Category Archives: Tyler Matakevich

04.19.19
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Temple Football: Checking Five Magic Boxes

Penn State v Temple

Robby Anderson celebrates win over Penn State with many of the 70,000 fans that day

There was a lot of talk on Saturday at the various aptly named fun-fest stops about the current and the future of the Temple football program but, to get an appreciation for where we are now, it is a worthwhile endeavor to reflect upon the last decade or so.

There was no one more optimistic than me on that December day in 2005 that Al Golden was hired but if you told me one … ONE … of these things would happen in the span of 10 years I might agree it was possible.

All five?

I’d have to say you were crazy.

Consider these five boxes checked:

Penn State v Temple

Sharif Finch suckers Hackenberg into a near pick six.

Beating Penn State: This I would have believed the most. Temple had come close many times before in this series but just never got to the finish line.  Getting this monkey off the back, though, might have been the most satisfying of the five boxes we’re checking today. Having a capacity house of 70,000 fans (more Cherry than Blue in the stands) cheering their heads off for something that has not happened since 1941 was awe-inspiring. Having Temple be the team showing mercy to Penn State by taking four knees deep in Nittany Lion territory when it could have scored easily to make it 34-10 made it that much better.

golden

Al Golden no doubt was watching this day. I wonder if he saw his photo?

Being the focus of ESPN’s College Football Game Day: Not only were the Owls the focus, but the thousands of cheering Temple fans that filled Independence Mall made it one of the more iconic Game Day shows in that program’s history. Mix in a national TV game between then No. 21-ranked Temple vs. No. 9 ranked Notre Dame that night in 2015 that went down to the last play and that was the topper. If the Owls ever won a game they lost (24-20), that was it. It was the second-highest rated college football game on TV in 2015 and the Philadelphia rating of 18.2 (higher than most Eagles’ games) made it the most watched college football game in Philadelphia of all time on ESPN.

Tyler Matakevich, Temple, Notre Dame,

 

Having the National Defensive Player of the Year: Maybe the most difficult needle to pass through is getting a Temple player a prestigious national player of the year award but, in 2015, Tyler Matakevich squeezed through it by getting both the Chuck Bednarik and Bronco Nagurski Awards as national defensive player of the year.

Getting Two NFL first-round draft choices: In Mo Wilkerson and Hasson Reddick, the Owls have had two first-round draft choices in a span of five years. More, obviously, to come–maybe this season–but that’s pretty good stuff.

NCAA FOOTBALL: DEC 03 AAC Championship - Navy v Temple

Winning a championship: Winning the AAC is not a national championship, but it’s darn good. The year the Owls won their league, 2016, Navy beat Notre Dame (28-27), Cincinnati beat Purdue (38-20), Memphis beat Kansas (43-7) and Houston handed Oklahoma one of its only two losses (33-23). Temple, though, was the team in that league which hoisted the championship trophy of that league.

Hopefully, there’s more of that kind of hoisting to come.

Tuesday: What’s Next?

 

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

12.20.15
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Matakevich Deserves to Go Out With One Last Record

herschel

Herschel Walker was head over heels for Steve Conjar’s record, but even Herschel’s records fell before Steve’s.

Going into his final college football season, it appeared that Temple’s Tyler Matakevich was poised to do a lot of special things, but one thing appeared out of his reach and that was the school record for tackles held by Steve Conjar.

Before the opening game with Penn State, he needed 138 tackles to break the record 492 held by Conjar, a linebacker who played between 1978 and 81, and even the most optimistic number-crunchers could see that averaging over 10 tackles a game might have been a bit much to ask.

conjar

A dozen tackles for record.

Thanks to a season that saw him win the two top awards for national defensive player of the year (the Bronko Nagurski and Chuck Bednarik Awards), Matakevich has now put himself in a position to break the record.  He is sitting on 481 tackles and needs “only” 11 in Tuesday’s Boca Raton Bowl against Toledo to tie and a dozen to win.

It’s going to be tough, but everything Matakevich has done in his Temple career has epitomized toughness and getting this record will be a fitting last hurrah. There is no bigger fan of Matakevich than Conjar and the two linebackers swap notes in the Lincoln Financial Field parking lot after home games.  Now Matakevich will have a chance to do something Conjar did and that was to bring a school a bowl win. Conjar was a major player in a 28-17 Garden State Bowl win over California in 1979.

Matakevich also did a lot of things Conjar never did, like playing in a league championship game—the Owls fell short to Houston—and becoming a consensus first-team All-American, the first at the school since offensive lineman John Rienstra in 1987.  He is the centerpiece of a senior class that has injected Temple football with a sense of legitimacy in the national eye after years of being known as a doormat.

All the while, Matakevich has had to overcome some hurdles placed in front of him, like playing in three conferences (Mid-American, Big East and American Athletic) in his four years. He also had to sit in a room in 2012 and be told his head coach at the time, Steve Addazio, was leaving to take the same job at Boston College.

After all of that, a dozen tackles remains his last individual goal in a team game. If he doesn’t get it and the Owls win, he will walk out with a big smile on his face. That’s why he deserves both.

Tomorrow: A Tribute to the Other Seniors

Tuesday: Game Day

Wednesday: Post-Game Analysis

Thursday: What’s Next?

Friday: The Boca Raton Photo Gallery

Saturday: Putting AAC Bowl Struggles in Perspective

Sunday: The Chinatown Syndrome

12.11.15
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Bednarik, Nagurski Awards for Tyler Damages Butkus’ Credibility

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzs72euFu6I

When members of the Dick Butkus Award committee watched as Temple’s Tyler Matakevich took home another impressive piece of college football hardware on ESPN Thursday, it was dinner, not breakfast, time, but they surely had to have egg on their faces.

chuckles

This is just huge for Tyler, TU and recruiting.

Left off the list of finalists for the Butkus Award given to the nation’s best linebacker, Matakevich won the Chuck Bednarik Award as the nation’s best overall player, which had to be embarrassing for the Butkus people.  An uproar of epic proportions followed  release of the Butkus finalist list with committee members peppered with emails and letters from Temple and AAC football fans who were wondering what the criteria was. Many of those same fans posted on social media that the committee claimed they had nothing to do with the selection of the finalists.

Matakevich not only took home the Bednarik Award, but it was his second such award as the nation’s best defensive player. Earlier this week, Matakevich won the Charlotte Touchdown Club’s Bronko Nagurski Award. That begs this question: If Matakevich, a linebacker, is named the top defensive player by two historically more prestigious groups than the Butkus one, just why was he left off the list of 10 finalists as the nation’s top linebacker?

The answer has to be that the Butkus “committee,” or whoever is in charge of pairing the list down to 10, did a sloppy job without a whole lot of homework done. Matakevich is one of seven players in the history of the FBS to have at least 100 tackles in four-straight seasons. With one game left in a soon-to-be 14-game season for Temple this year, Matakevich has 126 tackles and that is 13 more tackles than Butkus winner Jaylon Smith of Notre Dame. In a head-to-head matchup on Halloween Night, Matakevich was the clearly the best linebacker on the field as he had 13 tackles and an interception in a 24-20 loss, while Smith had 10 tackles. Matakevich had five more interceptions than Smith, who had none, and five more interceptions than anyone competing for the Butkus, Bednarik and Nagurski Awards.

The latter two groups took their jobs seriously, while it now apparent that the Butkus people shirked their responsibility. That is a hit on the credibility of their award from which it could be very hard to recover.

11.25.15
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The Competition Thins for Tyler

http://youtu.be/rK_3PWFm8Tc

Plays by Tyler Matakevich, video by Scott (OVO) Hartkorn.

Too many times national college football awards are the result of vague criteria like “eye test” and pro potential. Tyler Matakevich has separated himself from two groups, the latest of which was the Chuck Bednarik Award for the nation’s best defensive player. He is now in the three finalists there, and  he is the in the Final Five for another. What has set that award, the Bronko Nagurski Award, given by the Charlotte Touchdown Club, apart, and given it additional credibility, is that assigns particular weight to hard numbers like tackles, sacks, tackles for losses and interceptions. It is now down to these five.

Georgia Tech v Clemson

Shaq Lawson

  1. Clemson DE Shaq Lawson

The 6-foot-3, 275-pound junior has 44 tackles in 11 games, 18 for losses with 7.5 sacks and no fumble recoveries and no interceptions. He is the best player on one of the best defenses in the nation, but doesn’t produce in the all-important turnover area.

Illinois v Penn State

Carl Nassib

  1. Carl Nassib, Penn State (DE)

The walk-on from Malvern Prep in the suburbs of Philadelphia has had a superb season for the Nittany Lions. In 10 games, Nassib has 46 tackles, 19.5 for losses, including 15.5 sacks. He also has one interception and returned it for 10 yards and forced six fumbles. He played only the first three snaps on Saturday against Michigan before being removed with an undisclosed injury.

Charleston Southern v Alabama

Reggie Ragland

  1.  Reggie Ragland, Alabama (LB)

In 11 games, the 6-2, 252-pound Ragland has 85 tackles, 6.5 for losses with 2.5 sacks, no interceptions and two forced fumbles. He almost has no impact, though, on the opponent’s passing game as he has no interceptions this season.

e

Jeremy Cash

  1. Jeremy Cash, Duke (SS)

The 6-2, 210-pound is projected as a strong safety on the next level, but has played both strong and free safety for the Blue Devils. This year, in 11 games, he has 85 tackles, 18 for losses with 2.5 sacks. After recording two interceptions a year ago, he has none this season.

a

Tyler Matakevich

  1. Tyler Matakevich, Temple (LB)

No one seems to be nearly as qualified for the Nagurski hardware as does the 6-1, 232-pound Matakevich, who is only the sixth player in FBS history to record fourth-straight 100-tackle seasons. He is also the only player in college football this season to lead his team in tackles in every game. He has 107 tackles, 13 for losses, four sacks and five interceptions.

Tomorrow: On to UConn

10.15.15
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A Special Milestone for Tyler Matakevich

One more tackle to No. 400

One more tackle to No. 400

If Tyler Matakevich was playing baseball instead of football on Saturday night, they would stop the game and give him the ball for what he is about to do and, while it’s not a home run, it will be just as significant.

Instead, when Matakevich gets his next tackle, which will be his No. 400 career one, against visiting Central Florida, the AAC game will go on and the Temple football linebacker will have to settle for getting his just rewards at the end of the season. Four hundred is just a number, but add that to all of the other numbers Matakevich has been able to compile over both his career and this season and he is building enough currency to purchase some valuable hardware at the end of the season.

tackles

With just 10 tackles on Saturday, Tyler moves from No. 30 to No. 22 on the all-time list.

Sports are all about numbers, with different numbers meaning different things but some meaning everything. For Matakevich, it’s just one more tackle but it should move him one step closer to winning the Dick Butkus’ Award as the nation’s best linebacker. It certainly will cement his legacy as one of the greatest ever to play on the defensive side of the ball in college football. In college football, 400 tackles means just as much—if not more—than 500 or 600 home runs mean in major league baseball simply because the number of guys who have done both is approximately the same.

Already, Matakevich is the nation’s leading active career tackler in all five NCAA classifications (FBS, FCS and Divisions I-III) and what’s left for him is to add to it in his final season by getting some much-deserved hardware in addition to the Butkus’ Award. One of his top competitors for the trophy, Scooby Wright III of Arizona, has played only one game due to injury. Matakevich has to be considered at the head of this year’s linebacker class.

When it comes to numbers, few have been as impressive as Matakevich. He is the only active FBS player with 100 tackles in each of his last three seasons. This year, he is the only player among FBS teams to lead his team in tackles each game—remarkable on its own, but even more impressive in that his defense is the No. 13-ranked scoring defense in the country. With 44 tackles in five games, he is right on pace for 100 in 12 games and, with the way the unbeaten Owls are playing, they could easily have more games than the regular-season minimum. The Temple school record for tackles, by Steve Conjar (492) clearly is in sight and, should Matakevich reach it, only two players in the history of college football, Boston College’s Luke Kuechly (532) and Houston’s Marcus McGraw (510) will finish ahead of him.

With that career and with this season, that should be more than enough to get Matakevich long overdue recognition.

Tomorrow: Forgetting is Not An Excuse

Saturday: Game Day Preview