Tag Archives: Dion Dawkins

04.01.15
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Now that the Basketball Season is Over …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zv14-LmnOc&list=PLuGMfpTCWJuzbjewW7wbQuZi9z9xhO4GQ

Now that the basketball season is over–sorry, we don’t count women’s basketball–the attention of the Temple University sports community rests with the improvement of the football team.

The team is in full pads now and plenty of positions are up for grabs.

We don’t usually talk about basketball here, but congratulations are in order for head coach Fran Dunphy and the men’s basketball team. Fran did a fantastic job and the team was robbed of an NCAA bid by the corrupt Selection Committee. They turned that into winning three more games after Selection Sunday and it could not have been easy to get up for those games when lesser NCAA achievers were included in the field.

Start with UCLA, a 20-13 team from the Pac-12 that did not have a quality road win the entire season. Continue with Indiana, a 20-13 team from the Big Ten that went 9-9 in its own conference, which was not as good as it has been in the recent past. Oklahoma State and Texas, among others with far lesser resumes than Temple, were included in the field.

This post by Owlsdaily.com editor Shawn Pastor was uncanningly prophetic and it came at 10:03 a.m. on Selection Sunday, approximately eight hours before the Owls were not included:

“Speaking of the committee, my biggest paranoid worry right now is about its current membership.  For whatever reason, the committee is heavily populated by individuals from the West, Midwest, and South.  The only East Coast guy on the committee is Northeastern AD Peter Roby (DOB’s successor, incidentally).  The next best thing is the AD from UNC-Asheville.  But the committee chairman Scott Barnes is from Utah State (Mountain West), and the rest of the committee is from BYU, Stanford, LSU, Michigan State, Creighton, and Conference USA.  I guess Creighton is “sort of” an East Coast representative.  But the bottom line is that BYU and LSU definitely have an advantage over the other bubble teams.”

All of this points to the fact that Temple must get into a Power 5 conference or the AAC must become one.

That happening probably is closer to being an April Fool’s story than it is a reality.

Speaking of April Fool’s, we considered some ideas for our annual April Fool’s Day feature but rejected them as unbelievable:

  • Team’s second-best offensive lineman gets arrested and will miss the season due to getting into a fight:
  • Heavily recruited linebacker “retires” at 19;
  • Team that desperately needs slot receiver allows SR candidate to transfer because he doesn’t want to play DB;
  • Starting guard in final game at Tulane transfers so he can play FCS football;
  • NCAA gets rid of the hardship waiver rule just to deny Temple the ability to start a four-star WR.

Nobody would believe any of that, so we’re posting a best-of here:

https://templefootballforever.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/big-10-explores-idea-of-adding-temple/

https://templefootballforever.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/addazios-first-5-star-recruit-urban-meyer/

https://templefootballforever.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/skys-the-limit-for-6-11-walk-on-freshman/

https://templefootballforever.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/robby-anderson-the-prodigal-son-returns/

03.28.15
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Who is Here and Who is Not?

Jihaad Pretlow will not be roaming he secondary for the Owls next season.

Jihaad Pretlow will not be roaming he secondary for the Owls next season.

Every spring practice season, only the most ardent of Temple fans frequently updated rosters on Owlsports.com trying to cross both fingers while holding a rabbit’s foot.

The goal, of course, is hoping that “nobody good” has left the team. I do not know about you, but I want the money for my rabbit’s foot back.

Jacob Quinn will be leading the way for a Delaware back this fall, not an Owl like Zaire Williams (23) in this 2013 game at SMU.

Jacob Quinn will be leading the way for a Delaware back this fall, not an Owl like Zaire Williams (23) in this 2013 game at SMU.

I didn’t need to open the roster to find out that the team’s best offensive lineman, Dion Dawkins, might be facing some legal problems after being involved in an off-campus fight. I’m always one for “innocent until proven guilty” and the day Jim Gardner led Action News that “a Temple football player had been involved in an alleged rape” I dashed off an email to Gardner asking that if the player got exonerated to please lead off Action News with that exoneration. He later was exonerated and Action News underplayed that development as much as it overplayed the player’s arrest.

Hopefully, Dawkins will have the same fate but another offensive line starter (at least in the final game at Tulane), Jacob Quinn, has decided to eschew his final year of eligibility and go home to Delaware to play for the Blue Hens. He will be eligible immediately. Buddy Brown, who came to the school as a highly recruited linebacker, “retired” from football.

Another guy not here, Jihaad Pretlow, one of the team’s best defensive backs transferred out of school.

All good guys and players, unfortunately. Someday  I’d like to open up the roster and see the only news is that the fifth string quarterback or the fourth-team offensive guard leave the team but that never seems to happen at Temple.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that 100 or so players do remain.

Unfortunately, college age kids being what they are, this kind of thing happens everywhere but it’s a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of thing with the Owls. An offensive line that already was a weakness became weakened in two areas and there are only so many good players to go around. The defensive backfield and linebacking corps lost some depth.

How this impacts Temple won’t be known this spring. Heck, it will not be known by Cherry and White Day. The Owls will have to wait until the Penn State game for that answer.