Category Archives: Temple football,

06.22.16
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Going North To Go South

burn

If doing this a lot does not cause burnout, nothing does.

Sometime in the first year of Al Golden’s tenure at Temple University, I stopped at the SAC to purchase some Temple gear and, much to my surprise, I saw the coach jog by me in the general direction of leaving the green zone, near 12th and Montgomery.

It occurred to me then that if there was ever a time for a coach to “burn out” that was it. Golden had to deal with a 20-game losing streak, a nationally low APR, and had to weed out so many of Bobby Wallace’s mistakes that it was a wonder he would field a team.

dazio

This may have been the greatest day in Temple football history.

He didn’t, and somehow found as much strength to rebuild Temple that he showed courage in jogging toward 12th Street and who knows how far East. The 20-game losing streak would end the next week, and a bowl game came not all that much longer after that.

Now, we have learned from this story that Golden was “burned out” from the combination of coaching at Temple and dealing with unrealistic expectations at Miami. If Golden went 33-25 at Temple, like he did at Miami, there would be a statue of him in front of the E-0. Instead, for being a winning coach, he got fired. Now he is the tight ends’ coach with the Detroit Lions.

Golden went North to go South, which means that he will end up at a better place as a head coach and should be able to recharge his batteries. It’s ironic that both Golden and Steve Addazio saw fit to leave Temple and ran into tougher times elsewhere. Temple caught a huge break when Daz left on his own, because Temple does not fire coaches. Sometimes, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence. Acres of Diamonds means something here.

No one knows when or if Matt Rhule will get burned out at Temple, but he does have the advantage of not having to deal with those same APR troubles as Golden did. He seems to like Philadelphia, and has enough perspective to know that coaching his kid’s baseball team will somehow keep those batteries on constant recharge for Temple.

Knowing what happened to the two coaches who left before him might keep him grounded for awhile. At least it has got to be part of any thought process, as Golden used to say, going forward.

06.15.16
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UAB: The Temple of The South

uab

UAB is spending $250 million on its stadium, twice as much as TU.

When I was working at the Philadelphia Inquirer, two cubicles down from me was a guy who, like me, was born inside the City Limits of Philadelphia, went to a high school inside the city limits and, also like me, graduated from Temple University.

The difference between the two of us was that he wore Alabama apparel to work and went crazy with each play every time Alabama was on the newsroom television and I did the same for Temple.

uabgraphic

 

Years after that played out every night at work, I am now an Alabama fan. Not the Roll Tide version, but the 2.0 rollout version of Alabama-Birmingham. (Don’t worry, unlike my fellow co-worker, Temple still comes first.) Unfortunately, the rollout doesn’t come until the 2017 season, but this is a story that is worth following nonetheless.

There are at least five reasons for this:

  • UAB is bringing back football after dropping it.
  • UAB is trying to do it by bringing in ready-made JUCO recruits.
  • UAB is trying to build an on-campus stadium after years playing in a stadium too large for its fan base.
  • Tyler Haddock is on the roster.
  • Mark Ingram is the athletic director.

All good, solid reasons to follow the Blazers, as Ingram was the assistant athletic director at Temple recently and Haddock held the Temple recruiting class together almost single-handedly between the time Steve Addazio quit and Matt Rhule was hired.

Haddock never got a chance to play for Temple, but it should be interesting to see what kind of impact he makes on the field. In order to get up to speed, the program recruited JUCO players with the promise of playing right away.

It should be interesting to see how well they do. I will be rooting for them, just not as hard as my former co-worker rooted for the Crimson Tide.

Friday: Camp Rhule

05.28.16
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Be All, Or End All?

houston

Houston is more like Temple than any other AAC school.

This will be the last post, at least on this site, on a stadium until Temple University officially makes some sort of pronouncement about a timetable for construction.  The prediction here is that will not come for another year or two, so any further speculation on the topic is really silly.

All that has happened so far is that Temple has announced it wants to build a stadium and the city has announced it is against Temple building that stadium. We have reached, with apologies to Donald J. Trump, a Mexican Standoff.

This is going to be a long, drawn-out, process. First, the uni is going to have to get past the minefield that is City Council and, once past that, artillery of the “community” and, after that hurdle, the tanks and suicide bombers of possible law suits holding up the project. People who are talking like there could be a game in the new stadium in two years are really kidding themselves. More like two years until there is the first shovel on the ground.

If that.

This post, though, is largely to tell the tale about Houston’s beautiful new facility and the similarities that Houston has with Temple, which are many. When I first heard that Temple was considering a football stadium,  oh, about 50 or so years ago, I found the idea more than intriguing but necessary.

The Owls were nomads at the time, playing at a sub-standard stadium, the Vet, or at the tail end of their long-term relationship in Mount Airy. Then, the Owls talked about building a 35,000-seat indoor football/basketball complex on the site of Wilkie-Buick, and that’s probably what should have happened. The Owls would have solved two problems, football and basketball, and dealt with the community and the city once, not twice.



“There’s the games-are-at-the-(pro stadium)
excuse, so there’s no college environment,
and if UH just moves games to campus,
things will be fine. … then there’s
the neighborhood-isn’t-safe excuse.
And the traffic-sucks excuse.
Don’t forget the problems-with-parking,
or there’s-not-enough-good-spaces
-for-tailgating excuses.”
Sound familiar?
It’s Houston, not TU

Now, the Owls are in a half-billion dollar palace just seven miles south of the campus with a dedicated subway stop at each end taking as many students who want to attend games door-to-door.

There are a lot of things to consider about a new stadium, and chief among them, is the question about it solving all or most of the program’s current ills. There are a couple of working studies to consider and one is the 15-year Liacouras Center history. In the years since the LC was built, Fran Dunphy had the team winning three-straight A10 titles and there were plenty of seats to be had in those years. You can complain all you want about Dunphy, but when he gives you three-straight league titles and that arena comes nowhere close to selling out  on a regular basis, you’ve got a fan problem that is deeper than an on-campus facility. Another is Houston’s beautiful stadium, where the Cougars have completed their second season.

In this story, head coach Tom Herman complains about attendance, and the writer cites many of the concerns some Temple fans have about an on-campus stadium. There are a lot of sides to this stadium story, and it’s not all crystal clear.

While l would love to be able to walk from one end of the campus to a football game on the other end of the campus, it’s worth five minutes of your time to read that what happened in Houston wasn’t the be-all or end all it was cracked up to be.

Monday: Anthony Russo’s 2016 Role

Wednesday: The Second Easiest Schedule In College Football

05.05.16
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Matakevich: Steel City Walker

Joe Walker is nothing special here.

By passing over the consensus national defensive player of the year, Tyler Matakevich, twice in the seventh round, Philadelphia Eagles general manager Howie Roseman has made Pennsylvania a battleground state for right or wrong.

joewalker

Joe Walker

Or, more precisely, an eye test. By, oh, the 14th game of this season, we will probably find out that Roseman needs to be fitted for a new pair of glasses. From Roseman’s subjective view, Walker was the better player.

Forget the fact that a whole bunch of other eyes saw enough of Matakevich to make him both the Chuck Bednarik and Bronco Nagurski Awards as national defensive player of the year, here are the stone hard cold numbers:

tyles

 

If that was a blind Player A and Player B comparison, most people would pick the guy with 138 tackles and 15.5 tackles for losses over the guy with 87 tackles and five for losses.

Not Roseman, though.

The explanation offered by Roseman for not picking Matakevich was tepid at best:

“He’s a good football player,” Roseman said of Matakevich. “Obviously we had a chance to watch him locally live. Coach [Matt] Rhule is a big booster of his. We know him well. We spoke to him a couple of times today. Happy for him that he got an opportunity in Pittsburgh. A good football player. He was in consideration for us when we were looking at linebackers here.”

Big deal because “in consideration for us” and picking Walker let the entire Philadelphia area know that the Eagles felt that Walker was the better player. The stone cold hard numbers suggest otherwise, as do a whole lot of good football people on both the Nagurski and Bednarik committees.

On the other hand, Roseman is a nerd who never played football. Matakevich will be walking the sidelines in the Steel City long after Walker is back home in Oregon. That’s not a prediction, it’s a promise.

Saturday: Stadium Stompers React To Our Story

04.17.16
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Deloatch Could Make Impact At Defensive End

Matt Rhule hits on some key points postgame.

The hard numbers coming out of Saturday’s Cherry and White Game were three touchdown passes by P.J. Walker in the White’s 35-25win over the Cherry.

That’s important, because Walker is going to have a big year and the Owls are going to crush Army and Stony Brook in their first two games. With a four-year starter like Walker at quarterback, I also like their chances against anybody Penn State uses at quarterback in the third, which leads us to the rest of the story (as Paul Harvey likes to say).

Putting pressure on that PSU quarterback is going be more important and a guy like Romond Deloatch could hold that key.

Romond Deloatch, Temple football,

When we last saw Romond Deloatch, he was walking off the field in disgust following the Toledo game.

Three years ago, Matt Rhule dipped into Charlie Strong’s playbook when he decided to discipline wide receiver Romond Deloatch for missing a team meeting. As a punishment, Rhule put Deloatch on defense.

The only punishing done that day, though, was by Deloatch, who had what is believed to be a team-high seven sacks in a scrimmage. The move was reminiscent of Strong, then the Louisville head coach, who punished a quarterback named Marcus Smith by putting him at defensive end in a practice four years ago.

sked

The difference, though, was Strong kept Smith at end and he became a first-round draft choice of the Philadelphia Eagles.  Rhule, having made his point, put Deloatch back at starting wide receiver for Temple. Rhule and the defensive coaches filed away that sophomore performance and now Deloatch is back at defensive end in Saturday’s annual spring game. Quarterback P.J. Walker’s White team beat Deloatch’s Cherry team, 35-25, but the score in these games are never has important as the personnel moves and Deloatch’s is certainly one of the most unusual in Temple history.

At times, Deloatch appeared unblockable, but because the quarterback was not “live” there were no stats kept on sacks. Like Smith, though, Deloatch’s long arms, leaping ability, first step to the quarterback and lean frame (6-foot-4, 220 pounds), make him an intriguing weapon at defensive end. At the very least, the experiment will continue into the fall and Deloatch could be a specialty pass rusher in third-and-long situations. Either way, if Deloatch is able to disrupt things there are a whole lot of talented guys on that DL that can contribute to collapsing the pocket, too.

If he gets seven sacks in the opener against Army, and seven more against Stony Brook, the PSU quarterback—whoever he is—might be wise to take out an insurance policy.

Tuesday: 5 Things We’ve Learned This Spring

Thursday: The Real Key to the Season

Saturday: Opponents Spring Games

01.13.16
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Unfinished Business: Perfect Slogan for 2016

unfinished

 

Of all the Vince Vaughn movie titles the Temple football team could have used for a 2016 slogan, the final choice was Unfinished Business.

Since Swingers and Return to Paradise did not seem like appropriate themes for a college football season, it was probably the best choice for a couple of reasons. Unfinished is a nod to the notion that the 3-4 finish of 2015 was unacceptable and admitting the problem is the first step to solving it. A lot of the problem was the result of a knock-down, drag-out, game against Notre Dame but a team  that trains as hard as Temple should have been able to physically respond from a physical game and that is something the Owls have to fix going forward.

opponents

There were other issues that caused the 3-4 that need to be fixed, preferably by the mid-April spring game. The team needs to find a better method to contain dual-threat quarterbacks. Nobody contained Houston quarterback Greg Ward, but even a mediocre Maryland team contained South Florida’s Quinton Flowers and Temple will have to study what Maryland did in a 35-17 win and try to copy that against all other dual-threat quarterbacks. More unfinished work is fixing an inefficient offense. Having to look to the sideline in the final quarter of the Houston game for the AAC championship robbed them of the chance of making that game competitive. It has to be ditched for a more streamlined approach when trailing in the final quarter of games.

The business part of the slogan is a reminder that bowl games are going to have to be business trips. The fun in bowl games is lifting that trophy at the end of the game, not bowling, kayaking or beach volleyball that the Owls overdosed on at the Boca Raton Bowl.A little birdie (Owl) told us that there was open curfew the night before the first practice and that many of the players got into their hotel rooms at 3 a.m.  They had to practice at 8 a.m. and there was throwing up on the field and much joking about it. That, in my mind, was a wasted practice. Judging from what happened on the field against Toledo, it may not have been the only one. Temple fans who stayed at the Toledo hotel were reporting fewer such side trips and late night curfew busting the Rockets. Perhaps not coincidentally, Toledo won the game, 32-17.

The 2015 slogan “Leave No Doubt” served this past team well because it was an original slogan born out of a heartfelt speech by departing senior Kenny Harper a year ago when the team wasn’t picked for a bowl despite qualifying. Harper’s message to his teammates was “leave no doubt” by finishing with such a good record that bowls would have to choose the team. That part of Harper’s speech stuck and was the 2015 rallying cry.

This year’s “Unfinished Business” is a recycled one done by a number of teams before. Recycling saves energy, though, and the Owls certainly ran out of that commodity at the end of the season so maybe this slogan will help sustain them through what they hope will be a longer season in 2016.