01.15.21
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You want rigged? Try college football

Hooter lifting the National Championship trophy, which was much more likely in 1979 than it is now.

For the first time in a long while, I checked out after halftime of college football’s national championship game on Monday.

I saw what I needed to see.

Some people have talked about rigged elections over the last month or so, but really–if you want rigged–looked no further than the state of college football today.

Alabama, as most of us figured out prior to the season, won the national championship. The Tide’s receiver is all world. Nick Saban is a great coach and, oh yes, Alabama is one of the few teams that uses a fullback (really a linebacker brought in for goal-line situations).

Seeing the same teams in the title game pretty much every year is just another in a long line of reasons why college football has become boring.

The national recruiting rankings come out every signing day and they mirror what happens four years later. All five star recruits go to places like Clemson, Ohio State and Alabama and, almost every year, the same teams are in the four-team playoff.

So 2025’s National Title has already been decided and the winner is (envelope please), Alabama. What a shock because the Tide’s 2021 recruiting class has been ranked No. 1.

The rich get richer while the poor press their noses against Mansion windows.

Mark Bright accepting his MVP trophy for a helluva ballclub in 1979.

What happened? There used to be a whole lot of different teams under consideration for the national title. Syracuse won it as recently as 1959. Hell, if Temple found 16 more points in the 1979 season, it would have finished unbeaten and probably would have played Alabama in the Sugar Bowl for all the marbles.

Those days are over, sadly.

Cincinnati gave Georgia a helluva game and probably should have won it except for some Andy Reid-level poor clock management in the final 2:45 of the game.

To me, Cincy proved it belonged in a four-team playoff–certainly more than Notre Dame did.

The gears of college football, though, are controlled by the Power 5 and they will never let a Group of Five team into the party.

That’s why the party should be more inclusive.

Teams like UCF (2017), Temple (2016) and Cincy (2020) deserved to be invited to the dance but will never be under the current system. If this were a graduating class of 129 in a high school, say, the 64 most popular kids would do everything in their power to keep the other kids from enjoying the same graduation.

That’s got to change.

How will it?

Ostensibly, the “bottom” 65 universities should also have strong presidents representing them and arguing a case for fairness to the governing body, the NCAA,

If some of those 65 can get even a handful of the other 64 to agree with them, then the rules should be modified to include things like an eight-team playoff, a scholarship limit of 75 (not the current 85) to make this entire boring offseason a little more interesting.

Anything less and you risk losing half of your fans and that’s not a business model even the most greedy among us should ever consider.

Until then, my interest in the so-called Final Four will continue to wane. I don’t think I’m the only one.

Monday: The projected Temple 22

01.11.21
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Temple football: The Known and Unknown

Whatever happens in the 2021 football season, we already know something about it.

The paradigm is about to shift for Temple football and that’s out of necessity: From the Known to the Unknown.

Lancine Turay

When John Chaney was the legendary Hall of Fame coach of the basketball, he liked to talk about the known and the unknown. He tailored his game plans to the known.

They were pretty simple. On defense, he shifted his famed 2-3 matchup zone to overplay the bad guy’s best one or two players and took his chances on lesser talented players to hurt him.

On offense, I sat behind him in a game where Temple’s three best players were Rick Brunson, Eddie Jones and Aaron McKie. He called time out and yelled at the other guys on the team when they were missing shots: “From now on, I only want Brunson, Eddie and McKie to shoot the ball. Everybody else pass.”

There were a few expletives deleted from that conversation, but you get the idea.

If Chaney lost, he lost knowing that he had what for him was a good plan.

Now, by necessity, Temple head coach Rod Carey will have to develop his own plan.

Getting four-star players in from Power 5 schools might work for Temple football now but, what is known, that approach has not worked so far. In fairness, it’s never been tried at 10th and Diamond before.

The Temple football paradigm pretty much for the last decade has been to recruit as many two- and three-star players and coach them up into five stars. Haason Reddick, Tyler Matakevich, Muhammed Wilkerson and Matt Hennessey pretty much fit that profile because by the time they left, were coached up into five stars. Matakevich was the consensus national defensive player of the year in 2015 and Wilkerson and Reddick were first-round NFL picks. Hennessey was a second-rounder but you rarely find centers drafted into the first round.

North Carolina sent Temple 2 players last week.

The formula worked. Prior to the Memphis game of the 2020 season, Temple had more regular-season AAC wins than any team of the league’s championship era. After that loss, Memphis caught up to Temple (31-11).

It’s been downhill ever since.

Portal departures necessitated the paradigm shift from the known to unknown.

The marquee get of 2021 so is Florida running back transfer Iverson Clement, who was a four-star out of Rancocas Valley. They already added Illinois transfer Ra’Von Bonner at that position in December to go along with quarterback Duece Mathis. If Clement and Mathis start, it will be the first time in Temple history that the Owls will start two four-stars in the offensive backfield. It’s worth noting that it will mean something only if they play like four stars. Let’s see. Penn State quarterback transfer Kevin Newsome was the last four-star to come to Temple. He never saw the field.

The tradeoff is simply this: Temple is bringing in more four-star talent than ever before with the recent additions of two defensive linemen from North Carolina (Xach Gill, a 6-5, 290-pound tackle and Lancine Turay, who is 6-6, 280). Turay is a little more versatile since he can play inside or outside and you’ve got to like a 6-6 pass rusher with a decent vertical leap.

In my gameday program of the Dec. 27, 2019 Military Bowl, Gill was listed as senior Jason Strowbridge’s backup in the 55-13 win over Temple. He had one solo tackle to Strowbridge’s three but both underperformed the best name on that team, Storm Duck, who had five tackles, four solos and two for losses.

It appears that the Owls have at least offset the losses on the line of tackles, Khris Banks, Ifeanyi Meijeh (portal) and Dan Archibong (NFL draft) and are hoping Will Rodgers and Manny Walker emerge as effective edge rushers now that Arnold Ebiketie has transferred to Penn State.

Still, there is more work to do.

The Owls need at least one starting-level offensive lineman to replace Vince Picozzi (Colorado State) and another top linebacker to replace Isaiah Graham-Mobley (Boston College). Two of each would be nice, but let’s not get greedy here.

Or maybe do get greedy.

The good news is that there are plenty still available in the portal who, at least on paper, are just as good as those two. Since it’s a buyer’s market this year (and won’t be next), the sooner Temple adds those type of players the better, because other teams with similar needs are scouring those same lists.

01.07.21
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What can Joe Temple fan do?

According to google, there are 1,563 people named Joe Temple in the United States.

That’s not counting a fictional minor Seinfeld character named Joe Temple in the episode “The Couch” where George wants to rent Breakfast at Tiffany’s but Temple has rented it. George arrives at Temple’s home, and asks to watch it with him and his daughter. George makes foolish demands, which causes him to be forced to leave.

George makes foolish demands but Joe Temple needs to start making serious ones.

Before social distancing ...

Our “Joe Temple” is a much larger group, including myself, probably you, who will be receiving calls over the next weeks or months about renewing their Temple football season tickets.

When fellow long-time Temple season ticketholder Dave “Fizzy” Weinraub brought up the subject of Temple fans putting a GoFundMe account to buy out the contract of Rod Carey, it was obviously tongue-in-cheek. Still, it got me to thinking about what a regular “Joe Temple” football fan can do to make his voice heard.

You can vote with your wallet and your voice.

When I get that inevitable phone call asking for a couple hundred bucks for season tickets, I intend simply to say this:

“Sorry (Mark, Joe or whatever your name is), I’m not going to be renewing my season tickets this fall because I’m not happy with the direction of the program under Rod Carey. Too many players are leaving the program and not nearly enough are coming in. I’m going to watch what he does between now and spring practice before making that decision.”

Signing a quarterback from Georgia, and defensive linemen from Washington State and North Carolina, among others, is not enough so far. Carey needs many more starting level players even to turn 1-6 into 6-6. How many is a matter of conjecture but to me he needs seven more starting-level players to build the kind of depth necessary to even begin to turn it around.

At the end of last season, I pegged 2021 as a 2-10 season and, from what happened between signing day and now, nothing has changed that prognostication. Sitting in the stands and watching a 2-10 Temple team holds no appeal for me anymore, particularly after averaging nearly nine wins in the four seasons prior to this one.

That’s the message I will convey to the season ticket sellers. Presumably, if enough of us have the same message, it will eventually reach the higher-ups.

Only then can hope for real change be affected.

It’s a little more realistic than getting a group of guys together to raise $6 million on GoFundMe and includes a message that needs to be delivered to the Temple administration now, whether they want to hear it or not.

Monday: The Known and The Unknown

01.04.21
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How UAB’s Bill Clark made football fun again

Depending upon the source, Temple’s administration is close to naming a “permanent” athletic director to replace the apparently disinterested Fran Dunphy.

Close could mean weeks or months. Knowing Temple as I do, it probably means longer than that but there is always hope.

One of those prominently mentioned is UAB’s Mark Ingram, who was one-time associate athletic director at Temple.

The Owls could do much worse.

Mark Ingram could probably fix what ails Temple

Ingram was a frequent visitor to Lot K and ingratiated himself with many Owl fans with his personality.

The theory is that Ingram is much more suited to name a new head football coach than Dunphy should things fall off the rails as expected in 2021.

If Ingram names a head coach, it would probably be someone like Bill Clark, the 2018 college football coach of the year.

Clark has made football fun again after UAB dropped the sport for a year. The Blazers came back in 2017 and have been in three-straight Conference USA title games, winning two, including the most recent one.

Behind twitter paywalls, Mark Ingram’s name is being mentioned prominently as Temple’s next permanent AD.

If there’s anything apparent about Temple football under Rod Carey, is that it has not been fun. Temple leads the nation in portal transfers and several ex-players–Freddy Booth-Lloyd to mention one–say they’ve talked to several current members of the team and “they are not feeling Carey.”

Which is urban slang for they don’t like him.

Clark made the UAB program an immediate winner by heavily relying on JUCO transfers and, with the program established as a winner right away, used that winning to attract three top CUSA recruiting classes. On top of that, UAB is the polar opposite of Temple in the portal, able to retain most of its players.

Ingram helped Clark revive the UAB program and, by all accounts, the two are very good friends. There is another program on life support that Ingram knows well and deserves to be revived. Carey is making a base salary of $2 million. Clark is making a base salary $555,000. One of them is underpaid and one is overpaid.

Would Clark come to Temple?

Who knows but hiring Ingram would be a very good carrot and the E-O would probably be a lot more fun place to do the work necessary to get Temple back on the stick.

Friday: What Joe Temple Fan Can Do

Monday: The Known and the Unknown

12.31.20
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TU football: New Year, New Hopes

If you would have told me on the first day of 2020 that there would be a pandemic and all of us would be wearing masks until well into 2021, I would have said, “Yeah, right, get the bleep outta here.”

After the happenings of the last 10 months or so, I’d believe anything going forward.

Asteroid?

Sure.

Nuclear war?

Maybe.

So, by contrast, what happened to Temple football over October and November is small potatoes. Who would have thought in 12 short months the Owls would go from a respectable 8-5 team that had their championship destiny pretty much in their own hands as late as the final road game of the year at Cincinnati (a 15-13 loss) to a team that was lucky to finish 1-6. How did Temple go from a team that beat Maryland, Memphis and Georgia Tech to a team that will likely be a double-digit underdog in the opener at Rutgers? (Mind you, the Maryland team Temple beat in 2019 destroyed Rutgers, 48-7, three weeks after the Temple game.)

On a believability scale, I’d rate it a little below pandemic, asteroid and nukes but not much.

New Year, New Hopes?

We only need to get 9 portal transfers in who feel like BJ does here.

I guess but that rash of signings of big-time Power 5 portal players between Dec. 14 and Jan. 1 that was needed has not materialized and who knows if it ever will? Right now, as we sit here in a New Year, I’m projecting two wins–Wagner and Akron–with the current talent on the roster. Give me high-profile P5 portal starters at defensive end (2), defensive tackle (2), linebackers (2), offensive tackle (1) and a big-time running back (1) and I might increase that to six wins.

Might.

It’s hard to remember the last time I’ve had lower expectations for a Temple football season. Maybe the last Bobby Wallace 0-11 one, but I still thought they would win two that year.

You can only control what you can control. It’s asking a lot of the current staff now to sign eight “sure” starters but that is the adult minimum offseason requirement before starting a late spring practice in April. It is the minimal talent level needed for Temple to have even a chance of winning. Simply, it’s what is required of a CEO who is making $2 million a year. It’s not much of a stretch to say that urgency is required of this particular task and, if nothing is accomplished in, say, four weeks, you can pretty much assume this staff is sitting on their collective asses and doing nothing of substance.

This post was supposed to be about the five plays that defined the season but, upon research, there were much more. The Navy opener was one of the most poorly coached Temple games I’ve ever seen, from a failure to stop a simple fullback dive (something Air Force and BYU had no trouble doing) to the only trick play of the season being a wide receiver pass to a tight end.

Hmm.

If that wide receiver had thrown that pass to another wide receiver (Jadan Blue, for instance) instead of a tight end, the Navy defensive back would not have been able to catch up to him like he did with the tight end. A really poorly designed play. That was the difference between a touchdown and a missed field goal and the Owls lost that game by two points. That game was so important because it could have jump-started the momentum process and led to a decent season. More importantly, the Owls had between Dec. 28, 2019 and October 10 of this year to get ready for a triple option team and showed no interest in doing so.

You can talk about COVID all you want but the Temple football hierarchy did a poor job game-planning and play-calling and that had nothing to do with COVID.

Since they can control that area, that must improve or their career demise will be a lot more predictable than any pandemic, asteroid or nuclear disaster.

Monday: Making the E-O a fun place to be

Friday: What Joe Temple Fan Can Do

12.28.20
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Temple athletics: Who’s Minding The Store?

If football is the front porch of a university, this is what Temple’s has looked like for most of 2020

When a whole group of employees leave one store in a large chain, the algorithms eventually reach the corporate offices and an investigation is conducted.

Is it the manager?

Is it the work environment?

At the very least this should be the Board of Trustees’ message to Rod Carey

Is it something else?

With Temple football, there appears to be no algorithms and no corporate offices.

Responsibility for employees leaving begins and ends at the store involved and that’s a terrible way to run a corporation.

Rod Carey’s desk is pretty much where the buck stops with Temple football and the same appears to be true with both Aaron McKie and Tonya Cardoza (basketball).

Probably not a good way to run an organization because there has to be some oversight if lower level employees are not doing their jobs.

At a minimum, the question needs to be asked from a Temple administrative perspective why so many football players are leaving what was not only a winning program for most of the last decade, but one where the great majority of the players seemed to be much happier under previous CEOs. If the remedy includes using the buyout money obtained from Georgia Tech and Miami to replace Carey earlier than anticipated, so be it.

The fact that this question doesn’t even begin to be addressed hints at a flaw in Temple’s overall organization that allows top positions to be filled by interim people (President and athletic director) for far too long.

The football program is undoubtedly the front porch of the university and now the front porch is falling apart like Jed Clampett’s cabin in the backwoods before they hit oil. Why is Temple BY FAR the school most adversely impacted by the Transfer Portal?

Two former very good players.

Why indeed?

At the minimum, an impartial athletics committee (made up mostly of former players and possibly chaired by current BOT member Tony McIntyre, a former player as well) needs to be formed to ask why so many Temple players are leaving and to implement suggestions on how the current staff can retain players in the future.

That can only happen under strong, not interim, leadership. Since there isn’t that in place right now, the Temple Board of Trustees must step in and do something.

The sooner the better.

Friday: Five Plays That Defined The Season

12.25.20
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Only coal under the Temple football stockings so far

That’s a fireplace, not the E-O burning down.

Hope every single Temple football fan has a healthy and happy Christmas.

So far, though, at least from a football perspective, the only thing head coach Rod Carey has found under the tree is coal.

Somebody keeps stealing his nice living room furniture mostly procured by a current NFL head coach (err, players) and the tree doesn’t look quite the same in an empty room.

An attempt at humor (we think).

The coaching staff rallying cry for the last month at the $17 million Edberg-Olson facility (it cost $7 million to build with a $10 million addition in 2010) is FEBU (f*ck everyone but us) but the only “but us” left seems to be nothing other than a glorified scout team so the boast appears to be an empty one. Let’s put it this way. Rudy was a great story for Notre Dame but a team full of Rudys would not have been.

Temple has Branden Mack, Jaden Blue, a transfer from Georgia and a team full of Rudys. Hmm. Who knows how long Mack and Blue stick around?

I haven’t checked the portal this morning. I probably won’t for awhile. Too depressing.

That’s why the job of winning in 2021 got harder. So far, by my count, at least seven starters (probably seven of the best nine PLAYERS on the team) have went out the back exit with only two potential good ones coming in the front door. It was imperative to stop the bleeding in order for the Owls to even get to the modest .500 record (which, theoretically over 60 FBS teams are able to do). Now, it looks like 2-10 is a distinct possibility unless the Owls score big with the remaining players in the portal and that’s assuming nobody else leaves, a huge assumption.

Did Temple pay $2 million per year for a 1-6 and 2-10 head coach? So far, it looks like it and it’s not a good look. The recruiting website 247.com reports that Temple is by far the school most hurt by the transfer portal.

Duh?

Carey needs to roll up his sleeves and sign the top available P5 players, not G5 players, not FCS players, to stop the bleeding and start the healing.

There are three four-star defensive linemen still in the portal (as of this writing) and it would be nice if Carey and company could get at least one:

DE-Charles Moore is a 6-4, 275-pound edge rusher from Oregon State. Defensive end did not seem like an area of need a couple of weeks ago, but it is now that Temple’s top edge rusher, Arnold Ebetitke, left the building on Wednesday.

DT-Ellison Jordan, Penn State. Jordan was a four-star signee but hasn’t worked his way into the rotation for the Nittany Lions. He would be an immediate starter here since both starting tackles passed up their final years at Temple.

DT-Brant Lawless-Sherrill, North Carolina. Lawless-Sherrill is a four-star 6-1, 290-pounder who, like just about all of his teammates, had a great game against Temple in the 2019 Military Bowl.

Linebackers

There are at least five three-star linebackers still left in the portal. The Owls need to get at least two of a group that includes Anthony McKee (Pitt), Griffin Grady (Wisconsin), Jon Smith (UNC), Xander Gagnon (Duke) and Evander Craft (Toledo). Craft had offers from three Power 5 schools in his final five.

The value of assigned stars is that independent Power 5 coaching staffs have already done talent evaluations on the above players before bringing them in and that’s less work for the Carey staff to do.

Less work, because cleaning that coal off the floor is going to be job one. It’s an industrial strength cleaning job and we don’t know if the spill accidents are even over yet.

Monday: Who’s Minding the Store?

12.20.20
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The Portal Pandora’s Box

Temple fans have seen the Georgia highlights, but this is what got Ohio State and Georgia’s attention.

The NCAA’s transfer portal always seemed to be a scheme cooked up by the Power 5 schools to further kneecap the Group of Five schools.

For Temple, at least, that’s what it turned out to be.

Owl fans are excited by the addition of Duece Mathis at quarterback but the reality is that they traded a guy with 44 regular-season touchdown passes and 31 interceptions in FBS real games for a guy who has more interceptions than touchdown passes in FBS real games. Interesting that Mathis originally committed to Michigan State, then flipped to Ohio State, then flipped to Georgia.

So in a roundabout way, Temple got Michigan State’s quarterback and Michigan State got Temple’s. One has lots of impressive FBS numbers. The other has impressive potential.

Temple’s major selling point for how long?

Potential, sure, but potential doesn’t win championships or bowl games.

Maybe being in a system that suits his style of play eventually makes Mathis one of the best three quarterbacks in Temple history in terms of numbers and winning percentage (like Anthony Russo was), but only time (three years) will tell.

There’s a flip side of the transfer portal and that’s the Pandora’s Box side of it. As Yahoo sports’ Pete Thamel points out in this excellent story, that side provides a cautionary tale for current players. Thamel quotes current South Florida head coach Jeff Scott saying that there could be as many as 1,000 players in this portal by this week alone who will not find scholarships at any school because those scholarships are almost gone.

The modern definition of Pandora’s Box is a process that generates many complicated problems as the result of unwise interference in something.

To me, that describes the transfer portal to an, err, Temple ‘][‘.

The NCAA had a good system going where players had to sit out a year before transferring to another school and it worked well for several decades. Then someone got the idea, hey, if coaches don’t have to sit out a year then players shouldn’t either.

How about coaches sitting out a year? (Yeah, I know schools could be sued for restraint of trade but, in a perfect world, coaches and players would have to sit out a year and fans of the schools could have some sense of continuity.) That would have allowed Matt Rhule and Geoff Collins to go out coaching bowl games for Temple.

This ended under Rod Carey in 2019

That would have been fairer to Temple and all the other G5 schools who lose their head coaches to the P5. Now the P5 has essentially stolen more from the G5 in creating a farm system to they can steal the best G5 players as well. It’s not fair. It’s not a perfect world and this is far from a perfect system.

While it’s still here, and I don’t think it will be for long, Temple should take advantage of it. The Owls have as many as seven scholarships for this class open and they should be able to get two of the best defensive tackles available and at least a couple of great linebackers. With 1,000 players left scrambling for the few scholarships left, Temple would seem to be in a good place to benefit, say, like Sonny Dykes did a couple of years ago when he brought in 15 Power 5 transfers as starters and went 10-2. Either way, this hurts the players who jump thinking getting a landing spot will be easy.

It won’t.

Maybe 1,000 or more players left holding the bag will cause college football to rethink this poorly conceived idea.

Friday: What players are under the Christmas tree?

12.17.20
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Recruiting: All That Matters is Winning

What Bobby Wallace used to call “the fill-em” (or the film).

In a vacuum, what happened on the recruiting part of the 2021 Class first signing day would have to be listed as one of the best signing days in Temple football history.

Maybe the best.

Unfortunately, these days, the vacuum works both ways because what you are sucking in the door has to be weighed out for what is going out the other end of that Hoover wind tunnel. That was never part of the equation in the Golden Rhule Era.

Freddy Booth-Lloyd has expressed concerns felt by many current Temple fans.

In that sense, what in other years would be viewed as an unmitigated success is extremely mitigated by the departures of tackles Dan Archibong (NFL draft), Ifeanyi Meijeh and Vince Picozzi, linebacker Isaiah Graham-Mobley (other FBS teams) and starting quarterback Anthony Russo (Michigan State), among others.

These are mostly guys I’ve met, interacted with and liked very much at post-game tailgates in the past. They are good young men, character guys, not malcontents. More than that, though, from a pure bottom-line perspective, Temple is losing proven players who were developed over years in the system for (largely) unproven FBS level players–many of whom have some development left to do. For guys the character of Dan, Ifeanyi, Vince and IGM to leave indicates something smells inside the halls of Edberg-Olson and a vacuum cleaner isn’t going to remove the stench.

FBL=good man, fortunately did not major in English at Temple.

That’s going to affect the only bottom line I care about in 2021: Winning.

To me, Temple has to have a major rebound year for the school’s administration to even think about keeping Rod Carey after a 1-6 year with, say, 5-2 talent. Temple has come too far and the road has been too hard and bumpy to be satisfied with 6-6 seasons going forward. Two double-digit win seasons were followed by another winning season and two eight-win seasons before this year’s disaster. Blame COVID if you want but a standard had been set for this program and 2020 fell way below it, COVID or not.

FBL said one of his goals was to come back as a Temperor. If Temple had all 105 scholarship players with that kind of loyalty, it would win a chip every year.

The Owls got immediate starting help in edge rusher Will Rodgers and the quarterback from Georgia, D’Wan Mathis, but where are the immediate upgrades from Picozzi, IGM and the two interior defensive tackles? Hell, where are the guys who can replace those skill sets, let alone upgrades. I didn’t see them. Unless they magically arrive by February, the Owls will have trouble getting to .500 next season.

You can talk about how “happy I am” with the signing day and “I’m through the roof” but I, as a Temple fan, won’t be happy or through any roof until that 1-6 gets turned around to 8-4 or better and, sorry, nothing I saw on this signing day indicates those days are coming back fast enough.

Talk is cheap. Proving it is expensive. Now comes time for Rod Carey to put his money where his mouth is.

Picks This Weekend: 8-5 against the spread on the season and going with all underdogs to stay above water for the season. San Jose State getting 6.5 in the Mountain West championship against Boise State, Tulsa getting 14.5 for the AAC title at Cincy, and UAB (with hopefully future Temple AD Mark Ingram) getting the 5.5 in the CUSA title game at Marshall. (Would have had Louisiana Lafayette getting 3.5 in revenge match with Coastal for the Sun Belt title, but that game was canceled due to COVID in the CC program. Probably the first championship cancellation of all time. Very sad.)

Update: Went 3-0 against the spread with both SJS and UAB winning outright and Tulsa easily covering the 14.5 in a 27-24 loss. Now at 11-5 against the spread this season.

12.13.20
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Russo’s Temple legacy: A winner

If anything, the succession of four quarterbacks who tried to replace Russo showed how much he will be missed.

That old adage about statistics being for losers doesn’t apply to Anthony Russo’s all-too-brief three-year career at Temple.

He exits the school not only as a winner, but only behind Steve Joachim and Brian Broomell in winning percentage as a Temple quarterback.

To me, that’s the most important statistic.

Arguably, Joachim and Broomell and even P.J. Walker played with better talent around them (at least compared to the level of competition Temple was playing at the time) so Russo’s numbers were even more impressive.

Further, Joachim, Broomell and P.J. Walker were playing a systems more suited to their respective talents.

Under Rod Carey and, to a lesser extent, Geoff Collins, Russo was not. I’d love to see what Russo would have done at Temple under just the system Matt Rhule ran his last two years at Temple: Fullback, (often) double tight ends, establishing the run behind a premier tailback and then making the safeties and linebackers inch up to the line of scrimmage so that Russo could fake to, say, Ray Davis, and throw over the top to wide open receivers like Branden Mack and Jadan Blue.

Les Miles with AR when Les was head coach at LSU.

Unfortunately, we never saw that.

Now we will never see it because, err, that’s the offense “we” ran at Northern Illinois. Great coaches structure their offense around the talents of their players and not try to force feed their own philosophy on a different skill set. If there’s one thing we’ve discovered in two years, Rod Carey is not a great coach.

Even in that ill-fitting system, Temple, under Russo this year, was able to put up 32 offensive points against USF and 29 each against Navy and Memphis.

The other quarterbacks combined put up 3 (Tulane and ECU), 13 (UCF), and 23 (SMU).

There are certain quarterbacks who should NEVER be asked to run the ball except on quarterback sneaks. At Temple, I would have put Tim Riordan, Lee Saltz, Marty Ginestra, Pat Carey, Doug Shobert and Matty Baker into that group. You can ask Joachim, Walker, Walter Washington and Broomell to run but the first four were also effective in exclusive passing systems.

In the NFL, Tom Brady, Matt Stafford or Joe Flacco should never be asked to do that.

Not saying AR is headed to Michigan State, but these are his most recent followers on twitter.

And, above all, Anthony Russo should never have been in that kind of system at Temple.

Even a blind man can see that.

That’s probably why Russo is taking his talents elsewhere. There’s a lot of speculation about where he will land, but I think he’s better than any of the quarterbacks at Penn State, Pitt or Kansas right now. It’s not the school that matters, though, but how the coaches at any school will utilize his unique talents. The next few weeks he’s going to have to sort all that out.

If he finds one without an RPO, even if it’s not a marquee school, that’s where he should go and that’s where he will finally be able to reach his full potential and have his name called on NFL draft day.

Unfortunately, the name Temple will not be called once he walks to the podium.

Thanks to Rod Carey.

Friday: Digesting The Wednesday Signings