Temple: Heartbreak Central

If the Temple Board of Trustees are men of their word, and there is no reason to doubt them, seven sports that were cut this past week won’t be coming back to Temple.

That’s a shame. It’s sad. It’s also not surprising.

Anyone who has been a season ticket-holder in football, like I have for the past 30 or so years, knows apathy follows Temple sports like a huge dark shadow. When I attended the basketball game against Charlotte at the LC earlier this year, the first thing I said when I sat in my seat was: “Where are all the fans?” That was during a weeknight when there were 12,500 students living on campus and only a couple hundred felt moved to walk two feet outside their dorms to the game. The “official” attendance was about 4,000 in a state-of-the-art 10,000-seat on-campus arena.

Click on the Holy Trinity of  Phils' Oldheads for a comparison between Ruben Amaro's approach and Temple football.

Click on the Holy Trinity of Phils’ Oldheads for a comparison between Ruben Amaro’s approach and Temple football.

In football,  Wayne Hardin might have said it best when someone asked him if Temple would ever fill Veterans Stadium.

“For us to do that, we have to have 10 straight winning seasons,” said Hardin, who was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame on Tuesday night.

The best he could do was four. I hope Matt Rhule rips off 10 straight winning seasons starting in less than a year so we can finally test coach Hardin’s theory.

I will say this: Gavin White Sr. and Gavin White Jr. have brought the university a significant amount of glory and I was rather shocked that men’s crew was part of the cuts. When I lived in Center City, I always made it to the Dad Vail Regatta and it was great to hear the roar of the crowd when the Temple Varsity Eight crossed the finish line first, which was many, many times. I played pick-up basketball with Gavin and Gavin Jr. when they lived in Northeast Philadelphia on the OLC courts and they were both quite good back in the day.

One year, there was a crowd estimated at 35,000 on the banks of the Schuylkill cheering the Owls on to victory. Other years,  the team was invited to the prestigious Henley Regatta and got the university some significant and positive publicity by beating up a group of Skinheads in Downtown London. People say John Chaney invented the term Temple tough (since becoming Temple TUFF), but that trip to Henley came around the start of Chaney’s Temple career and gave Temple athletes a reputation for toughness.

Temple baseball had a great coach in Skip Wilson and he took the team to the College World Series twice in the 1970s. Temple  and St. John’s were the premier college baseball programs on the East Coast for much of that decade, but the 1970s was a long time ago and there was no ESPN to televise the CWS then.

All in all, the announcement of Olympic sports cuts was the capper to a pretty heartbreaking year for Temple sports, from a chance to upset No. 1 Indiana in basketball slipping away to the Hail Mary heartbreakers the team experienced in football. I’ve got to wonder if any college football team has ever lost in the fashions below.

Just once, I’d love to see Temple win on a Hail Mary pass. Maybe at Penn State. Our luck would be the Big 10 refs would call it back for a phantom hold.

I don’t think any group of fans and players ever had to go through this much heartbreak:

Snow: Hire a loser, get losing results


Notice how Avery Williams (22) over runs the blitz and appears to stop, while Nate D. Smith (35)  “almost” sacks Bortles. “Almost” is the story of Temple’s season, thanks to Matt Rhule hiring an Eastern Michigan guy.

You hire a loser and you get losing results.
That’s the story of the year for Phil Snow and the Temple defense.
With virtually everyone back on defense except safeties Justin Gildea and Vaughn Carraway (not great players) or John Youboty (a decent DE who made it to an NFL camp), Temple’s defense was supposed to improve this season.
Instead, against arguably worse competition (Pitt, which beat Notre Dame, and Syracuse, which was good last year, off to the ACC), Temple got two cupcakes in Fordham and Idaho among the replacements on this year’s schedule.

"Hey, I know I'm 0-16 here, but if I ever need a job, I'm owed a favor by a young guy I helped at UCLA if he ever gets a head coaching job."

“Hey, I know I’m 0-16 here, but if I ever need a job, I’m owed a favor by a young guy I helped at UCLA if he ever gets a head coaching job.”

When Snow is your DC, though, there are no cupcakes the schedule. Lafayette, by the way, held Fordham to 14 points, a week after Bucknell held Fordham to 23 points. Snow held the Rams to 30.

Temple should never be mentioned in the same breath with schools like Fordham, Bucknell and Lafayette, but thanks largely to Snow it is.
Snow gave up 44 points a game three years ago at Eastern Michigan and 38 points per game last year at the same school. Before he came to Eastern Michigan, Snow was the defensive backs’ coach for an 0-16 Detroit Lions’ team. Is it any wonder why the defensive backs have not improved this season?
For some reason, perhaps because he has very few coaching contacts, Temple head coach Matt Rhule reached out to an old buddy and gave the keys to his defense to Snow. It’s really never a good idea to hire old buddies as a CEO and place them in key management positions because your judgment is clouded more by personal relationships than productivity. For some reason, Rhule remembered the Snow he knew as a UCLA graduate assistant and not the Snow who failed miserably before he came to Temple.
So, considering that, is it any surprise to get this comparison between the Temple defense of last year and this, with the 2013 team in the middle and 2012 on the far right:

Scoring Defense 30.9 points per game 31.18 points per game
Rushing Defense 213 yards per game 199 yards per game
Passing Defense 367 yards per game 237 yards per game
Total Defense 580 yards per game 437 yards per game

Snow’s best days were in the last century and he came to Temple with no solid resume of stopping today’s modern spread offenses.
You hire an Eastern Michigan guy, you get Eastern Michigan results.

You can throw as many kids under the bus as you want, but giving up 10 points in the last 1 minute, 6 seconds to UCF is a coaching responsibility and that’s happened way too much this season to be the players’ fault.  Even a Pee-Wee DC knows with 19 seconds left and the offense 70 yards away with no timeouts, you put your LBs at 10 yards, your corners at 20 and your safeties at 30 yards and keep everything in front. Temple’s deepest defender was lined up 10 yards off the ball and Rannell Hall just ran by him.

There’s a word for that: Stupefying.

If Matt Rhule, who is not getting fired, doesn’t realize that and jettison Snow at the end of the season, then Rhule will eventually get fired one or two more years down the road. In the case of Snow, we’ll find out if Matt Rhule is “too nice a guy” to be Temple coach by the staff decisions he makes at the end of the season.

Matt Rhule Guarantees Win Over UCF

"Look, I'm not going to guarantee a win over you guys because I don't feel like blitzing Gilbert today, but I will guarantee a win over somebody before the season is out."

“Look, I’m not going to guarantee a win over you guys because I don’t feel like blitzing Gilbert today and maybe not Rutgers because winning by a QB sneak would be too easy, but I will guarantee a win over somebody before the season is out. I’m going to go big or go home, so it won’t be UConn.”

As you can see (hear), here, Matt Rhule “guarantees” a win over UCF on Saturday.

Don’t know about the wisdom of that comment, but I like people in sports who back up their comments. That’s part of the reason why I was a big fan of guys like Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath.

Temple coach Matt Ruhle

November 14, 2013

talking TU football and Chip Kelly/Eagles

Don’t think Muhammad Ali or Joe Namath ever had a 1-8 record, though, when they guaranteed anything.

The Matt Rhule Apologists have already spun the guarantee saying, “it was all in good fun.”

To me, the only “fun” is winning so I hope for Matt’s sake, the Temple players’ sakes and, most importantly, the long-suffering Temple fans’ sakes, the guarantee comes true. He says if the guarantee comes true, he’ll come back on WIP next week. He doesn’t say what will happen if it doesn’t. It’s near the end of this podcast:

Temple coach Matt Ruhle.