There’s the real world and there’s Temple
The real world coaching hot seat. You can take Matt Rhule off that list.
In the real world, an employee who shows gross incompetence gets a period of about two months, not a year or years to evaluate his performance.
It’s called a probationary period.
Matt Rhule’s probationary period has come and gone and, in the long and storied history Temple football employees, he deserves a longer look.
In the real world, the boss calls Rhule in after a performance like Saturday night (and a lot of Saturday days before that) and says, “Matt, you’re a good guy, but you are not cut out for this job. The guy who hired you wasn’t my guy. I now have my own guy as athletic director I want to have my own guy as head football coach. After watching Pete Lembo beat Indiana with Ball State talent every year, I decided he’s my guy. I want to be able to beat Penn State with Temple talent next year and I think he’s better suited to do that than you are. That’s why I’m bringing in Pete Lembo from Muncie, Ind. to replace you at the end of the season. You can coach the final game. Good luck, Matt. Here’s your severance check. No hard feelings. I think Kutztown might have an opening after next season. I’ll give you a good reference.”
That’s what the real world does. That’s what USC did to Lane Kiffin (a winning coach this season). That’s what UConn did to Paul Pasqualoni. That’s what evenly lowly Eastern Michigan did to Ron English.
There’s the real world and there’s Temple.
At Temple, they allowed a most incompetent coach, Bobby Wallace, hang around for eight years to nearly destroy a program.
In one of the comments in the story below, a poster named Dave says he “would not be shocked” to see Rhule fired by 10 a.m. Monday morning.
I would.
That’s just not the way Temple has operated for the past 30 years. Maybe the new guys, Neil Theobald and Kevin Clark, are much more connected to the real world of major intercollegiate athletics than the Ann Weaver Harts and the David Adamanys were.
I’m OK with how Temple does business in this way. You need to give a guy five years, not one or two.
Still, I get that he wants to be the anti-Daz with all this passing, but did the thought EVER occur to him that Zaire Williams could have ripped of a few second-half runs like that spectacular touchdown run he had in the first half if given the chance? Tunnel-vision, that’s what it is. You do not abandon the run game with a 21-0 lead, you embrace the run game.
Addazio had virtually the same talent against a better UConn team last year and shut the Huskies out in the second half. Rhule allowed a worse version of the Huskies to score 28 points in the second half. With the same talent, the only variable in this lab experiment is coaching.
How do you play Central Florida so well and lose to a team Central Florida beat, 63-17? Mind-boggling. How do you lose to arguably the worst team in the history of the FBS in Idaho (double-mind boggling)? How do you lose to a Fordham team that lost to Lafayette (triple-mind-boggling)?
In this high-stakes’ game of major college intercollegiate athletics, three strikes like that usually mean you are out. Temple doesn’t play that game of hardball and we are OK with that here and now. Five years from now, maybe not but Matt deserves a longer look.
Halftime Adjustments?
| Game | First Half Points | Second Half Points |
| Notre Dame | 6 | 0 |
| Houston | 13 | 0 |
| Cincinnati | 20 | 0 |
| UConn | 21 | 0 |
Temple is the only team in America with these dubious distinctions: Giving two ESPN Bottom 10 teams their only win of the season and being the only team shut out in the second half of four games. Either the coaches of four other teams are coming up with a lot of adjustments or the coach of one team isn’t. Or both.
A Most Special Group of Seniors
My favorite internet photo of the Eagle Bank Bowl because it shows only about 1/10th of the Temple fans who were there. Twenty thousand Temple fans traveling to D.C. for a bowl game is something I will always remember.
While paging through my copy of the Eagle Bank Bowl program from the 2009 game, I was stunned to see many of the current football players for Temple on that roster.
A college career these days usually is four years and most of those players would have graduated by now but, in my mind, 2009 represented the rebirth of Temple football from what was essentially a 30-year slumber and a lot of those guys were there. Chris Coyer was throwing the ball to Ryan Alderman every day in practice and Coyer was named the Scout Team MVP the week before Vaughn Charlton started against UCLA in the Eagle Bank Bowl.
The best helmet this year. I hope they keep it.
Who knows would have happened had Coyer started the bowl game, but I think he might have made just enough plays with his arm and feet to have won it in the second half after Bernard Pierce went down in the first half. Al Golden was 100 percent right in preserving Coyer’s redshirt at the expense of a loss to UCLA in a bowl game but, in retrospect, he was probably a lot more talented than Charlton and Stewart even then. I do know for metaphysical certainty that had Joe Paterno granted Adam DiMichele his release he would have had an extra year of eligibility and Temple would have probably won the MAC that year and maybe have had the same kind of year Northern Illinois is having this season.
Either way, as a Temple fan in D.C., freezing your ass off watching a football game never felt so good, at least for the first half.
Kamal Johnson, a defensive tackle, had a sack in the Eagle Bank Bowl and another in the New Mexico Bowl and is the only Temple player I’ve ever known to have sacks while playing for the Owls in two bowl games.
I hope he’s not the last.
Click on the photo for five upsets this weekend.
One of the current seniors, Sean Boyle, spent much of the 2008 year (no, that’s not a typo) centering the ball to Adam DiMichele. Imagine that? Boyle played on an offensive line in front of DiMichele, Charlton, Coyer, Chester Stewart, Clinton Granger, Mike Gerardi, Connor Reilly and as a teammate to P.J. Walker. I once said “Hi, Pat” to Sean and he shot back, “Mike, I’m Sean.” Could not tell the difference between Sean and his twin brother Pat. Sorry, Sean. I will always remember both guys as great Owls.
I will go to my grave thinking that Chris Coyer was grossly underutilized by an offensive coordinator, Marcus Satterfield, who never really understood how his versatility could have created so many more scoring opportunities in the passing and running game.
While Ryan Alderman was not my choice to return punts this year (I would have picked the redshirted Khalif Herbin), I walked up to him and thanked him after an early game for not fair catching. “We need to make that an offensive play,” I told Ryan. (He’ll probably get off a good return tomorrow night. That’s my prediction.)
Juice Granger could have quit when they moved him from quarterback but he didn’t and caught a touchdown pass in the Cincinnati game. That was a great moment in a year devoid of great moments. Whatever you think about Juice, just remember, he was the quarterback who “managed” the team to 63 points in a win at Army last year and would have “managed” the team to more than 50 points against Fordham if the team adopted a similar game plan this season. The team was getting six yards a pop (5.8, exactly) against Fordham on the run in the first quarter but then inexplicably stopped running.
I talked to Cody Booth’s dad before the Houston game and lamented they haven’t thrown the tackle eligible pass to him. They still haven’t. Kid has the best hands on the team and he plays tackle, they should throw at least one tackle eligible pass in his direction. In the NFL, this is allowed on any play in which a lineman declares to the ref to be eligible. In college, it’s allowed only on fourth down FG attempts, which would be a perfect fake from a FG formation for Temple. In fact, I have serious doubts that this coaching staff even knows HOW to draw up a tackle eligible play on the blackboard. In the diagram below, the right tackle (in this case) would be eligible:
Cody Booth would be eligible if he lined up on the far right as a RT in this formation.
Paul Layton is the Montel Harris of punting. He will go down in my mind as one of the three greatest punters in Temple history, right up there with Brandon McManus and Casey Murphy. He understands the art and just doesn’t boom for the sake of booming. Temple’s downed more kicks inside the 10 this year than I remember in a long time. I think his game translates well to the next level.
In many ways, this is my favorite group of seniors because they were all around when it changed from losing to winning.
Things did not turn out the way I expected for them this year because of dumb coaching last year (running the ball 75.9 percent of the time on both first and second down, setting up third-down disaster scenarios) and even dumber coaching this year: No quarterback sneak robbed the team of a win at Rutgers, using a punter to attempt a 25-yard FG against Houston when a perfectly good backup kicker (Nick Visco) was available cost them a 16-15 lead with less than 2 minutes left in that one. Visco later went 7 for 7 in from the same distance in extra points at SMU. That cost the team two wins right there. Not pounding the ball against terrible run defenses (Fordham and Idaho) cost the team two more wins. Matt Rhule spent this year learning on the job and these seniors were the Guinea Pigs. My stance all season was Rhule should have learned on the job at place like Kutztown, not a place like Temple. At the Temple level, this is a too big a business to hire a CEO who requires on-the-job training. The Temple community learned that lesson the hard way with the bottom line being 1-9 and there are simply no excuses for 1-9.
So it is with great sadness that we as Temple fans say goodbye to these players tomorrow night (7 p.m., ESPN3) in their final home game at Lincoln Financial Field. UConn is the opponent.
They deserved a lot better.
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| Some of these guys I had the pleasure to meet and they are great people. |
Howard Smith’s (USA Today) Photo Essay
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.”
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.
Bortles’ clutch play robs P.J. of his Day
Click on the photo for game coverage. Analysis from the Temple perspective tomorrow after a 24-hour cooling off period.
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 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:
5 College Football Upsets This Week
There are a lot of good head coaches who have perfected their craft in the MAC and one of the best-ever is Pete Lembo of Ball State, a former head coach at Lehigh. Click on photo for 5 upsets this week.
UCF’s O’Leary is one of the best
George O’Leary’s time was short at ND.
George O’Leary was the best coach in Notre Dame history who lasted only five days on the job. We’ll never know if he would have been the best who lasted 500 days or 5,000 days, but nothing in his coaching history suggests he would not have been.
When the Irish hired O’Leary, then 55, in December of 2001, I thought they were getting a terrific coach.
I still do.
Heck, if he had not fudged his resume, he might still be there. He’s THAT good of a coach.
Notre Dame had to fire him (technically, he resigned), because that’s what they did in those days to people who got jobs off fake resumes.
To me, though, the guy did not commit a crime. He didn’t stick up a bank, kill or molest someone. Embellishing his resume did not change the fact that he was an accomplished head coach at Georgia Tech and probably would have been an accomplished head coach at Notre Dame.
O’Leary’s downfall came when he said he played at UNH but no one there could remember him.
We’ll never know that, but those Temple fans not sickened to the pit of their stomachs by seeing the numbers 1-8 next to the word Temple in the papers will see at least one well-coached team when the Black Knights come to Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday at noon. Other Temple fans have already checked out.
Can’t blame them. They were hoping for better than the 4-7 Daz gave them last year. Those hopes were dashed a long time ago, buried under the rubble of disgraceful losses to Fordham and Idaho.
O’Leary dots the I’s and crosses the T’s on every game plan. If he’s beaten, it’s because the talent on the other side of the ball is better. He’s not afraid to use the quarterback sneak on fourth-and-inches. He’s probably afraid NOT to, it’s such a high-percentage call. O’Leary watches the film, picks out an opponents’ weakness, and attacks that weakness. If O’Leary was playing, say, a FCS team with a 247-pound-average defensive line, he would probably use his 305-pound-average OL to pound that FCS team into submission via the run game. If O’Leary was playing the 125th-ranked rushing defense in the FBS, dome or no dome, he probably would commit a game plan heavily laden in all kinds of running plays and probably save the eleven overthrown 50-yard bombs for another day.
That’s the kind of advantage a seasoned head coach gives the team he’s coaching and the school he works for.
If you get the feeling that Temple coaches NEVER watch the film of opponents or check their tendencies, this season has provided enough evidence to convict on all counts.
After Al Golden left Temple, I thought the Owls should go after someone who fit the O’Leary profile: A proven success as a head coach, a guy on the rise, not a recycled has-been like Dennis Franchione or Larry Coker.
Golden was perfect for his time because, at THAT time, Temple needed a young guy with the boundless energy to roll up his sleeves and build a program brick by brick.
After Al left, the foundation was already solid.
It did not need to be taken down and rebuilt again and that’s why someone who fit the O’Leary profile, say a MAC head coach who did nothing but win, was just the right person who could take Temple to the next level. For Temple, a perfectly nice brick house has been knocked down for no good reason.
Fortunately for fans in Orlando, O’Leary became available to UCF and he’s done nothing but win down there.
Notre Dame’s loss is Central Florida’s gain and ask any of their fans who make the trip North if they care one wit whether or not he fudged his resume.
All that matters to them is winning. Temple’s administration and fans should demand no less.
TU football should strive for what TU hoops, soccer have done
This is the 1953 Temple men’s soccer team which finished unbeaten and untied and No. 1 in the nation. The untied part is pretty amazing when you consider that 0-0 is the most common score in that sport and there was no overtime back then.
Imagine, if you will, Matt Rhule going through his next six seasons at Temple like this:
Winning four league championships, making bowl games six straight years and winning two of them. Then, in an informal poll of other FBS coaches, Rhule is named the most underrated coach in the country.
Ryan Alderman up for Wueffel Award. Could not happen to a nicer guy. Hope he wins it. Click on photo for details.
Would you sign for that, without the hope of any higher ceiling?
Give me the papers right now. I’ve got the pen ready.
Well, the Temple men’s basketball season opens today and that’s just what Fran Dunphy has done. I’ve never understood the criticism of Fran because he’s done for basketball what I’ve always wanted for football. Substitute NCAA appearances for bowl games and there you have it. He was also named the most underrated coach in the country in a poll of his peers last year.
Temple fans freezing their arses off in the parking lot at JFK.
After a first year of adjusting to Temple from a Hall of Fame career as a Penn head coach, Dunphy won three straight post-season tournament A-10 playoff titles and followed that up with a regular-season A10 League championship the next.
Let’s hope these crater-sized potholes in the road for Matt Rhule this year are part of the adjustment process.
Fran Dunphy is 2-4 in NCAA tournament games with the Owls, but would you consider a 2-4 bowl record by Rhule a success? I know I would because, in football like basketball, getting there is the hardest part.
Now consider what coach Dave MacWilliams has done with this current edition of the men’s soccer team. Picked to finish last in the American Athletic Conference, the Owls finished first during the regular season. Anything after this is gravy. If Rhule does the same thing with the football team, which no doubt will be picked to finish last or near-last next year, he will be doing the same kind of job MacWilliams has done this season.
MacWilliams and Dunphy are two coaches Temple fans do not have to make excuses for and two standards of excellence that Temple should strive for in any sport.
It’s not much to ask for football, either.
Temple Football Forever 