With only a few seconds in an eminently winnable game NBA at Miami, something stood out like a 6-foot-11 sore thumb.

The Philadelphia 76ers were winning and this decade’s version of “Hack-A-Shack” was in the game. Of course, instead of two 90 percent free throw shooters Mario Bellinelli and J.J. Redick being in there to catch the ball and get fouled and win the game, Ben Simmons was spotted and fouled immediately and the Sixers lost at the buzzer mostly because he missed two free throws.

What does this have to do with Temple football?

Because after the game, Sixers head coach Brett Brown said it was “more important for Simmons’ development” to be in there than it was to win the game.

The word “development” caught my ear because I heard, by my count, Temple football head coach Geoff Collins a derivative of it not one, not two but four times at the recent recruiting celebration. Collins said “we’re a developmental program”  while reviewing some recruiting film and saying a lot of these players are in the developmental stage and are coming here to be developed. It wasn’t the first time he used it. This is what he said in an interview on SI.com last May:  “I think this place is a developmental program, so I take pride in that.”

I guess Florida wasn’t a developmental program.

Hmmm. I’m sure Collins means well, but I don’t like the term.

Developmental program is a term I’ve never associated with Temple football before Collins came to town. AAC championship program, yes. Top 25 program, yes. Developmental program, no. While players certainly have been developed and nurtured (the most recent example is Haason Reddick), the primary purpose of Temple football has been to win as many games as possible. If someone got developed along the way, fine, but development was always secondary to playing in championship games.

To me, like the Sixers’ game above, winning is not the most important thing, it’s the only thing. I could not give a rat’s ass about Simmons being in there to learn a lesson, nor could I give a similar derriere for Logan Marchi’s “development” as a quarterback meant keeping him in there for seven games, looking awful against a bad Villanova team and stinking up Lincoln Financial Field in winnable games against Houston and UConn. A seven-game career as a starter was way too long for Marchi, who failed an eye test two games into his starting career and should have earned a permanent spot on the bench.

Big-time college football is a business and, in business, it’s either up or out. Marchi wasn’t treading upward after a brutal Game Two performance against Villanova and should have been out.

One of William Bendix’s catch phrases in the old TV show “Life of Riley” was “What a Revolting Development” and that applies to the word “developmental” and Temple football. A year ago, Collins was touting Temple as a “Top 25 program” and now it’s “developmental program.”

I prefer Top 25, thank you.

Let’s hope Temple never becomes the Sixers and sacrifices a precious game for the development of any single player. The football Owls don’t get to play 82 games a year. They can’t afford to trade wins for development.

Monday: 5 Questions for The Stadium Meeting

Wednesday: Eye On Atlanta

Friday: Reflections on The Town Meeting

3/12: Spring Practice Begins

When it comes to getting an assistant coaching job at Temple, as anywhere, it really comes down to who you know.

Geoff Collins.

If you know Geoff Collins, you are in, and that was pretty much what happened with the hiring Nathan Burton as safeties coach after being the “quality control” coach at North Carolina State last season.

Coastal Carolina soft

Burton met Collins when he was walk-on in the last century at Georgia Tech and Collins was a graduate assistant there.

Prior to his time with NC State, Burton served as the defensive coordinator at West Alabama for three seasons. West Alabama was the place where former Temple head coach Bobby Wallace finished his career after making his chops at North Alabama.
Burton was hired as safeties coach but will take over the entire defensive backfield due to the exit of Cory Robinson for Rutgers. Robinson had been the defensive backfield coach at Temple last year.

To me, that was addition by subtraction.

One of the most disappointing areas of the team was the play of the defensive backs. Three starters returned from the AAC championship team and a fourth, Mike Jones, eschewed a chance for being a late-round NFL draft pick last year (Mike Mayock had him projected as the steal of the sixth round of the 2017 draft) to play for Temple.

Time and time again, the Owls were burned by touchdown passes late in the games (particularly Army and Navy) and they appeared to be out of position and the communication was not there like it was two years ago. Fran Brown and Phil Snow did a much better job with essentially the same players.

Defensive coordinator Taver Johnson, who presumably had a role in that miscommunication, was “demoted” to co-coordinator, probably saw the handwriting on that wall and took a lesser job at Ohio State.

Larry Knight will take over the linebackers, a role current defensive coordinator Andrew Thacker had last year. Knight had been the “director of player personnel.”

To me, the Knight move was interesting considering that he performed that same role at Georgia State in both 2015 and 2016.  Nick Rapone and Kevin Ross, probably overqualified to be DC and DB coach at Temple, expressed interests in the open jobs through back channels. No doubt in my mind they would have been better for the kids than the guys hired, but Collins is comfortable with who he hired and it is Collins who will sink or swim with them.

Would I like to see more ex-Temple guys like Nick Rapone and Kevin Ross included in this staff? Sure, but they did not know Collins before now and apparently Collins apparently did not have the same comfort level with them.

At least those of us who care about those things still have native son Adam DiMichele and adopted son Ed Foley. Hopefully, that’s enough to swing the pendulum of the offense back in the direction of Temple TUFF and away from the Coastal Carolina SOFT we witnessed too much a year ago.

The defense is pretty much all Collins anyway. Maybe it takes a year to install the Mayhem we have been promised. Let’s hope so because I didn’t see any evidence of that last year, the lone exception being the bowl game.

Wednesday: Comparing Staffs

The thing about coaching changes is that bumps in the road are going to be an expected part of the process.

No one—at least the people I talk to—expected to hit this many major potholes on the way to what was largely an under-performing season in 2017. Plenty of starters and key contributors returned from the AAC championship team and Matt Rhule did not leave the cupboard bare for first-year coach Geoff Collins. Talent-wise, this was a team that should not have lost to UConn and Army. You may say that is crying over spilled milk but leaving that milk there without cleaning  it up could make next season more sour tasting that it should.

Part of the process is asking hard questions and answering them honestly.  So far, no member of the Temple football media (to our knowledge) has asked any of these five questions of  Collins and getting these answers by Cherry and White Day would be nice:

5) What happened to the fullback position at Temple?

Matt Rhule said he had an Epiphany after his second season that the way to create explosive plays in the passing game was not by spreading the field with receivers but by establishing the run behind a blocking fullback and then using play action to get receivers open. That plan worked for two 10-win seasons and Collins seemed on board with it as late as the season-ticket holder party in August. What happened? Will Nitro be used as a fullback this year or is the fullback position done at Temple? (And don’t say the fullback isn’t used in college football anymore. Just because other teams don’t use the triple option, that doesn’t mean that Navy will stop using it. The fullback fits the Temple TUFF football philosophy as the triple-option is to Navy. Run the ball, play great defense and special teams and hit explosive plays in the play-action game is what got Temple consecutive double-digit win seasons)

4) What happened to Jared Folks?

How does a guy start in the AAC championship game for a great team one year and become a non-factor for a mediocre team the next? Inquiring minds need to know.

3) How could it have taken them seven games to figure one quarterback was better than the other?

Despite saying for nine months leading up to the opener that all four quarterbacks were “equal” Collins rolled out an under-performing quarterback for seven games before an injury allowed Frank Nutile to play. Fans immediately saw that he was the far superior quarterback in the Army game. How could a highly paid coaching staff miss that?

2) What did Collins mean by his “square peg, round hole” comment?

Before the bowl game, Collins said that the offense didn’t come around because “I think we were trying to fit a square peg into a round hole on offense.” What were they trying to do that was wrong and what fixes did they apply to make it work?

1) How could they have screwed up the kicking situation?

All over college football, you could see kickers on Power 5 teams miss chip-shot field goals but Temple had two kickers, Austin Jones, and Aaron Boumerhi, who were elite. That was an asset they should have extended by playing the healthy one and redshirting the other.  Instead the Owls tried to use two kickers from the jump. The Owls could have used Boomer for the extra year. Now Jones is gone and odds are the next one probably won’t be as good as Brandon McManus, Jones or Boomer. Great kickers are hard to find as Rhule found out in his first  year on the job.

Wednesday: The Coaching Shuffle

Friday: Killing Two Birds With One Stone

Monday: Strange Hashtags