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Temple’s biggest rivalry comes to an end
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Five Upsets this week
Click on the Wake Forest guys for five upsets this week.
Photo essay Temple-SMU
One thing is certain: It won’t be a tie
Not my ticket. Two things that struck me about this. The game kicked off at 8:30 p.m. on a Friday night on the East Coast (and I don’t think TV had anything to do with it) and 31 seats in one row is a lot of seats.
Most people agree that Temple’s football game at SMU today (3 p.m., ESPN3; 97.5, The Fanatic) will be a high-scoring one, very unlike the last two meetings between the teams.
One thing it will not be that the other two games were are ties: SMU and Temple tied, 6-6, in 1942 and 7-7 in 1946. In the 1946 game, SMU was called for offsides on a missed Temple extra point that enabled the Owls to kick a second extra point.
Temple was the only team from the “traditional East” the Mustangs played that year.
I’m old enough to remember college football games that were tied and I’ve never really understood them. I became a Temple football fan while sitting through a Temple tie with visiting Villanova, 13-13, in the early days of coach Wayne Hardin.
At the time, I was just a young kid who was a fan of both teams: Villanova, because my dad went there; Temple, because its games were on Philadelphia television (Al Meltzer play-by-play, Charlie Swift color).
The SMU team Temple tied in 1946 played in the Cotton Bowl in a regular-season game against Texas A&M that same calendar year. Cotton Bowl was SMU’s home field back then.
When Villanova coach Lou Ferry took three knees to avoid a loss deep in his own territory, I saw all I needed to see. I became a Temple fan for life.
Temple, in my mind, was the team that always tried to win. Against Penn State years later, the Owls lost, 31-30, because they eschewed the extra point on the final play of the game. Temple also played a 17-17 tie at Cincinnati. To me, a wasted trip.
I’ve never understood the concept of ties. They didn’t settle for them in basketball and they should not settle for them in football.
While I like the new overtime rules better than the old ties, I’d still prefer to see an extra quarter before going to them. They must have had their reasons, though.
Another theme about today is the back-to-the-future aspect of TV-watching. I thought those days of being in the MAC and watching the game on the computer were over, but they are not. No local TV station chose to pick up the ESPN3 feed, but why not Temple TV (Channel 50 on Comcast)? Today, on Channel 50 between 3:30 and 6:30 is the following programming: Campbell’s Comedy Show, Jock Joint, The Grog Show, Temple Smash and a rerun of Temple Update. Seems to me like it would not take much to plug in the HDMI feed of ESPN3 and broadcast it over the air, with permission from ESPN. Maybe Cal and Lucille Rudman can look into this for the future. The last two games I watched on computer did not have a good ending: Temple at Bowling Green (2011) and Temple at Idaho (2013).
At least this Temple-SMU game will not end in a tie and hopefully the Owls will have this one wrapped up before they have to play an overtime. If they do, I will take back all of the bad things I said about Matt Rhule.
Err, at least some of them.
Early TV. Unfortunately, we get UConn-UCF on Channel 6 instead of RU-Houston.
Color win Cherry, White … and Brown
The Diamond Marching Band killed at halftime.
One way to tie the Temple football win with the Homecoming Game crowd was the mention of Morkeith Brown, whose Homecoming lasted a full week with the team.
The defensive end and tight end was always one of my favorite Temple Owls. He was the guy seen in the middle of the celebration at the Eagle Bank Bank announcement, a former Army ranger and probably one of the best leaders on the Al Golden and Steve Addazio teams. Morkeith wasn’t the greatest player, but he got the most out of his ability and his leadership with infectious in a good way.
Great shot of the tailgate scene. You’ll never find more Temple grads in one spot as you will at a TU football game.
Brown, like a lot of other alumni, was around all week and his influence as a motivator was felt on the team. Hopefully, he used the days to develop another leader. Temple head coach Matt Rhule made special mention of Brown in the post-game press conference and how his mere presence around the team all week was an intangible benefit.
Maybe they can take him to Dallas.
Whatever, the post-game burgers tasted better in Lot K after the win. (Thanks to Adrian Robinson for the burger.) No amount of spicy hot mustard or Heinz Ketchup can make the burgers and dogs taste better than a dash of winning.
Speaking of which, it was a great crowd and the Diamond Marching Band, always unbeaten in my book, was never better than it was at halftime. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the video above. In all my time coming to Temple games, I never saw a pre-game Temple crowd quite that large in the parking lot. That’s particularly impressive after an 0-6 start.
The win changed the whole atmosphere around Temple and now the challenge is not to make this a one-week deal. Six wins in a row is probably too much to ask, but there’s no team left on this schedule, with the possible exception of UCF, that Temple cannot beat.
Heater flourishing at Marshall
Click over photo for great story on Marshall DC Chuck Heater.
Related:
http://templefootballforever.blogspot.com/2013/01/whats-up-with-chuck-and-marshall-matters.html
http://templefootballforever.blogspot.com/2013/01/rolovich-heater-gone.html
5 Possible Upsets This Week
Click on the photo for this week’s college football upset specials.
Keep Calm and Hoot On
Nick Visco kicking for Archbishop Wood.
One of the parents gave me this great T-Shirt (or is that ‘][‘-Shirt) I wore yesterday while jogging:
“Keep Calm and Hoot On.”
Once I saw that in the bag, I had to wear it. I haven’t been too calm since Saturday.
The recipe for a productive Coyer is simple:
Five passes, five runs, five catches.
He also carried the ball for 184 yards
in a game at Ohio once. How do you not
get someone with those kind of instincts
involved in the running game?
To under-utilize a talent
like this is cheating the team.
It’s one thing to lose a game to a team slightly favored, but a whole other story to lose it the way Temple did. So I have a hard time letting go, but let go I must and so must Temple.
In my mind, if you are going to pull a kicker, you use the backup kicker, not the punter. I don’t know if Nick Visco makes that 25-yard field goal (essentially an extra-point), but I do know this: Nick Visco made the highest percentage of extra points of any kicker who ever kicked on the soil of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. That field goal was an extra point.
I’d say his making it would have been a good bet since I’ve always believed the best predictor of future success is past success and that’s some damn good past success.
That whole game changes at 16-15.
Now it looks as though Visco will play (Matt Rhule: “I think we’ll give Nick a shot”), so things are looking up in the kicking game.
For things to look up for the rest of the offense, the Owls must do a better job of getting the ball in the hands of their play-makers going forward. One of the things that made John Chaney a great coach was that he yelled when someone passed the ball to someone other than Eddie Jones or Aaron McKie. He knew who his scorers were.
These are ours:
Bowl win
CHRIS COYER _ Does our new offensive coordinator even know this kid was the MVP as a quarterback for the school’s first bowl win in 30 years? He hasn’t been given an opportunity to throw the ball yet. He should not be a Wildcat quarterback. (How many times have you seen the Wildcat work? Me, too.) He should be throwing the ball five times a game off pitchouts from Connor Reilly or maybe a throwback pass. The recipe for a productive Coyer is simple: Five passes, five runs, five catches. He also carried the ball for 184 yards in a game at Ohio once. How do you not get someone with those kind of instincts involved in the running game? To under-utilize a talent like this is cheating the team. This is someone who can get 100 yards receiving, 100 yards rushing and 100 yards passing in any given game but not the way he’s being used now.
Khalif Herbin, scoring one of his five touchdowns in Montclair’s 35-7 win over East Orange in front of 9,000 fans.
KHALIF HERBIN _ I hope they find a way to get this kid the ball in space, maybe on a reverse or two, punt and kickoff returns, a bubble screen, whatever. He runs a 4.34 40 and Hassan Dixon is the only guy on the team faster. Herbin, though, wasn’t Offensive Player of the Year in New Jersey (2011) for nothing. We haven’t seen him yet because of injury issues, but he’s good to go and 100 percent for Saturday.
ZAIRE WILLIAMS_Thought after going 7 for 33 from scrimmage against Notre Dame, we’d see more of him against Houston, but all we saw was 11 for 57. Bernard Pierce went 6 for 44 in his first game and that was against a FCS school. The next game, Pierce went for over 100 yards against Eastern Michigan and almost never went below 100 yards after that but he didn’t get the ball just 11 times in any of those games. Williams is of the Palmer-Pierce-Brown-Harris lineage, at least in ability. He was open in the flat all day for screen passes against Houston. I would have loved to have seen him take one of those screen passes to the house.
RYAN ALDERMAN _ Any time the team needs nine yards, throw it to him. He not only catches everything, he’s got a remarkable knack for getting open.
DEON MILLER _ I know he’s had dehydration issues, but if they are not going to throw the ball to him on a fade in the end zone, they probably should put him back on the field goal blocking team. The 6-foot-6 wide receiver blocked two FGs last year perfectly timing his jump from behind the nose guard. I didn’t see him out there for any of Richie Leone’s five made field goals last week. In the absence of 6-11 basketball players coming out for the team, he’s the best option the Owls have for that job.
Other than that, keep calm and Hoot on … there’s plenty of season left to be played and you can only cry over spilled milk for three days.
Tomorrow: The road to a winning season
Temple people supporting Temple
The greatest 18-second video ever … 12K Temple students singing T for Temple U.
They are going to honor former Temple football coach Wayne Hardin on Saturday for his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame. The players will be wearing the same uniforms, and hopefully helmets, that the Owls wore when Temple seemingly won all the time.
Coach said a lot of interesting things to me over the years, but maybe the most interesting had to do with Temple attendance.
“If you have just Temple people supporting Temple, you’d have no attendance problem,” he said. “Between the students and alumni and employees, you have enough people to fill the stadium.”
This should be on every floor of every dorm on campus.
That makes sense.
So how many people will be there when Temple makes its home debut in the American Athletic Conference?
I’m not good at a lot of things, but this unfortunately is one of them.
22,807.
Or thereabouts.
Sadly.
Unless I’m pleasantly surprised about Temple attendance, which is rarely.
The problem is two-fold: Students and alumni.
Students now have little excuse. There are about 14,000 living on campus. Plenty of free buses are available if they can’t get a ride and there is a subway stop out the front door of their dorm that ends right at the stadium. So they can even fall asleep on the subway and not fear they’ll miss their stop.
Matt Rhule, more than any Temple coach
I’ve ever seen, has done his level
best to reverse it. He’s given spirit
pep talks in every dorm, including
the new Morgan Hall. He’s even had
the football players help the kids
move in at every dorm everywhere.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s there
at 7 a.m. with a bullhorn and physically
dragging kids out of their beds and onto
the subway. That might be what it takes
There was a lot of great student momentum two years ago. Over 10,000 students attended the Villanova game and made a lot of noise (see video above). Then there was the Penn State game and there were 14,000 students making more noise. To me, there should be 14,000 students at every game (10K of the 14K living on campus and 4K of the remaining 25K commuters is not too much to ask). Maybe that’s just me, though. I haven’t missed a home game in 30 years and even that was job-related.
Last year, though, was another story.
The first home game against Maryland there were only about 2,000 students.
It was worse against Rutgers, despite the Owls taking a 2-0 Big East record into the game. Maybe 1,000 students attended.
Don’t exactly know what happened there, but it’s not a good trend.
Matt Rhule, more than any Temple coach I’ve ever seen, has done his level best to reverse it. He’s given spirit pep talks in every dorm, including the new Morgan Hall. He’s even had the football players help the kids move in at every dorm everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s there at 7 a.m. with a bullhorn and physically dragging kids out of their beds and onto the subway. That might be what it takes.
Coach Rhule pumping up the students at Morgan Hall. I wonder if that was named for former Diamond Gem Roxie Morgan?
Temple people supporting Temple.
There are 139,000 alumni living within one hour’s drive of Lincoln Financial Field. Asking for at least 10 percent of them to attend is not too much to ask.
Way too many alumni, though, sit at home and watch the games on TV (Temple is a TV powerhouse; when the games are on local TV, the Owls outdraws other college games on a regular basis, so the evidence of coach-potato-itis is there).
Yet we have one grad who owns a bar down the shore who didn’t attend the Eagle Bank Bowl, despite it being the first bowl the school played in for 30 years. The Atlantic City press did a story on him. He and his bartender were just about the only people in the bar watching the game. You think he could have let the bartender run things for one day and made the trip to D.C.? You think? Then there was another Temple person who missed that game because it was “too cold.” Get that man a coat and some mittens, get the other guy to take a day off from work and get the coach potato alumni off the couches and into the stadium and the attendance “problem” is solved.
There you have it, a 30K baseline at every Temple game. At least. Then you can build it up from there.
Temple people supporting Temple. Maybe someday. Maybe Saturday.
These girls have caught Temple Smallpox. It’s the best kind.
Tomorrow: That lost bag of tricks
Here’s The Kicker: Relax
Don Bitterlich, who now plays the best rendition of Fight Temple Fight I’ve ever heard, never missed a FG inside the 40 in his 3 years as Temple’s kicker.
Cap Poklemba after winning indoor football league title for Harrisburg pro team this season (with his rugrat).
One of the great things about HDTV is that you can see the expression on guys’ faces during the game.
One of the worst things about HDTV is that you can see the expression on guys’ faces during the game.
When I saw Jim Cooper Jr.’s face before he lined up for the first kick of his collegiate career against Notre Dame, I said to the person sitting next to me: “Geez, the poor kid looks scared to death.”
Wouldn’t you?
Wouldn’t anyone?
Well, not really.
Cap Poklemba, in my mind, would have embraced the moment. So would have Brandon McManus. So would have Don Bitterlich.
In a way, so would have Jim Cooper Sr.
Jim Cooper Jr.’s dad missed a big kick early in a game against West Virginia. A few minutes later, he kicked the game-winner.
Maybe Jim should talk to his dad about it. Maybe they already have.
Or maybe he should talk Cap or Don. There’s something about kickers. Both Cap and Don have remained loyal to the school after all these years and will be in Lot K on Saturday. I’m sure Brandon will, too. For years, another kicker, Wes Sornisky, ran the tailgate in the Jethro Lot. Ron Fiorvante, who kicked the game-winning field goal in a 34-31 win at Hawaii in 1979, will be there Saturday, as will former kicker and punter Jake Brownell, who made the trip with the team to the Eagle Bank Bowl in 1979.
There have been no more loyal group of ex-Temple players than the kickers and punters.
Click on the photo of Don Bitterlich kicking to read my story on him that appeared in a suburban newspaper.
I was at Rutgers’ Stadium the night Poklemba was being heckled by Rutgers’ fans. He turned around and said to them, “You better hope this doesn’t come down to a kick because I’M WINNING THIS GAME!” It came down to a kick and Poklemba nailed it and led the Owls over to the Big East Logo and they danced on the logo and sung T for Temple U in a pouring rain. That was a few months after Temple was kicked out of the Big East for being “non-competitive.” It was also the Owls’ fourth-straight win over “competitive” Rutgers. That was the loudest I’ve ever heard the team sing T for Temple U. They carried five Rutgers’ players off the field that night on stretchers. It was Temple’s version of the body bag game. Thank God the “targeting” penalty wasn’t in effect that night.
Before the game, I wrote the key number
for Temple was getting double-digit sacks.
I know that’s a lot to ask for,
but really that’s what needed to happen.
It didn’t. Temple got 1/10th the number
of sacks it needed to tilt the playing field.
Temple needed to buzz around Tommy Rees
like a bunch of crazed hornets.
When the Owls never got close to Rees,
I knew this gig was up
Someday, Jim Cooper Jr. will have that kind of attitude.
The good news for Jim Cooper Jr. is one day he will laugh about his first game and that he did not miss the kick that would have cost Temple, say, a 29-28 win.
Before the game, I wrote the key number for Temple was getting double-digit sacks. I know that’s a lot to ask for, but really that’s what needed to happen. It didn’t. Temple got 1/10th the number of sacks it needed to get to tilt the playing field. Temple needed to buzz around Tommy Rees like a bunch of crazed hornets. When the Owls never got close to Rees, I knew this gig was up. The lack of pass rush was the No. 1 reason why Temple lost. The placekicking game was about eighth on the list.
The interesting thing about Bitterlich was that he kicked for three years at Temple and NEVER missed a field goal within 40 yards DESPITE never having kicked a field goal UNTIL he got to Temple.
Click over logo for an excellent story in the New York Times on the game by an AP reporter. Note Kelly’s “dink and dunk” comment near the middle.
Don, who plays a mean accordion and the best rendition of Fight Temple Fight (which is kind of like T for Temple U, just a better beat and you can dance to it), will be hosting a tailgate party of his own in Lot K. It’s a private party, but I’m sure you can walk over and say hello.
Bitterlich not only kicked a 56-yarder for Temple, but he held the school’s single-season point-scoring record until 2009 (when Bernard Pierce and Brandon McManus scored 95 points).
At least Cooper The Younger won’t have to chase Bitterlich’s record for perfect games.
Even McManus missed key field goals (Bowling Green, 2011). He shook it off well.
I’m sure Jim will, too, and learn to embrace the moment with the strange mixture of determination and relaxation. I think the kids call it “being in a zone.”
He’ll just have to develop a meaner game face.
Temple Football Forever 