02.28.22
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Key to season: Taking care of business now

No pain, no gain at the E-O this winter.

Judging from social media, it looks like the Temple football team has lifted more weights in the last three or four weeks than in the prior full year under the coach who shall remain nameless.

There is a temptation that all these videos coming out of Temple football of the players lifting weights is pure public relations but put it this way: If the Owls were lifting weights like this and as many drills, wouldn’t the staff of the nameless guy want to put it out there?

Yes, just to give the appearance of showing fans he was earning his $2-million-per-year paycheck.

So he either didn’t care to promote what they were doing or they weren’t doing enough.

From the results on the field, the evidence is the latter.

Getting in some speed work.

The real eye-opener for me was the 34-14 loss at USF. The Owls were not only dominated on the scoreboard, they got pushed seemingly 5-7 yards down the field by a very bad team before they could even make contact. It’s almost like they had lifted no weights last winter.

Maybe they didn’t.

They lacked both strength and speed.

They had a cornerback pick up a loose ball and seemingly headed for the end zone only for that cornerback to be chased down from behind by a tight end.

A corner should never be caught by a tight end, especially when spotted 10 yards.

That game more than any demonstrated that big-time college football is a 365-day business and the Owls were not only out of business on game day but did not do enough work on the 300 days preceding the season to be competitive both strength and speed wise.

Now, under new coach Stan Drayton, they seem to be putting in the necessary work.

Now they have to show it. Winning the opener is nowhere near a given–the last time the Owls played Duke they lost, 56-27–but they need to show they can do what a mid-level Conference USA team (Charlotte) did and win there.

Then physically overwhelm UMass and Lafayette and not get embarrassed against Rutgers.

Then, to have a successful season, they had to win three of the last eight.

Tough?

Yes, but doable.

UCF, Cincy, revenge-minded Memphis (with quarterback Sean Henigan), Houston, Cincy and ECU seemed to have lapped them in the last couple of years. Maybe they can steal one of those games, but I doubt it.

They can beat Navy, Tulsa and USF if they put in the work now.

The fact that they seem to be doing it so far gives them a puncher’s chance. They will get a chance to throw a few punches (figuratively, of course) soon enough.

Friday: Spring practice keys

02.24.22
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We interrupt regular programming for … sadness

Thanks to the great Steve Conjar for this photo.

Sometimes one word so perfectly describes a person you think immediately of one guy when you hear it.

Every time I heard the word raconteur I thought of John Belli.

And I smiled. He was the best raconteur I ever knew or will ever know.

No one fit that definition more than John, at least among the real people I’ve met in my lifetime:

I thought of John this morning and I was incredibly sad when I heard he passed away.

This post today was supposed to be about something much less important so we interrupt this regular programming to talk about something much more important.

The wonderful gift God gave to all of us we call John Belli.

The last I saw him–the morning of the Boston College game–he seemed to be the healthiest of our regular tailgating group. He was in much better shape than almost all of us and his mind was as sharp as always.

For most of the last 20 years, I used to see and talk to John before and after every Temple football game.

That’s why I had to take a step back away from the computer and shake my head. Not ashamed to say a few tears rolled down both my cheeks and had to reach up with my shirt to wipe them away.

This was the last person of my age group I expected to leave us so soon. It does not compute but it goes to show that you never know and should never take any day for granted.

Someday, we will find out why he passed so early but that is so unimportant now.

He was not only a friend who shared the same love for Temple football I had but a frequent poster to this site. He was THE most frequent poster.

The ONLY thing we disagreed about was politics. Football, we were Sympatico. At some point, we both agreed to not mention politics.

John followed me when I talked to Geoff Collins about Nick Sharga at the season-ticket holders party and urged him to watch the film and how Sharga led the Owls to the championship. Collins agreed with me and swore on a stack of bibles to use him more than even Matt did but, in reality, he made Sharga disappear the next season. Probably the difference between 7-6 and 10-3 but that’s on Collins and not me and John.

In the first two years of the Matt Rhule regime, we were both frequent critics of Matt (sorry, Matt) but always thought that Rhule could be a good coach if he ditched the spread and went to a fullback-oriented, play-action offense.

Low and behold, Matt did exactly that in Year Three–using a run game established by the blocking of Nick Sharga and the running of Jahad Thomas and Ryquell Armstrong to set up a dynamic play-action downfield passing game behind Temple all-time leading quarterback P.J. Walker.

Since Matt told me personally on the day he was hired the only way he followed Temple football the year he was at the Giants was by reading Temple Football Forever, I somehow feel Matt got the message then, too.

“Mike, Matt owes us $7.4 million bucks,” John said.

He was only slightly exaggerating because, without Sharga, Rhule doesn’t get the Baylor job.

After Temple beat Penn State, Belli whispered in Rhule’s ear: “Hey, Matt, see what the fullback can do for you?” Matt nodded and laughed.

Then Rhule leaned over and kissed 90-year-old Wayne Hardin on the cheek and gave him the game ball, telling him, “Coach this is for all the times you came so close to doing what we did today.”

John played for coach Hardin at Temple so we had come full circle.

We had a party in Lot K that night. When the cops came around and tried to kick us out at 9–almost four hours after the game ended–a police captain came by on his motorcycle and said to his underlings: “Let them be. They waited 74 years for this.”

John never got to 74, like most of us do, and that means a lot of great stories only he can tell in the manner only he can tell them will never be heard again.

Those of us who heard his stories and the wonderful way he communicated them will be sad from this day forward. The tailgates will never be the same without him.

Monday: What we had planned for today

02.21.22
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Now we’ll find out how bad Carey really was…

As the losses piled up and the exorbitant margins added to the pain of losing, one truth was more apparent last year than even the year before.

Rod Carey is a really bad coach.

At least he was for Temple. How he went 52-30 at NIU is a question for another day.

The answer to how bad could come in about seven months when the Owls are finishing up what could be a 3-1 September.

After that, it will be tough to find three wins on the schedule in the last eight because of the way the 2021 Owls got handled by most of the same teams.

Three wins in those eight will be hard but doable.

There are two keys to a successful season:

No. 1, the Owls have to do what Charlotte did last season: Open with a win at Duke.

No. 2, find three wins in the last eight games.

It should not be too much to ask Temple to do what a lower level CUSA team did. If Temple can’t do better than a team that allowed 56 points to Old Dominion, 38 points to Florida Atlantic, 45 points to Western Kentucky and 49 points to Marshall, maybe the Owls should get out of the football-playing business.

The team that gave all of those points away beat Duke.

Temple should be able to as well.

Then the Owls must take care of business in two of three next three games against overmatched foes like Lafayette and UMass.

Beating a Rutgers team that beat them, 61-14, might be a bridge too far but what the Owls do with the momentum of 3-1 behind them might be enough to get three wins in their next eight games.

That (6-6) would be a successful season, especially after 1-6 and 3-9.

Anything less?

That would probably raise serious questions about the future and would not meet even the minimal expectations of success.

The 3-9 probably was worse than the 1-6 because of how the Owls lost those nine games. They weren’t in any of them and probably shouldn’t have been because of the way they were pushed around. They had one historically bad strength coach. Now they have three new strength coaches and 12 months to lift weights and that should show on the field.

They always say the biggest game is your next one and, for this year’s Owls, that’s never been more true. It’s probably the difference between making a bowl or having a third-straight losing season.

If Carey is as bad as we think he was, six wins should be attainable.

Friday: Finding Those Three Wins

Monday: Benchmarks

02.18.22
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How did a DC become a better job than a HC?

Roughly nine years a couple of months ago, the defensive coordinator at Notre Dame took a head coaching job at an AAC school.

It wasn’t just any defensive coordinator. It was the one, Bob Diaco, voted as the Broyles Award Winner, the best assistant coach in the country.

For UCONN, it was a spectacular fail of a hire, hitting on a number of themes we warn about here on a regular basis (i.e., being an assistant is a totally different job from a head coach and being good at one is no guarantee of success at the other).

Classroom, community, competition, complex.

Those are the four C’s that helped Al Golden build Temple from a 20-consecutive loss team to a nationally respected program.

When Golden took the Temple job, the Owls were ranked dead last in the classroom and lost scholarships due to a poor APR. By the Eagle Bank Bowl, the Owls were ranked among the best in the classroom. Under Golden, the Owls were a regular part of the community, building bridges of trust with the neighbors. The competition factor was there for all to see as the Owls went from 1-11 to 5-7 to 9-3 and 8-4 in Golden’s final season.

As far as the complex, one of Al’s secretaries told me his last sentence on the day he left the E-O was: “God, I love this place.” He then turned around and walked out the door. Miami and the big money were even more of a lure than that love.

There was some talk about Golden, like Diaco, going from an assistant coach (this time in the NFL) to head coach at UConn. No one knows if UConn offered the job to Al but I would not be surprised if the Huskies did and he turned them down.

Notre Dame might not have been on the horizon then but it certainly makes sense now than any current G5 head coaching job.

That’s because the UConn head coaching job as presently constituted is now an inferior job to the Notre Dame DC and, if Golden didn’t see that, he wasn’t reading the current college football landscape right and he’s too smart for that.

Reason being that the deck of cards that were stacked against the G5 schools even back in 2013 are even more slanted today. G5 players routinely transfer to the P5 even if they have a modicum of success and that wasn’t even a thing in 2013.

Moreso, a G5 team probably will never make the CFB playoff after Cincinnati goes to the Big 12 because one of the leagues, the ACC, is dead set against playoff expansion.

Back in 2013, there was always some hope for the G5 to eventually join the big boy club but now it looks more and more impossible.

Marcus Freeman jumped from DC to perennially top 10 program HC at Notre Dame and that’s probably the path more coaches feel will be more realistic in the future than grabbing a HC job at a G5 and moving on up to the East side.

Golden was rumored as a head coaching candidate to replace Rod Carey at Temple but at least six of his former players told me he would not take it not because it was Temple but because “he loves being in the NFL.” A contrary view by a guy who coached with Al at Temple told me that Golden himself told him that he would take the Temple job if the Owls “recruited” him. My response to that guy, who currently works in the NFL, was that since Golden is in the school’s Hall of Fame that’s a courtesy Temple should have extended him. It probably never happened because the school’s new Texas AD was enamored with hiring a guy from the same school, much like LaSalle’s Bill Bradshaw hired a guy from his school (Fran Dunphy) and Indiana’s Pat Kraft hired a guy from his school (Rod Carey).

You would think those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it but there are always exceptions to every rule and, as a Temple fan, I hope the hiring of Drayton gives the Owls a .333 batting average in crony hires. Right now, it’s 0-for-2. You know what George W. Bush was getting at when he said “fool me twice” even if it escaped him at the moment.

Well, it turned out that the Owls a) probably did not “recruit” Golden and b) that Golden didn’t love the NFL so much he wouldn’t return to college for the right job.

For him, being an assistant at Notre Dame is a better job than HC at UConn and, probably, Temple.

Sadly, for his career trajectory, he is probably right.

That wouldn’t have been the case nine years ago and that’s another reason why college football has devolved and not evolved in that relatively short span of time.

Fans of teams like Temple should take no joy in that fact.

Monday: The Calendar

02.14.22
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Simulated pressure: Something we’ve never seen before

This is how simulated pressures are supposed to work.

In the last two Temple football coaching regimes, Temple went from promising Mayhem on defense to absolutely no pressure on the quarterback at all.

Now Temple fans will get to see something they’ve never seen before: Simulated pressures.

Meh.

To me, I’ve always felt that the best defense is putting the bad guy’s quarterback on his ass and, in the process, hopefully separating him from the football, and picking it up and running the other way for a score. Plus, the benefit of hitting the guy so much is putting his head on a swivel looking for pass rushers instead of open receivers.

That’s the kind of Temple TUFF most fans like to see.

D.J. Eliot is considered a master of simulated pressures.

That was what essentially was promised by former coach Geoff Collins, the self-anointed “Minister of Mayhem” who rarely delivered what he promised.

Collins was the victim of his own hiring process, though, grabbing a guy from Kennesaw State (Andrew Thacker) to run his defense. In fact, his own staff was peppered with FCS coaches who had a hard time adjusting to FBS life. Still, the few times we did see Mayhem, it was a beautiful thing. The Owls had a pair of pick 6s (Christian Braswell and Ty Mason) caused by pressure on the quarterback as well as a Quincy Roche-forced fumble that Karamo Diaboute picked up and took to the house.

Too few and far between.

This is the best example of “real” and not “simulated” pressure.

The guy who succeeded Collins, Rod Carey, made no promises on defense and delivered on that promise.

Now new head coach Stan Drayton is delivering the keys to his defense to a “simulated pressure” specialist in D.J. Eliot.

In terms of points and sacks, they haven’t delivered much in Eliot’s last three stops but he has a chance to draw up the X’s and O’s here in a way that have his linebackers and safeties getting to the quarterback faster than Matt Rhule’s defensive ends did and, if that happens, all will be forgiven.

Just remember that in the greatest Temple victory of maybe all time, the Owls put the bad guy’s quarterback down 10 times and six of those were credited to defensive linemen and only four to linebackers (Nate Smith and three for Tyler Matakevich). The only sack that came as a result of a “simulated pressure” was Smith’s on a two-man rush.

Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, which was proven that day.

Another kind of day starts with the opener at Duke and pardon at least one Temple fan for being skeptical at this point.

Friday: Which coaching job is better?

02.11.22
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The Case for the Defense: Keep hope alive

If this win doesn’t give you hope for the Temple defense, nothing will.

Sometimes reading through the bios of Temple coaches, both past and present, provides some useful clues for anyone trying to look into a crystal ball and predict the future.

Having had a course in sports information at Temple to get some insight into the guys I was going to be dealing with for the next several decades in sports journalism, I found out a big part of their job is to put lipstick on a pig.

Maybe D.J. Eliot gets his first career shutout at Duke. We can only hope.

There were two major defensive coaching hires made by Stan Drayton, one I liked and one I didn’t, and the guy I liked went off to the Denver Broncos on Wednesday, and the one I didn’t remains here.

Maybe the silver lining in this development is that the successful guy, co-DC Ola Adams, won’t have to butt heads in the coaching room with the unsuccessful guy, DC D.J. Eliot. Let’s put it this way: If Eliot went to Denver and Adams was elevated to sole DC, I might be more optimistic about the future.

That didn’t happen, though.

Now the show is all Eliot’s. Soon we will find out if it’s a long-running hit or a circus. Logic doesn’t look good but, as the above video indicates, at Temple there is always hope.

Hope doesn’t get me to a bowl game.

So to Eliot’s bio I went. Here are some highlights (my comments are in italics, the other is from Temple PR people):
 
Kansas: In 2020, true freshman cornerback Karon Prunty earned Freshmen All-America honors by 247Sports.com after having the most pass breakups of any true freshman in the country. Additionally, Kyron Johnson earned All-Big 12 Honorable Mention at outside linebacker, along with Prunty. Up front, redshirt freshman Marcus Harris totaled 7.5 tackles-for-loss, which marked the most by a Kansas freshman since 2012.

Err, nice but who did he shut out and how many points per game did he allow? Kansas lost every game that year and gave up 36.1 points per game. Ugh as in ugly.
 
Colorado: Eliot led the Buffaloes to one of the best defenses in the Pac 12. The Buffs ranked fourth in the conference in yards allowed per play (5.24), while tying for fourth with 29 sacks. Colorado also ranked third in opponent third-down conversion rate (36.36 percent) and fourth in red zone touchdowns allowed (51.6 percent).

Fourth in yards allowed and fourth in sacks and fourth red zone touchdowns allowed ain’t going to get it done in the AAC. Temple has got to get guys who were first in their conference, not fourth.
 
Kentucky: Eliot joined the Colorado staff from Kentucky, where he was the Wildcats’ defensive coordinator and linebackers coach for four seasons (2013-16). He helped coach UK to the 2016 TaxSlayer Bowl, the first postseason appearance for Kentucky since 2010. Eliot also helped Kentucky land the 22nd-ranked recruiting class in the nation, marking the first time the Wildcats assembled a Top 25 recruiting class.

In Kentucky’s best season under Eliot, the Wildcats were 7-6 but allowed 42 points to New Mexico State (3-9 that year), 38 points to Mississippi State (6-7), 21 points to Missouri (4-8) and 38 points to the only winning team he beat, Louisville (9-4).

 Those were his most recent stops.

Not exactly, in my mind, the stellar resume I would look for in a defensive coordinator. There’s a lot of “he developed this guy and he developed that guy” in his resume, but I could not find a single team he shut out during his tenure as a defensive coordinator anywhere. For comparison, former Florida and Temple DC Chuck Heater shut out Ball State and Bowling Green in consecutive weeks (not years) for the 2011 Owls.

To me, keeping the bad guys out of your end zone is a prerequisite for being a good defensive coordinator, not “developing guys.” Developing guys for someone else (like the NFL), doesn’t hold the same appeal for me as sacking the quarterback playing against Temple, getting turnovers for Temple and, most important, pitching a shutout against the team Temple is playing that day.

Hell, maybe Adams walked into a room at the E-O and had the same feelings before leaving for Denver. We might never know but now Adams joins Manny Diaz in having the two shortest tenures of any ex-Temple coach.

Maybe this will work out to Eliot’s advantage but hope will have to defeat logic.

It happened for Temple at least once before.

If the 1998 Temple Owls could prove the naysayers wrong in upsetting No. 10 Virginia Tech, maybe Eliot can, too.

Shutting out Duke would almost be as shocking as that win. Maybe more.

Monday: Pressures


 

02.07.22
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American Underdog: We’ve Come Full Circle

Saturday night usually is movie night for me so, being a Temple football fan, I scanned through the new offerings of Amazon Prime and found out I could purchase “American Underdog.”

It was the best $19.95 I’ve ever spent, not quite bringing me as much bang for the buck as the $125 I spent for a bus trip to the AAC championship game of 2016 (that included tickets) but close. Hell, a championship is worth a million, not a mere $125.

With the signing of Elijah Warner less than a week ago by new head coach Stan Drayton, this seemed like a pretty good time to revisit the story of his dad, 2017 NFL Hall of Famer Kurt Warner.

In the movie, it was funny to hear coaches at several levels call Kurt “Pop” referring to one of the greatest coaches of all time who made two schools (Temple and Stanford) famous for football back in the day. We’ve come full circle now that his kid has “fallen in love” with Temple, whose President played football at Stanford. His winning Super Bowl coach with the Rams was Dick Vermeil, a West Coast guy who fell in love with Philadelphia and still lives a figurative stone’s throw away from Temple.

Vermeil believed in Kurt, a true American Underdog who was bagging groceries at the Iowa equivalent of “The Ac-a-Me” (or Shop-Rite) before the Rams signed him.

Kurt, Elijah and Brenda on signing day.

Evidently, others believe with me. The movie gets a solid 75 percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, beating by almost 20 points my second favorite movie of this calendar year “Don’t Look Up” which has quite a few more A-list stars. The 98 percent rating from viewers is off the charts.

It’s easy to see why.

American Underdog was extremely well done and should resonate well here, not just because of the Temple/Warner/Vermeil/Philadelphia angle.

There are so many wired storylines in this family, Philadelphia, and Temple to shut down a Texas power grid.

Something tells me this “Warner Era” at Temple is going to work out. Elijah, like Kurt, experienced his share of rejection along the way, only to be told by other schools he was “their guy” one day who then called that they signed another guy the next day. Drayton said he liked Elijah because he had that same “chip on his shoulder” his dad did after getting rebuffed by the Packers only to prove himself in the Arena Football League and again with the Rams.

In that case, Drayton might be Temple’s Dick Vermeil.

As a big recent fan of thoroughbred horse racing, I’ve long been a believer in bloodlines of champions. The best horse in the business right now is named Flightline, who is the product of the great Tapit. Temple is the one school that has success with bloodlines. Temple NG Joe Klecko’s son, Dan, was Big East defensive MVP at Temple. Jim Bright, a 1950 fullback with the Owls, sired a 1979 Garden State bowl MVP, Mark Bright, also a fullback. Zach Dixon, a terrific 1,000-yard running back with the 1978 Owls, sired future NFL defensive end Raheem Brock.

Now we get to adopt a Northern Iowa son, just like Kurt adopted Brenda’s son, Zach, in the movie. (If the “I pick you” line doesn’t get you in the feels, you don’t have tear ducts.)

Unless the son of John Elway, Dan Marino or even Tom Brady walk through the E-O door, Temple is going to do no better from a gene pool standpoint than Warner.

Not many schools are.

I’ve never seen his mom throw a football but I’ve seen his dad chuck it several thousand times.

If Elijah wings it the way his dad does and both Tapit and Flightline run it, the Owls should be in pretty good shape.

Somewhere up there, the real Pop Warner is looking down and smiling.

Friday: The Case For the Defense

02.04.22
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Temple Football: It just feels different

The number one takeaway from Wednesday around the world will be that Temple signed about a dozen fewer football players than anyone else in the American Athletic Conference, most of them with fewer stars than the top dozen or so signees from the other teams.

That’s important but no less important is the vibe very successful ex-Owls who have been to the Edberg Olson facility since Stan Drayton took over have experienced.

Almost to a man everyone else has said: “It just feels different.”

Different, meaning good.

Stan Drayton’s hastily put together first class might not be rated high but has a couple of starters

Personality matters and the Owls went from a dead fish personality (Rod Carey) to a dynamo (Stan Drayton).

Many of us (raising my hand here) believe both Al Golden and Fran Brown (Temple guys) would have the same dynamic personality of (Texas guy) Stan Drayton but, now, with the decision already made, I will take my dynamos wherever I can get them. More and more, Drayton is becoming a Temple guy and that’s not an easy thing to do.

Anyone who treats Paul Palmer, Dave Gerson and Nadia Harvin with this much respect is OK in my book.

If you really believe only one person can return Temple to the kind of glory it had only in 2018 and 2019, then you are a special kind of naive. It wasn’t that long ago and there’s nowhere near the work now that needs to be done that, say, Golden did in 2005.

I’ve always felt that there are dozens of guys who could perform CPR on Temple now and my fellow ex-Owls who have visited the E-O have given Drayton their stamp of approval.

Since I haven’t been in the building (but most likely will on Cherry and White Day), I have to take their word for it.

Now the bigger question becomes does signing a dozen or so supbar (compared to the rest of the league) players put Temple in a position to win immediately?

That answer appears to be no.

In the AAC, the Jimmies and Joes will always beat the X’s and O’s.

There are two starters in this class, one I can identify (running back Darvon Hubbard) and that will come out of nowhere, maybe in the linebacker group. After 1-6 and 3-9, that’s not enough but it’s a starting point.

Drayton gets major points in my mind for acknowledging the need to sign a “scholarship quarterback” sometime after spring if “no one here has demonstrated the ability to handle the job.”

My advice is meaningless but I think Drayton should not wait until spring. Incumbent Dwan Mathis hasn’t proven to be good enough and newcomer Elijah Warner probably is a year away. Mathis needs competition at least as good and probably better if the Owls want to double their 2021 win total and that should be the minimum goal. Waiting until after spring means one of those three guys will already have committed elsewhere. Temple can’t afford to gamble.

If the Owls want more adversity, they should probably settle with Mathis and Warner leading the quarterback room.

Drayton said he wants adversity but if adversity means 3-9 again, that’s probably the kind of adversity he doesn’t want nor the kind of adversity fans are expecting.

There are at least three quarterbacks right now still in the portal who are better than anyone Temple has now and Drayton should probably pull the trigger before one of them gets away. Waiting until spring is definitely not needed if Drayton has, as he noted, watched the film. Stan, please rewind to the 3d and 17 play in the Cincy game and watch was Mathis did. After seeing that, please tell me he doesn’t need competition.

No matter how different things feel now, another 3-9 would be the kind of flashback no Temple fan or coach ever wants to experience again and raise questions about the future that would counter any current optimism.

Monday: American Underdog

01.31.22
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Temple football: Dog hunting season

Hopefully, Drayton does turn out to be a home run for Temple.

That old saying a “hungry dog hunts best” certainly could apply to new head Temple football coach Stan Drayton.

The outsiders, objective people supposedly in the know about college football, rated the Temple coaching hire pretty low on the totem pole and maybe Drayton will use that disrespect and work that much harder to prove the doubters wrong.

What he needs now is players and this is the week to get them.

Heaven knows the Owls need some dogs, the fighting kind and not the laying down kind.

The national sports website Yardbarkers rated the Temple hiring 25th between Sonny Cumbie (Louisiana Tech) and Jon Sumrall (Troy).

Maybe Drayton is hungry enough to prove the doubters wrong. Or guys like Cumbie and Sumrall will prove to be hungrier.

Whatever, the way college football works these days, we could know as soon as December because the transfer portal has proven to turn some mediocre teams to winning ones in a year. For instance, Western Kentucky recruited a portal quarterback out of Houston Baptist, Bailey Zappe, and his 61 touchdown passes helped turn the Hilltoppers from 5-7 to 8-5 in a few months.

Co-DC Ola Adams teased some good news with this Sunday tweet.

Can Temple go from 3-9 to 8-5?

Probably not, but certainly a bowl is within reach in an era where there are more good players in the portal than available scholarships across the 130 FBS programs. It’s a buyer’s market, not a seller’s, and the teams that shop best off the field produce best on it. Recently, defensive back George Reid left the Owls and declared for the portal. Nice player, but there are upgrades all over the place out there and one of Drayton’s jobs is to find one for Reid, and another for record-breaking wide receiver Jadan Blue, two of the few who left.

Already, Drayton got a South Carolina cornerback to commit and a Florida linebacker visited this weekend and Kurt Warner’s son, Elijah, “fell in love with the place” (Temple) and committed. While Warner is only 5-foot-11, the more important numbers associated with him are 26 (touchdowns) and eight (interceptions). That’s a more than acceptable ratio when you consider the Owls’ starting quarterback, Dwan Mathis, had 20 touchdown passes to 11 interceptions in his last full high school year. G5 football proved much tougher as Mathis had only nine touchdown passes against six interceptions and that was nowhere near good enough for either Dwan or Temple.

In fact, only two other recent Temple recruits had more touchdown passes as a high school senior than Warner did and those were Anthony Russo (Archbishop Wood, 2015) and Adam DiMichele (Sto-Rox, 2004), both with 35 each. Even the great P.J. Walker (Elizabeth, N.J) had only 24 touchdown passes his senior year. If Warner produces at Temple like Russo, Walker and DiMichele did, I will sign for that now. It’s not the only metric but consider this: Vaughn Charlton (Avon Grove) and Chester Stewart (DeMatha) had nine and 17 touchdown passes, respectively, their senior years and they were at Temple what their record said they were in high school.

Subpar would be a kind word.

Still, it’s hard to figure that Warner, right now, is anything more than a replacement for Justin Lynch, who transferred to Northern Illinois. Maybe a couple of more years down the road he can be a starter at Temple.

One immediate starter probably will be at running back, where the Owls upgraded their room with the addition of Texas A&M portal transfer Darvon Hubbard.

Definitely fits the profile of a fighting dog, not a passive one.

The Owls need a few more who fit the description. By Wednesday, we will know how hungry Drayton turned out to be.

Friday: Reaction to Signing Season

01.28.22
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Why the old signing day is important to Temple

Temple needed to sign about 14 Darvon Hubbards for this class to make an immediate impact.

Two things you will never hear a college football coach say:

  1. “We’ve got no chance this season.”

2. “Today is signing day. We did a lousy job getting players.”

The first Wednesday in February was the “old” signing day. It’s the most important day now. It hasn’t been that important to Temple football since the 2007 season when Al Golden took great pride in the fact that one of the two major online scouting services ranked the Temple recruiting class No. 1 in the Mid-American Conference (MAC).

Many of those players had key roles for the 2009 team that played in the Eagle Bank Bowl. Arguably, they were even better in 2010 season when they went 8-4 and beat the G5’s only representative in the top six bowls, UCONN. (That Temple team didn’t go to a bowl but should have. On the day after Golden had to break the bad news to the Owls, he hightailed it out to Miami.)

Since then, Temple has not had a No. 1 recruiting class in any league it has been a participant.

Still, the Owls were able to not only win one championship (2016) but finish second in another season (2015).

Those were outliers, though, and the “inlier” of every recruiting year is that the haves will win championships and the haves will not. Since Temple beat Cincinnati in the 2018 season, the Bearcats have had No. 1-ranked recruiting classes in the AAC and Temple has been in the middle of the pack or worse.

The results?

Despite coaching schemes that were better suited to NIU personnel than Temple’s, Rod Carey was able to cobble together whatever talent Geoff Collins had in that 2019 season and win eight games. On the field, recruiting has pretty much predicted the wins and losses.

It does almost every year in every league.

This year, despite hiring a “charismatic” head coach, the Owls have failed to move up from their penultimate ranking in the league’s recruiting. To expect a recruiting class at the bottom of the league now to finish in the top of taking care of business on the field two or three years from now takes an overly active imagination.

Before the Hubbard signing, Temple’s recruiting class was ranked ahead of only Navy in the AAC. I don’t think that has moved the needle upward.

Logically, that cannot continue for Temple to expect success in the future.

Stan Drayton could prove to be a great recruiter in the future but did not deliver a great first class. Other than Kurt Warner’s son, Elijah, or a portal running back from Texas A&M, Darvon Hubbard, there isn’t a significant IMMEDIATE impact player in this group.

Still, the Hubbard transfer represents more of what Temple needs right now. Power 5 players with big upside who haven’t been able to get on the field but could help the Owls. Temple had about five running backs who were decent last year but could not outrun a single AAC secondary for a long score. That was a huge red flag. Temple needs someone who is a threat to take it to the house on every single handoff, just like Paul Palmer, Bernard Pierce and Jahad Thomas was back in their days.

Hubbard, who has a better resume than any of the holdovers, just might be and Warner, because he’s got the same bloodlines as his dad, should be an immediate upgrade over the departed Justin Lynch. Lord knows Dwan Mathis who was good in only one game–but NOT GOOD ENOUGH in the others–needs competition next season. He needs to fear that there is someone behind him good enough to replace him. Warner may or may not be that guy but there are plenty of players still left in the portal who are and Temple should be open to getting them as well.

When you lose the last six games of the season by seemingly (although not actually) 100-0 each Saturday, that dictates the talent you have in the Edberg Olson Hall meeting room needs a significant upgrade.

Have we seen it with the players this new staff has brought in?

Err, no.

When Wednesday rolls around, Drayton will say all the right things about being pleased with his first recruiting class but unless he brings in more guys like Warner and Hubbard, history will tell the story. The Owls need run-stoppers and pass rushers, particularly. They can get by with the corners, safeties, and linebackers they have right now but the defensive front seven needs to be stronger, both literally and figuratively, and that can’t be improved just in the weight room.

Temple needs to get to where it was recruiting at the top of the league it competes in and it hasn’t been there in a decade and a half. It needs 14 Hubbards at all positions, not just one at running back.

There’s a reason why Alabama or Georgia win the recruiting rankings every year and four years later one of them win the natty. Temple needs only to win the AAC recruiting rankings. It won’t this season but that better be the standard next. It has not been met this year due to the extenuating circumstance of waiting too long to fire the last guy (who should have been outta here after the USF debacle and what we wrote right after that game in this space).

Next year, Temple’s class should be at the top of the league.

The Temple administration or fans should demand no less.

Monday: Great Expectations.