Tag Archives: spring football

04.24.20
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Spring Football looking more likely

Screenshot 2020-04-22 at 11.22.09 PM

The number on my cellphone flashed as unfamiliar the other day so I let it go to voice mail. The guy on the other end said he was from Temple and wanted to tell me that “the deadline for season ticket renewals” had been “extended” until May 1.

What’s the rush, I thought? Has this guy read the news recently?

The biggest Temple football news a year ago at this time was the absence of real hitting in the spring for the first time in memory for a lot of Temple fans.

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In April of 2019, the faithful crammed into the seats–with no social distancing–to watch this drill: Punt returner catches the ball, then runs through a line of players on both sides who hit him gently with pads.

That’s not the Temple TUFF I had come to know and love. It became apparent I wasn’t going to go over a stat sheet and see Jadan Blue with 119 yards and three touchdown catches, as I did after the 2017 game. There was no “Cherry and White” game anymore.

At that point, a lot of us (raising my hand here) got up out of the seats and walked out of the Olympic sports complex.

Now it appears that we will have hitting in the spring, but it will be next spring and in real games, not practices. According to a column in Wednesday’s Forbes, the writer assumes it is pretty much a given that there won’t be football in the fall. His reasoning is that since the students probably won’t be coming back, it doesn’t figure the athletes will, either.

Bummer.

Since the coronavirus has turned the world upside down, it only figures to turn college football upside down as well. Fall becomes spring. Spring becomes fall.

That was the latest in several stories that first started out as speculation, then assumption. Until a few days ago, I thought it was possible that my beloved Temple Owls would be playing this fall. I thought we’d have to wear masks and gloves and they’d sell only every other seat in the 70K stadium but that doesn’t seem plausible now.

If we have to wait a few extra months for Temple football, so be it. I’d rather have all of our fans healthy in the spring than worrying about a recurrence of these quarantines in the fall.

Since I don’t think that the May 1 deadline will be set in stone, that phone call will remain unreturned until some kind of concrete announcement is made.

Monday: Owls and the NFL Draft

05.01.14
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Two Ways To Look at Cherry and White

Not much to take from the Cherry and White game other than this:

Either the defense is much improved or the offense has a lot of work to do. I’m leaning toward the former. I liked the play of the safeties and I’m not concerned about P.J. Walker’s “off” game, if it really was that.

P.J. Walker is a proven commodity. The Owls’ defense is not. However, if you put two safeties in the middle of the field and are able to find two good cover corners that the defense is 100 percent improved. I have a feeling Cequan Jefferson could be a better cover corner than anyone Temple had last year.

What I don’t like about the offense is that Temple seems to have two similar-type players as receivers. I’d prefer a tall receiver, a Rod Streater-type, to go along with a Jalen Fitzpatrick-type. Maybe that will happen, but there is just as good a chance that both Khalif Hebin and Fitzpatrick will be on the field at the same time. To fix that, I’d move Herbin to a running back and hopefully have one of the taller freshman wide receivers win the WR spot opposite Fitzpatrick.

Plenty of time to fiddle. Hopefully, the Owls will put the right pieces in the right spots.

Why We Post Rant.com stories:

Before the Cherry and White game, I received a few inquiries about why readers have to click on a Rant.com story to get to a post I would normally put on Temple Football Forever.

The answer is simple: For every click on Rant.com story, TFF gets a very minimal fee, as small as a penny and as high as 5-10 cents. Since we’ve only had two donations so far this calendar year (one at New Year’s and the other a couple of weeks ago), we’ve used this method to generate income off the website. This is a labor or love but, with two other jobs, putting time into this has to generate some income. Thanks for supporting TFF however you can.