Tag Archives: nfl

10.01.26
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Time for the DL to Live Up to Press Clippings

Nobody got better reviews through four weeks of spring practice and five more weeks of summer practice than the Temple defensive line.

“I think our defensive line is going to be one of the biggest stories in our conference,” Temple head coach K.C. Keeler said midway through August. “We thought we had a good offensive line with everyone returning but there were a lot of times our offensive line couldn’t block our defensive line.”

Something has happened since.

The entire DL–with the exception of some plucky first-half play against Penn State–has been on one side of the milk carton that includes Temple tight end Peter Clarke on the other.

Both need to be located by Saturday night. The big difference is that Clarke is a proven playmaker once you get the ball into his hands, but the defensive line has only shown to be practice warriors.

So far.

We haven’t seen the playmaking ability from the DL yet this year that we saw from Clarke last year.

Toledo was able to block the DL. So was Army.

There are signs, though, that South Florida won’t be able to do the same thing in an ESPNU matchup (7:30 p.m.) on Saturday night at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa.

For Temple to taste victory, the first chapter of that “story of the year” Keeler was talking about must be written now.

The USF offensive line’s Pro Football Focus pass-blocking grade of 53.6, ranks No. 121 in the country and the Bulls haven’t faced a single defensive line with the talent of Temple’s. Even in their win against Army, the Cadets were playing without any starters on the DL returning from last year.

For the season, USF quarterback Michael Van Buren has been sacked eight times, six times last week against Bowling Green and the Falcons are one of the worst teams in America.

Time for the DL to both get off the ball and get to the quarterback and also continue to stuff the run the way it has all season.

If the Owls exceed those six sacks that BG was able to have, Temple will win.

If they get only a tepid pass rush and hurries instead of sacks, the Owls will lose.

About a 60 percent chance of rain on Saturday night.

Time for the defensive line to put their money where coach Keeler’s mouth is and that time is now. Nothing helps out a secondary which has struggled better than putting the bad guy’s quarterback on his ass, which often leads to tipped ball interceptions and fumbles that go the other way.

Defensive havoc needs to happen and it needs to happen now.

Keeler is not prone to “coachspeak” nor is he overblowing their ability. Remember, this was a Temple offensive line (returning pretty much intact) that blocked well enough to put up 515 yards of total offense against Navy last year and Navy was a team USF lost to a year ago. If that Temple OL couldn’t block this Temple DL in practice, that had to be something Keeler saw on his own.

That USF team who lost to Navy had a better QB, a better head coach and better overall personnel–many of whom are starting at Auburn now–than this USF team.

If Temple is able to get seven sacks or more, Temple wins. Even with fewer sacks and a solid effort against the run, the Owls are in good shape.

You can’t write the story of the year without a compelling first paragraph and Saturday night is not a good time to get writer’s block.

Saturday (approaching midnight): Temple-USF Game Analysis

09.26.26
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Temple football: It’s Getting Late Early

Here we are about to play the fifth game of the season, and the theme of K.C. Keeler’s post-game press conferences the last two weeks were that the Temple kids battled.

The truth is that the Owls of a year ago got pushed around for a closing 10-minute drive a year ago at Army and, on Friday, they allowed a killer six-minute drive for the win when they went up 17-14, and a lot of those plays were with eight men in the box. (It might have been an eight-minute drive if the Owls didn’t wisely their timeouts on defense.)

Evan Simon had a knack of finding secondary receivers if his initial target was covered. The Owls’ current QBs appear to lock on the primary receiver.

Yet they lost both games.

At some point, battling will not be enough and we’re about to reach that point when the Owls go on the road for their next game in South Florida.

Yes, the same South Florida team that not only “battled” Army but beat them. How come they can battle and win and we battle and lose?

I’d rather fight a skillful retreat and win than battle hard and lose but maybe that’s me.

The Owls had one job after losing a pair of one-point games to Army and Navy last year and that was to turn those one-point losses into wins, preferably by more than one point. From roster construction to game planning, they needed to figure out a way to turn those 3-to-4 yard gains Army and Navy live by to 1 and 2 yard gains. They didn’t figure that out.

Instead, they turned one half of that two-headed monster into a four-point loss to Army.

Keeler has said the roster is better, the team is deeper than last year but if the results are the same 5-7 does it really matter?

Death by a thousand paper cuts a year ago and death by a thousand paper cuts this year are pretty much the same.

Hard to see the improvement when the ledger at this point says 1-3. Just to get to 5-7–which I would consider unacceptable–the Owls have to split the last eight games of the season.

That’s why it’s getting late early. Pretty soon the math won’t be there for a winning season.

Last year the team started 5-2 and faltered late. Maybe this year’s team is built to finish 5-2 after faltering early.

You’ve got to hope so but there are several concerning signs out there.

One, they no longer appear to have a quarterback with the savvy of Evan Simon, a guy who was able to toss 25 touchdown passes against only two interceptions. Simon was particularly adept at finding mismatches in the secondary, often to secondary receivers, and a reliable safety valve was Peter Clarke. Simon was the Steve Carlton of the Owls and Clarke was the Tim McCarver, Simon’s personal catcher.

Now you might as well put Clarke’s face on a milk carton that’s how MIA he has been this season through no fault of his own. On the final drive of the game, Clarke was wide open over the middle at the 10 and Ajani Sheppard forced the ball into the end zone to JoJo Bermudez, where he was covered by three Army guys. If I had to choose one Temple All-American I’d rather not see play, it would be punter Dante Atton over Peter Clarke. Instead, we see too much of Atton (no offense, literally) and not enough of Clarke.

Two, the much-praised defensive line, which Keeler called 10 deep, was pushed around in the same fashion last year’s lesser praised defensive line of guys like Sekou Kromah, Khalil Poteat and Cameron Stewart were.

Maybe it’s better but the proof is in the pudding. Or the putting of the bad guy’s quarterback on his ass, which we haven’t seen much of so far.

Three, the Owls were supposed to have a reliable field goal kicker in Carl Hardin and the stats back that up because Hardin went 11-for-14 last year. Yet two of the misses came in one-point losses to the academies, one from 45 and the other from 38. On Saturday, he hit the crossbar from 42 yards out. Had he hit that one early, he would have lined up for another makeable game-winner. Rather have him miss the 52-yarder at Georgia Tech last year in a 42-24 loss and hit the 38-yarder in a 31-30 loss to Navy last year.

They say the best predictor of future success is past success and, judging the 2026 Owls so far, the future doesn’t appear to be all too bright.

Battling is OK but winning is better. The winning needs to start now because it’s later than most would think.

Monday: The Breakdown

09.20.26
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This Temple loss was the hardest ever

This guy is all of us. We Temple fans should be able to enjoy a 42-28 lead but too often defeat is grabbed from the jaws of victory.

As a kid, I was a Penn football fan.

Watched every game on TV. Went to every home game and watched running back Adolph Belizaire, wide receiver Don Clune and a quarterback from Bishop Egan named Billy Creeden terrorize Ivy League defenses.

Still, something was missing.

Never understood why Penn was big-time in football and gave that up to pursue academics. There was a void in the City of Philadelphia, one of the largest cities in the country without a big-time football team.

I was a football fan, not a chemistry class fan, and looked on the other side of the city and saw a legendary coach named Wayne Hardin try to fill that void with Temple.

For awhile, he did.

The ultimate metaphor how Temple fans felt: K.C. Keeler all alone on the field after Saturday’s game.

That’s when I became a Temple fan and turned down a full academic ride to Cabrini University (RIP) to walk on (err, pay my own way with a college job at the Philadelphia Bulletin) with the Owls and try to get a journalism degree. All the while my goal was to cover my new favorite sports team, the Temple football Owls.

That dream was achieved both at The Temple News and professionally elsewhere.

Temple had four-straight winning seasons under Hardin capped off by a No. 17 ranking in the country with a 10-2 season in 1979.

To me, if Hardin proved Temple football could be a factor on the national scale, subsequent coaches could.

So far, Bruce Arians did. Al Golden did. Matt Rhule did so those “eras” only reinforced my belief. Winning football is not only possible at Temple, but winning football on a national stage.

If they can do it, and they did, it can be done.

Still, as a Temple fan, I experienced a lot of heartbreaking unexplainable losses along this journey.

None took me to the special place in hell quite like Saturday’s.

Some say the 53-52 Ron Dickerson loss at Pitt was the worst in Temple history. Or the 2024 29-20 loss at UConn was bad but none, in my mind, surpassed the debacle we saw on Saturday at Toledo.

Maybe it’s recency bias but based on what I saw last week against Penn State, this defense should never have given half a hundred to anybody else.

Penn State tried for a white out in Temple’s home stadium, but there was plenty of Cherry as in this photo from the press box. Doubt there will be this much Cherry for Army after the Toledo debacle.

Even Hardin had his brutal losses but the difference between his 26-25 loss at Franklin Field in 1975 and the next year 31-30 at Veterans Stadium, both against Penn State, is that Hardin made no tactical errors in those two losses, coached brilliantly, and lost.

On Saturday, at Toledo, Temple made plenty of coaching mistakes.

The first as detailed here on Saturday was not rushing the passer. The second was throwing a fade to the tight end in the end zone when every Temple fan in America who followed Hardin, Al Golden and Matt Rhule knew the call would have been a rollout pass for a mobile quarterback. Those coaches took advantage of the unique talents their players had. They would have not turned Ajani Sheppard, a rollout passer, into a pocket passer with the game on the line.

Mental mistakes that turned a 42-28 lead with 1:11 on the fourth-quarter clock to a 49-48 OT loss.

Unacceptable.

Everybody has said that North Carolina State’s fumble in the end zone that led to a 35-31 loss to host Vanderbilt was the most brutal loss on Saturday.

To me, that paled by comparison to Temple’s because all the Owls had to do was put the bad guys’ quarterback on his ass or roll out the good guys’ quarterback for a run/pass option that Toledo could not stop. If the easy flare toss to, say, Colin Chase, wasn’t there, Ajani Sheppard would have took it in for the winning 2-point conversion and a 50-49 win.

Don’t force your running quarterback to be a pocket passer on the most important play of the game but that’s what Temple did. The baseball analogy here is that a guy tries to bunt to get on with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. Instead of getting past the pitcher the bunt goes right to him and the pitcher for some inexplicable reason throws to second instead of walking the ball to first for the underhanded throw to end the game. Taking the analogy further, the pitcher throws the ball over the second baseman’s head and loses the game. Temple had a nice underhanded throw to first but for some inexplicable reason decided for the tougher throw to second which goes over the guy’s head.

Tried to watch and enjoy the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday but could not enjoy it because I kept thinking about the Temple loss. When the Eagles lose, nobody calls for the team to drop out of the NFL but for the last 24 hours or so on social media, I’ve had to listen and read the bullshit that Temple should drop football for losing to a team that was a 6-point favorite. When the Phillies lose two straight to the Mets, nobody has to hear that the Phillies should shut down Citizens Bank Park.

Every Temple loss, Temple fans have to listen to this crap.

That’s why every Temple loss cuts deep followed by the knife being stuck in the next day with the reaction. Things were supposed to be different with this winningest ever head coach in college football and we were going to show these losers that we are winners this year.

So, yes, this was the toughest Temple loss ever and there have been many. Hopefully, the kids are more resilient than the adults who have loved this team for the longest time but the flip side is those kids have done the hardest work and have nothing to show for it. Maybe some will say fuck it. Let’s hope not.

They have a choice now. Turn that hard work into a 10-2 season or turn that disappointment into more losses down the road.

They will now have to do it without a lot of Temple fans who saw what happened on Saturday and checked out. Getting them to check back in will take a few wins at least.

Friday: Army Preview

09.12.26
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TU-PSU: You play to win the game

Down three offensive linemen, their best running back, and one defensive lineman, Temple head coach K.C. Keeler was faced with a dilemma.

Play to win, or play to keep it close.

From this seat way up there in 215, it was pretty apparent what he did.

Play to keep it close.

I’m from the Herman Edwards School of Thought: You play to win the game.

I’d rather lose 37-10 playing to win than 27-9 playing to keep it close.

After the game, Keeler said “there are no moral victories” but this really seemed like it to me after losing 27-9 to Penn State on Saturday at Lincoln Financial Field.

Temple fans left the 2015 game happy partly because John Cristopher threw a “Philly Special” throwback pass to P.J. Walker and we didn’t see anything like that today.

What would playing to win look like? A double reverse here, a jet sweep to JoJo Bermudez there, the same kind of pass Ajani Sheppard threw on the first play of the game last week there. A few more blitzes on defense. There is value in creativity.

We never saw any of that on Saturday.

What we did see was the kids play hard enough to earn a victory but never got close enough to pull it off.

To me, that was a missed opportunity. For Temple, the opportunity was right there for not only a win over a ranked team, but that win fueling an attendance boost for the rest of the year.

Beat Penn State in front of 61,355 fans and that translates into 30,000 Temple fans for the rest of the season. Right now, we’ll be lucky to hit 20,000 in any of the remaining games.

I’m not from the school where I will ever be happy to lose by less than 20 points. Sorry.

It’s not like Temple doesn’t have talent to score more than nine points against anybody. The Owls have plenty of explosive players in space. They just have to devise ways to deliver them the ball.

This team–other than quarterback–has enough weapons to turn the scoreboard into an adding machine. Keveun Mason is a proven halfback and most Temple insiders say Sam Brown is better than him. Colin Chase is probably the best possession receiver in the league. JoJo Bermudez is not only the best punt returner in the country but a guy who can take any jet sweep to the house.

Other than Mason’s 76 yards, we saw none of that talent utilized against a team that many feel will be in the national championship picture.

What we did see was a defensive line that fought hard enough to win, but didn’t get it because there was no imagination on the offensive side of the ball.

Maybe Keeler was saving that for later but beating Penn State would have been a gamechanger for the program and the gamechanger was sacrificed for whatever is left in the season.

Did you see anything like this on Saturday? I certainly did not.

To me, the biggest problem ahead is that no one grabbed the quarterback position. Jaxon Smolik did some nice things in the first half but the bottom line is that Jaxon Smolik put only three points on the board. The other guy, Ajani Sheppard, is a bigger running threat and, in this era of college football, that’s the kind of a guy you win with.

Still, neither is Evan Simon and I think, with Evan Simon, Temple puts way more than nine points on the board. Simon had a knack, a sixth-sense if you will, to duct out of a rush and find a receiver downfield.

I don’t see that in either Temple quarterback after two games. Simon had an “it” factor. One of the two quarterbacks better show it or develop it and, after watching P.J. Walker, Steve Joachim, Marty Ginestra, Anthony Russo, E.J. Walker and Simon they all had it right away in the first game.

These guys either don’t have it or have not shown it. That’s a problem.

Temple won the rushing battle and time and possession battle.

What happened instead is a lot of Penn State fans left pissed off that they didn’t win 52-0. If that was Temple’s goal, congratulations.

My goal is to win.

Others are to cover.

I stopped by the concourse and saw a Penn State fan pleading for Matt Campbell to go for two after the Nittany Lions’ last touchdown and thought to myself it was nice he lost a lot of money on the game, but I wish Temple had rolled the dice just a little more. If having him win a bundle, meant my team was closer than a 27-9 score was a tradeoff I was willing to make.

It might not have been a moral victory to Keeler but it seemed like that way to me.

Monday: The Good

Friday: Toledo Preview

09.05.26
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An eye-opening opener against Rhode Island

Driving down Delaware Avenue, the all-news-all-the-time AM station gave its top Philadelphia stories on the hour.

“The top stories are Philadelphia reports four new West Nile Virus cases and the Temple Owls open their football season today.”

Odd juxtaposition of stories, but it was nice to see Temple football getting the same kind of billing as a health scare. Most times the local sports talk stations ignore the Owls, let alone the all-news station.

New season, new stories, so the task for the day was to judge whether the Owls would provide eye-popping results or eye-opening ones.

We’ll have to go with the latter in a workmanlike 38-14 win over visiting Rhode Island. Eye-popping would have been one of the quarterbacks throwing for six touchdowns, like the guy last year did in the opener. Eye-popping would have been for the defensive line to have a few sacks.

Neither happened.

Not great, not overly good, but just OK because, from the way K.C. Keeler talked over the last few months, he said that he has two quarterbacks who can win in this conference and maybe he’s correct but neither one knocked my socks off like Evan Simon did in the UMass game a year ago.

Don’t know if the Owls have one quarterback who can compete against this conference and certainly, on the results, did not see one who is capable of beating Penn State.

You would have hoped to see one of them take the job but neither did. John Madden’s old saying was “if you have two quarterbacks you have none” seemed to apply after the game because the Owls still have two quarterbacks.

The other concerning thing was the defensive line. Keeler said the line was so upgraded that it “could be the story of the year in this conference.”

Hell, it wasn’t even the story of the day because the Owls–although limiting Rhode Island to 97 yards on the ground–got no pressure on Rhode Island quarterback Tyler Budge, other than a single shoe-string sack by Kevin Hornbeak and one in the fourth quarter by Davier Bishop. Most of the time, URI rolled the pocket away from the rush and no doubt Penn State was taking notes.

The offensive line that helped the Owls put up 500+ yards of total offense against Navy last year could only muster 369 yards against a FCS team, albeit a very good one. On Jaxon Smolik’s touchdown pass, he was hit and this offensive line can’t let that happen after giving Simon a clean pocket for most of last year. He didn’t really have a clean pocket all day, nor did Ajani Sheppard.

Another head-scratcher was that tight end Peter Clarke was rewarded for his loyalty by being only targeted twice. Clarke was a matchup nightmare last year and why the Owls only threw two passes his way was baffling. Let’s hope they are saving him for Penn State.

That’s the hope. Doubtful because offensive coordinator Tyler Walker showed a nice wrinkle on the first play of the game, and if he’s saving Clarke for Penn State, he probably would have saved that play for the Nittany Lions, too.

Peter Clarke was MIA through no fault of his own. (Photo courtesy of Zamani Feelings)

To me, if Clarke is going to be a first-team All-American he needs a 10-touchdown, 1,000-yard season. The opening game did not help that cause.

The highlight of the day was sophomore running back Keveun Mason rushing for 158 yards on 20 carries and that’s impressive because he lost the job to starter Sam Brown, who will be ready for Penn State. We were looking forward to seeing Brown play and, if he’s better than Mason, he must be very good. Also, the secondary had two pick 6s in a single game and that hasn’t happened at Temple since Chuck Heater was the defensive coordinator in 2011.

What we do know is for the Owls to have any chance against the better opponents ahead, they have to get some sacks on defense and someone is going to have emerge as a clear starting quarterback by winning the job outright.

That, and staying away from mosquito bites.

Monday: Cherry on Top

Friday: Penn State Preview

Saturday: Penn State game analysis

08.16.26
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The opener will be on us before we know it

Saboor Karriem goes for the tackle against Eagles’ No. 1 pick Makai Lemon. Both will be calling the same stadium home.
Hey, guess who follows Temple Football Forever? The father of Penn State starting quarterback, Rocco Becht. Anthony Becht was a great tight end at Monsignor Bonner and the New York Jets. Thanks for the follow.

One of the things about getting older is having pains in places where you’ve never had them before.

Because I had a pain in my leg I couldn’t identify other than it being nerve-related, I mentioned that to my physician and he referred me to a neurologist. That was way back in April.

Made the appointment the next day and the “earliest” he could see me was Aug. 13.

“Geez, that seems like years away,” I told the person who answered the phone.

“That’s the earliest we have.”

That’s the U.S. Healthcare system in a nutshell.

Long story short, that time between April and August lasted what seemed like five minutes simply because the late spring and summer is my favorite time of the year.

So it goes with Temple’s football opener against visiting Rhode Island on Sept. 5.

If the time between April and August seemed like five minutes, the time between now and kickoff will be like a minute.

Or shorter.

Nobody knows that better than Temple head football coach K.C. Keeler, whose Owls conducted their first preseason scrimmage on Saturday.

One of the strongest areas of the team is the safeties and defensive coordinator Brian L. Smith calls it the deepest part of the defense.

Among the starters is expected to be Illinois transfer Saboor Karriem, who comes to Philadelphia with CVS type receipts. He started and had the most tackles in a 34-32 Big 10 win over USC last year, notching seven solo tackles and three assists. While there are concerns about the bright lights in big games at both the quarterback and cornerback positions at Temple, there are no such concerns about the safeties and linebackers, who played well for the Owls and other teams last year.

Recently, Karriem was “mic’d” up by the Temple video staff and his best quote was, “I miss my brothers, but I have 115 (other) brothers (here).”

Because of the uncertainty at quarterback, it looks like the Owls will have to lean on the defense for most of their success this year.

Fortunately. the defense is showing signs of being up to the task in summer ball so far but the proof will come on Sept. 5.

“Rhode Island Sept. 5 at 2 p.m., that’s it,” Karriem said.

It might seem a long way off now but it’ll be upon us in a minute. That’s the way these things work, both in life and in football.

08.06.26
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Bruce Arians in HOF: Temple righting a wrong

Bruce Arians leaving his South Jersey home with photos of Bear Bryant and his Temple kids.

In an interview in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2009, Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz threw in this casual remark about Bruce Arians:

“Firing Bruce Arians was the biggest mistake Temple football ever made.”

Ball recognizes ball and Ferentz is ball. Not a friend of Arians specifically but a member of the same coaching fraternity, Ferentz was able to spot a school that overstepped the bounds when it came to firing a head coach. The story was about colleges too quick to pull the trigger on firing head coaches and the first person to come into Ferentz’s mind was Arians.

That was 23 years after the offense was committed.

Temple University righted a wrong today by including Bruce Arians into its Hall of Fame 2027 Hall of Fame class.

Ferentz will be entering his 28th season as head coach at Iowa and, if Ferentz was right, Arians might–and we use that word “might” loosely–be entering his 43d year as head coach at Temple.

In my mind, most of them would have been pretty damn glorious. I know because I covered Temple football all five of the Arians years. I am still friends with most of his players in those days, including the GOAT (Paul Palmer) and super nice guys like Joe Greenwood, Sheldon Morris, Mike Hinnant, and Eddie Parker.

Arians was loyal to Temple and Temple should have been loyal to him. In 1986, Arians turned down an offer to be head coach of his alma mater, Virginia Tech, to remain at Temple, saying, “I can’t leave my guys at Temple.”

Frank Beamer took that job instead and stayed at Virginia Tech pretty much the exact same length Arians should have remained with the Owls.

Look at his five years at Temple.

He had two winning (6-5) seasons with the Owls against a Top 10 schedule. Compare that to the revered Matt Rhule, who had two winning seasons against schedules ranked No. 84 and No. 91, respectively.

Me, with Arians players (from left) Kevin Jones, Pat Powell and Mike Hinnant

Love the championship Matt gave Temple, but there is no comparison.

After a 17-10 loss at Delaware, Arians called a mandatory full-contact scrimmage at 5 a.m. on the Sunday after that Saturday on Geasy Field. “We didn’t lose a game after that,” Bruce said. (Partially right. Temple won five out of six after that scrimmage.)

Arians beat Pitt in three of his five seasons. He came closer than anyone would expect against Alabama, Georgia and Florida State.

Bruce’s letter to me after I congratulated him on signing Dick Beck, who becamed captain of his 1988 team.

Give me one other head coach at Temple who beat a P4 team in three of five seasons.

You can’t because I can’t.

In his introductory press conference at Temple, one anti-Temple football journalist asked this question, “Why does Temple even play football?”

Arians shot back: “To beat Penn State.”

The Temple fans at Mitten Hall in 1983 went wild.

Nobody was happier when that really happened than Arians, who was the only ex-Temple head coach to have an extended phone conversation with Rhule.

Matt had already talked to Wayne Hardin in person after that game, kissed him on the cheek and handed him the game ball.

Ball recognizes ball and hopefully Kirk Ferentz will notice what Temple did on Thursday. No doubt Wayne Hardin will be smiling from above.

Monday: Back to the Future

07.16.26
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A Temple Football Championship: There are no words

Editor’s Note: Every once in a while, I get asked why I write this site and my answer is winning. We get barely (and I do mean barely) enough contributions to keep this website alive yet winning remains the goal. Winning games, yes, but winning championships more. This is the one time in my lifetime of being a Temple fan I was there in person to watch Temple football win a championship. Yet winning remains the goal. When it happens, I’m usually speechless but I’ll try to come up with something. There are no words but I summoned some and they are below.

The morning after arguably the greatest win in Temple football history, there are no words.

Literally no words are coming out of my mouth, at least in the sense of being able to talk this morning.

The throaty and hoarse condition is more than OK because it was the result of cheering for the Owls at beautiful Navy-Marine Corps Stadium as they captured what really is their first-ever major football championship. The 1967 MAC title was admirable, but that was a day when the school played to a level of football that was beneath their status even then as one of America’s great public universities.

So this was it.

ride
I sat in the same aisle across from this trophy on the way home (thanks to Matt Rhule for arranging my seat). I couldn’t stop staring at it.

Walking out of the stadium and into the concourse, I let out a very loud primal: “THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKIN’ ABOUT!!”

Fortunately, I got a few high fives and smiles from my fellow Temple fans and not fitted for a straightjacket. It also put the voice out for 24 hours, maybe more.

When it comes to Temple football today at least, you cannot think in terms of a national championship—the deck is stacked against G5 teams in an unfair system—so what happened yesterday was the pinnacle of Temple football success. Thousands of Temple fans, easily in excess of 10,000 Temple fans, made Navy’s 15-game home winning streak a moot point by turning that stadium into a Temple home field advantage and to get to that mountaintop and look down from it is incredibly satisfying.

Hey, it’s a pretty spectacular pinnacle. The only thing that would have made it better was a G5 slot in a New Year’s Six bowl against Penn State, but that’s not happening for a number of reasons that are not important today. (Objectively, would you take a team for the Cotton Bowl that has won seven straight against this schedule and beat a Navy team, 34-10, over a Western Michigan team that struggled to beat a four-loss Ohio team? I would but I don’t expect the bowl committee to be that objective. I can also grudingly see the WMU argument.)

What is important is that the Owls have gone from being a perennial Bottom 10 team and laughed at nationally to being ranked in the Top 25 for two straight years and going to a title game one year and winning it the next. When you think of the success P.J. Walker and Jahad Thomas have had here, there is a Twilight Zone quality to the parallel between this success and their success at Elizabeth (N.J.). In their freshman year at Elizabeth, they won one game; in their freshman year at Temple they won two games. In their sophomore year at both schools, they won six games. In their junior year at both schools, they reached the title game and lost and, in their senior year at both schools, they lifted the ultimate hardware together.

“Get a Dub?”

Truly amazing and I will miss both of those guys.

The Navy team Temple held to 10 points scored 75 on SMU, 28 on Notre Dame, 45 on an 11-2 USF team, 46 on Houston, 42 on Tulane and 66 on ECU.

Back on Cherry and White Day, I wrote that this team will be better than last year’s team while people on other websites—notably, Rutgers and Penn State fan boards—insisted that Temple would take a step back. I was consistent in my belief that this was the STEP FORWARD year, not the step back one, and that belief was rooted in knowledge that both the defense and offense were significantly upgraded despite graduation losses. Only a Temple fan who follows the team closely would know that, not the know-it-alls who make assumptions on subjects they have no idea what they are talking about.

Today at noon, the Owls will know where they will go for a bowl game. They can finish the season in the top 25 and set the record for most wins in Temple football history.

It won’t be the cake because we saw that yesterday, but it will be the Cherry on top of that white cake and it will be delicious even going down past what promises to be a future sore throat.

Postscript: For the comments to the original post click here:

Monday: Regular Programming

Friday: American Conference Media Day

07.05.26
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Temple’s Mount Rushmore of Coaches

There’s been a lot of talk about Mount Rushmore lately and, while not getting into the context of that discussion, that got me to thinking about Temple’s Mount Rushmore.

Coaches, specifically.

On my Facebook memory feed, I came across a preview of the 1977 College World Series (baseball, of course) that listed Temple as one of the two favorites.

Matt McArdle, a former Temple football safety for the 1979 Garden State Bowl team, responded by saying his brother (John) was the third baseman of that team and we both said that Skip Wilson was responsible for Temple being the most dominant baseball team in the “traditional” East for much of the 1970s.

“Definitely on Temple’s Coaching Mount Rushmore, for sure,” I responded.

With only four spots on that mountain, that caused me to think who would take the other three positions on that mountain.

I came to three men: John Chaney, Pop Warner and Wayne Hardin.

Bruce Arians deserves an honorable mention for both his loyalty and two winning seasons against Top 10 schedules.

Then I asked Chat GPT to make an image of that mountain and, while Chat GPT can do a lot of impressive things, it can’t draw. It had Wilson and Hardin looking like twins and Chaney really not looking like himself.

Warner came closest, probably because of the Stetson hat he wore in the 1930s.

The post got a lot more engagement than I thought it would have with hoop guru Mike Jensen saying I should replace Warner with Harry Litwack. My thought was that if there was a fifth spot on the mountain, he’d definitely be it but the Sugar Bowl appearance gave Warner the nod.

Then I got a lot of people saying Olympic sports coaches like Fred Turoff (gymnastics) and women’s coaches like Tina Sloan Green, Dawn Staley and Nikki Franke belong there.

That’s all well and good but this is a football blog and not a Temple sports blog and we gave both Wilson and Chaney exemptions due to Wilson’s 1,000 wins and Chaney having the most Elite 8 appearances until Michigan State’s coach broke that record.

Let someone start a Temple women’s sports blog–I have neither the expertise nor interest in doing so–and get their own mountain to play with.

As far as football, at least three guys deserve honorable mention–Al Golden, Matt Rhule and Bruce Arians–but didn’t make the final cut for a number of reasons. While Arians showed the requisite loyalty (he turned down an offer to be head coach at Virginia Tech to remain at Temple), he didn’t have enough wins. (Yet his two winning seasons against top 10 schedules was about as impressive as anything a Temple coach has done.) Golden, while deserving credit for bringing Temple football back from the dead, interviewed for the UCLA job after his second season and Rhule, despite two 10-win seasons, didn’t stay for the bowl game that would have set the Temple record.

Longevity has its virtue and that virtue is etched in stone.

Even if it’s only chiseled by Chat GPT and not Gutzon Borglum.

06.21.26
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Temple’s recruiting focus: Speed Kills

Tylik Mitchell is expected to make some kind of immediate impact for the 2026 Owls on offense and special teams.

Lose a Hollawayne, gain a Holloway.

Kajiya Hollawayne was a productive receiver for the Temple football Owls a year ago, starting all 12 games including a spectacular nine-catch, 149-yard game against Navy. He ran out of eligibility, leaving the Owls look for a speed receiver on the edge.

Pretty impressive offer list for Kamari Hollaway.

Temple gained a “Holloway” recently, grabbing highly thought of North Carolina running back Kamari Holloway from Southern Durham (N.C.) High School, right under the noses of East Carolina, which offered him a full scholarship last year.

Holloway has four years of eligibility left.

He was the second “athlete” recruit with speed from North Carolina that K.C. Keeler and his coaching staff have recruited and both have something in common.

Blinding speed.

Hollaway has clocked a 4.48 in the 40-yard dash, which, in terms of measurables compares favorably to former Owl superstar back Bernard Pierce, whose NFL combine time in the 40 was 4.55. So Hollaway is a full seven tenths of a second faster in the 40 than Pierce was the year after he scored 25 touchdowns for the Owls and became a third-round NFL draft choice.

Mitchell, who should compete for a wide receiver job for the Owls this season, also was a former running back out of North Carolina’s Southern Nash High School. His measurable comparison to Pierce was that he ran a 10.7 100-meter dash in high school. Pierce’s 10.8 in the same event was enough to win the PIAA state indoor title as a senior at Glen Mills.

Both Hollaway and Mitchell both put up good football numbers as well. Hollaway had 122 carries for 1,420 yards and 13 touchdowns in 2025. Mitchell, also playing running back, had 1,866 and 21 touchdowns during his senior season in 2034.

Kamari Hollaway.

So the Owls plucked not only two great athletes out of North Carolina, but two of the fastest guys in that state.

The Owls looked a little slow against some of the better teams in the league last year. Going forward, it appears they are determined to win their share of foot races, which usually means getting to the goal line faster than the bad guys.

Friday: How Others See Temple