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.”

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:

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.

“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.

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.