The Owls lost their way and strayed from their roots since then and tried to do the same thing every other college football team did–a spread offense where the passing game was supposed to set up the running game.

That hasn’t worked here. Running to set up the play-action always did.

It was heartening to hear that the Owls established the run in their first scrimmage.

Keep it up and commit to it and the Owls can be the football version of Grand Canyon and Oakland this season.

If I win the Powerball tonight or the Mega tomorrow, they can dream of being a Georgia or a Michigan because the Owls will be the highest-paid team in the NCAA and it would be delicious irony to hear that “the only reason Temple is winning is because some alumn hit the $1.1 billion Megaball. Let’s go back to the old system of no transfer portal or NIL so Georgia and Michigan have a fair shot of winning again.”

Duh?

Until then, style over substance.

03.17.24
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What the UAB-TU hoop run can teach the football Owls

As someone who won The Philadelphia Inquirer employee NCAA pool (2011), the No. 1 thing that helped me was the full broadsheet page that included in small type (we in the business call it agate) every single score of every single game of every single team in the tournament.

Before every game, Stan Drayton should show this clip to his team as an example of how to dive on a ball when the other team fumbles.

Really, it was the secret sauce.

Kept checking and cross-checking comparative scores before I made my picks. When the tournament was over, I got $2,400 in cash delivered in a brown paper bag at Westy’s Bar (15th and Callowhill) at nearly 2 a..m. Never was more nervous walking to the Inky parking garage in my life. That’s when the Inky had its full complement of employees and the cash haul was impressive. I still haven’t paid taxes on them but I think the statue of limitations has passed so I should be OK.

Reid Tuvim, an Inky copy editor who ran the pool, did a nice analysis of my picks in the employee internal newsletter and why they were so good. Inky and every other paper in the country stopped publishing that cheat sheet. Not the same clicking and re-clicking to find the same info that I could hold in my hand. What then took seconds now takes hours.

As a result, I never duplicated that monetary success.

Give me something I can hold in my hand that has every score of every team and I can win just about any NCAA pool there is.

Adam Fisher had Temple sports trending on Sunday. Maybe Stan Drayton will be able to do the same come December.

That’s the lesson I’ve learned about NCAA pools.

There is a more important lesson Temple football can learn from the recent unlikely basketball runs of both UAB and Temple and those are just as clear as the small agate type was on those pages.

One, Stan Drayton’s emphasis on getting JUCOs is a Hail Mary prayer that just might be answered.

Two, if the Temple football defense gives even half the effort on every fumble by the bad guys that Hysier Miller gave on that Saturday loose ball, the Owls can improve from last in the nation in defensive turnovers to at least the middle of the pack and that will be twice as good.

Being twice as good usually translates into twice as many wins and hopefully that will be the case for the football Owls.

Back to the JUCOs, though.

That’s the strategy Drayton and his staff designed for Owl recruiting in the offseason. While my preferred pathway would be heavy on the FCS stars and lighter on the JUCOs, maybe Drayton is right. Hell, his $2.5 million salary per year is a lot better than my $2,400 haul that night at Westy’s. So he’s getting the big bucks to solve big problems.

Andy Kennedy proved you can win a AAC championship in a major sport with a heavy emphasis on JUCOs.

Maybe Drayton can do the same.

If so, that will be his secret sauce.

Friday: March Gladness

03.11.24
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The perfect guy to give the pre-game prayer

Nick Sharga (far right) will try to save souls like he did with the Temple program nearly a decade ago.

Most national observers will tell you what Temple head football coach Stan Drayton did in replenishing the roster amounted to a Hail Mary.

Nick Sharga’s (4) block sprung Ryquell Armstead (farthest Owl on the black line) for a long touchdown here against USF.

Maybe that’s a good way to describe the state of the program which desperately needed an infusion of not only talent but big bodies.

Now we know who can deliver the pre-game prayer.

It’s the same guy who, in my mind, was almost as responsible for double-digit winning seasons in 2015 and 2016 as P.J. Walker, Tyler Matakevich and Matt Rhule.

Nick Sharga.

Sharga was named to the Priesthood last week. Looks like Nick will remain relatively close by as he will be stationed at Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, on Franklin Street in North Philly.

While the starting fullback for the Owls, Sharga opened gaping holes for both Jahad Thomas and Ryquell Armstead and epitomized Temple TUFF. He also played half the game at defense (linebacker) in a 34-12 win over Memphis.

This is classic Temple TUFF football, with a fullback at the goal line.

At Rhule’s Baylor press conference, he gave much of the credit for Temple’s success to Sharga, saying “we ditched the spread offense and went with an old pro style offense because we had an NFL fullback.”

Rhule said the Owls were successful using that system not just because of Sharga but because it was a scheme that chewed up the clock, and kept the ball out of the hands of the other offense. He also said that it was a perfect system for Temple because with a fullback and two tight ends no one else in college football was doing that and it was just as difficult to get ready for a Temple game week as it was for big-time teams getting ready for a triple-option service academy team.

Father Nick (4) was always in the middle of Temple TUFF, pushing that pile into the end zone.

Sometimes, something as simple as a scheme can be a great equalizer when there is a talent imbalance.

Temple benefited from that scheme and won a lot of games.

We can only pray the lightbulb comes on in the E-O again and the Owls’ braintrust realizes now what the coaches in that same building realized then.

Now we have the perfect guy to lead us in prayer.

03.08.24
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What Temple can learn from the women

Women celebrate AAC championship on the floor of the Liacouras Center Wednesday.

If this were baseball, Temple University athletic director Arthur Johnson would have a pretty good batting average in major head coaching hires.

Home run with the women’s basketball hire, and two strikeouts (so far) with the other two people.

That’s a .333 average.

This really stinks that Temple is being looked at in this manner. Arthur Johnson and Adam Fisher have to be on top of this and investigate. A Boston College point shaving scandal was covered in the movie Goodfellas. Temple does not want to be the 2024 version of St. Joe’s 1961 basketball squad.

Baseball, a great average. Athletic directing, no so much.

Still, there are lessons in those three hires.

The two strikeouts came here as never leading a program as a head coach.

The home run, Diane Richardson, was an already established successful head coach in the same Mid-Atlantic region.

Richardson led her basketball women to an AAC championship in a couple of short years. Drayton has had two years of failure (3-9) and there are major questions about Adam Fisher and the men’s basketball program after it gave a clinic in matador defense on Thursday night in a 100-72 loss to visiting UAB. The lack of effort on defense was so appalling major questions were raised nationally.

The lesson is simply this.

If Drayton is not able to pull rabbit out of his hat in the form of a winning season, Johnson will have to look for the male version of Richardson: A successful coach with a history of knowing how to be a winning CEO elsewhere BEFORE coming to Temple. Also in that resume is an ability to successfully recruit the footprint–a 250-mile radius around Temple.

Looking at the North Texas film, the same could be said about the Temple football defense in 2023. Worst tackling I’ve ever seen in a Temple game.

That’s one big part of the job.

The other big part is not having to learn on it.

When you have to learn to be a head coach while on the job, the guinea pig is Temple. That means the players and the fans.

Temple is paying for the on-the-job training and, if you are successful here, the likely beneficiary is another school who gets to hire the guy away from Temple. If you fail, Temple pays the price and no one benefits.

What the Richardson hiring proved, Towson paid for the on-the-job training and Temple was the beneficiary. That has always been my preference for the football program. Other schools, preferably nearby, should have paid for the training for a ready-made football head coach so no learning on the job was required.

That’s Athletic Directing 101 but since Johnson is also learning on the job, we can only pray the lessons are being absorbed and applied to future hires.

Monday: Speaking of Praying

03.04.24
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Spring football’s Newest Trend: Hitting

It’s not often a third-year head coach can learn from a rookie one but maybe Fran Brown is onto something here.

Brown, the new Syracuse head coach, promised “hitting” as a requisite of his first spring practice and it makes sense for Temple for a couple of reasons:

A) Temple, at least on the defensive side, played the entire three months of the fall season as though that end of the sport was anathema.

Fran Brown while he was at Temple.

B) The Owls were so short of bodies last spring that they avoided hitting at all costs.

Brown has a history to rely upon. During Matt Rhule’s first year, he said he wanted the Owls to “learn the system” and went less with hitting and more with the fundamentals during spring.

A year later, Rhule changed philosophies in order to “re-establish the Temple TUFF” culture and the Owls practices–according to many players–were tougher than the games.

Brown was an assistant during those days (and later under Steve Addazio) and that’s all he knew at Temple. Then he went to Rutgers, which cut back on the physicality, and onto Georgia where the hitting was pretty much like Temple days due to the depth the Bulldogs had.

So Brown is firmly in the hitting camp.

Things got so bad at Temple under Rod Carey that one “Cherry and White” Game featured no more than running drills through foam rubber obsticles.

Certainly not football.

My guess is that the Syracuse spring game on April 20 will look more like a real football game than any Cherry and White Game has looked since Addazio. Back then, the Owls were hitting from the time spring ball started in March until the last game of the season.

If Stan Drayton beats Brown to the punch by a week (the Owls’ spring game is April 13), that could be just what this team needs.

02.25.24
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Temple sports: Winning means everything

Monica Malpass reports that Temple applications surged to an all-time high after the football team beat PSU.

Debated whether to do my usual two-hour bike ride on Sunday or watch the Temple men’s basketball game live.

Decided on going for the bike ride, listen to the game live, and watch the replay only if Temple won.

As a result, I watched my first Temple basketball game of the season and thoroughly enjoyed it because there wasn’t any angst involved in the end result.

The lesson of the day was winning means everything.

This blog started pretty much around the firing of Bobby Wallace (technically, his contract wasn’t renewed) and the hiring of Al Golden. In between there was an anti-football president (David Adamany) who tried to get the sport axed but cooler heads prevailed.

Hopefully, Stan Drayton is paying attention.

The result was a 20-game losing streak ended, the Owls made their first bowl game in 30 years (and won their next bowl game), beat Penn State, hosted College Game Day, had the highest-rated college football game ever in the Philadelphia market and won a championship.

Pretty good stuff.

Since then, though, it’s been a program swimming upstream in a river polluted by the NIL and the Transfer Portal. (I didn’t think Temple would win a championship every year but I thought it could at least remain in the top 80 of teams who made bowl games.)

Will Temple ever return to those heady days when it beats a Penn State, gets an ESPN Game Day and breaks its own TV ratings record in the largest market that currently doesn’t have a P5 team?

Doubtful since the gap between the G5 and the P5 will widen. Temple opens with Oklahoma in six months and plays Penn State in 2026 and, while Temple didn’t recruit in the same world with Penn State and Notre Dame in 2015, it doesn’t recruit in the same solar system with those schools now. By 2026, it might be a different galaxy.

Still, though, I’m convinced with the right schemes and coaching, the Owls can win an AAC championship in the next couple of years and that’s certainly a better outcome for the program than the Adamany Alternative floated in 2005.

The Owls better win soon, though, and by soon we mean this fall.

If they lose more than they win for the fifth-straight season, I don’t know if the BOT can hold off a purge of the program like they did in 2005. Already, the BOT has laid some clues in that direction by deciding to cut back on spending the money to paint the field over the last three seasons.

In women’s basketball, Temple now finds itself at the top of the league in the short tenure of Diane Richardson. Stan Drayton has had the same amount of time to improve his program.

He might not have to finish in first place this season like Richardson appears on the precipice of, but he will have to show the higher-ups that 3-9 is not the new Temple football Groundhog Day.

The Temple men’s basketball team showed the university how enjoyable winning was on the main ESPN network Sunday. The Temple football team will have 10x the urgency to do the same starting not on Aug. 31, but with the offseason workouts that are happening right now.

Friday: Some Projections

02.23.24
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Could Mike Locksley be big mad at Temple?

If this is true, it wouldn’t be the first time Maryland head football coach Mike Locksley was mad at Temple.

Way back when the Owls were a winning team in the last decade, Locksley opened his Maryland career with a 79-0 win over Howard.

He followed that up with 63-20 win over No. 21 Syracuse, then lost to Temple, 20-17. The post-game handshake with then Temple coach Rod Carey was particularly unenthusiastic.

That was in 2019, though, and this is now.

Locksley was recently quoted as saying his third-string running back demanded $100,000 to not enter the portal and that third-string running back appears to be at Temple right now.

Could Antwain Littleton II have been paid $100,000 by Temple to play for the Owls?

Certainly looks that way because there were two running backs who could be considered “third-string” and only one of them was taken by another team and that’s Littleton. The other “third-string” running back, Ramon Brown, is one of the still remaining 1,000 players in the transfer portal who have not found a team and probably won’t.

So it does not appear to be that Brown ever had the leverage (or even the stats) to make such a demand but Littleton, the more accomplished Big 10 running back of the two, did.

If Temple is paying Littleton $100,000, color me shocked but there are a couple of other possibilities at play here.

One, Brown could be the guy who demanded $100K. Two, Littleton demanded $100K and didn’t get it but bet on his NFL future by taking what would almost be a sure starting job at Temple.

Three, Temple head coach Stan Drayton could have found the $100K for Littleton.

Any of the scenarios work for me because Temple now has a starting tailback battle between an accomplished Big 10 back–more like a second-teamer than a third-teamer–and a JUCO back who was named first-team All-American in Torrez Worthy.

Significant upgrades over Darvon Hubbard and Edward Saydee, the Owls best two backs of the last two years.

That’s how you get better and that’s how you win more than three games.

Even with that good news for Temple, this singular situation highlights the Mike Francesa rant at the top of this post. When everyone in college football is free to move to the next team, college football is over as we know it.

Someone not named the NCAA (hint: Congress) has to rein this in and that probably won’t happen for another five or ten years.

Meanwhile, Temple has to remain above water and pay the piper.

Even if they upset a coach 100 miles down the road.