Tag Archives: new Temple football stadium

06.20.24
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Gone too soon: College Football

Steve Levy delivered the line of the week on ESPN during a Tuesday break in the Stanley Cup finals from the Bristol studios:

“The Say Hey Kid, is gone. Too soon. Willie Mays has passed away tonight at the age of 93.”

Say what?

Say hey.

Too soon?

With all due respect, I’d sign for 93 and I might do it on my 92d birthday.

You know what’s gone too soon?

College football.

Born in 1869 with a game at Rutgers with visiting Princeton, the game should have lasted until at least 2069. Unless you are in the SEC or the Big 10, I very much doubt it will.

Temple football allowed a few loud mouths derail its only chance to grab a P5 spot.

It died with the NIL and the transfer portal and not just for Temple. It died for every G5 school with the possible exception of Memphis, who might eventually slip its way into the big boy club. (I even think it is too late for the Tigers.)

Forget Temple football, which is what we almost exclusively talk about on this site. The other 63 teams playing the same level of G5 football do not have a chance to make a significant impact on the national level for a long time, maybe ever.

The NFL is a fair system and college football fans in big cities will soon realize that and abandon college football. The NFL lifts up its lowest teams with a draft that gives those teams a chance to succeed.

College football tells its lowest teams to go to hell.

What do the fans of those teams do?

Hope and pray.

Neither has ever been a good plan.

The BEST plan for Temple was the one I heard a decade ago at a Cherry and White game.

“Mike, the ACC told us that if we built a stadium, it would be LIKELY that we’d get an invitation,” a source told me that day.

That source was no random guy. It was a member of the 18-person Board of Trusteees.

Made sense because the next season Temple, located in the 4th-largest TV market, had the largest attendance in the AAC.

So what did Temple do?

Fast track a stadium only to back away when a handful of neighbors objected.

Would Navy have backed away on Navy-Marine Corps Stadium or Georgia Tech backed away on Bobby Dodds Stadium if Annapolis or Atlanta objected?

Probably not.

Because Philadelphia politics is a special kind of corrupt (on a level with New York City’s 19th century Tammany Hall), Temple threw up its hands.

Now here we are in an NIL and a transfer portal world where Temple can’t afford players or can’t even afford to get TEMPLE painted on the field.

The end is near and there is no Hail Mary (congressional action) in sight.

Willie Mays lived long enough. College football died way too soon.

Monday: Running over the AAC

06.20.18
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Stadium: No News Is Bad News

Colorado State was able to get this done in less than half the time TU talked about it.

Way back in May, a post from an ardent Temple fan on one of the two message boards covering Owl sports, read: “When You Hear Nothing, it’s a good thing.”

To use a double-negative for literary effect, nobody knows nothing about anything when it comes to concrete and mortar movement on a new football stadium, err, “multi-use complex” for Temple University.

Colorado State University

It will be a long time before the construction workers show up at Temple

That’s not a good thing, unless you are against the idea of an on-campus stadium at Temple.

Our esteemed friend who posted that is an Owl fan from Virginia who knows a lot about many things but very little about Philadelphia politics. In the same thread, someone else posted “I’m hearing a shovel-in-the-ground date will be in August.”

Obviously, that guy, too, is from a place where the Government functions at a reasonable pace without the palms outstretched and greased. Philadelphia City government in the 21st Century is something that would make the Tamney Hall guys blush.

There will be no “shovel-in-the-ground” date this August simply because there are no scheduled meetings of Philadelphia City Council’s facilities committee—the one that would have to approve Temple’s plan for closing 15th Street—on the docket.

City Council’s  adjourns for the summer after meeting tomorrow (June 21) and does not return until September. So file away the “I’m hearing” guy under another piece of misinformation that has been disseminated about this project since the words “done deal” were uttered in March of 2012.

That was six years ago.

Six.

By contrast, the new stadium at Colorado State was proposed in 2014 and construction started in March of 2016 and there has been a full season of football played in it already. That’s Fort Collins, Colorado. This is Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where there has been no progress with the neighbors and their representatives who oppose this plan and another key City Council period to get something done is about to expire.

No deal has been done and no news is definitely not good news.