Tag Archives: Temple football

07.10.23
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Cheat sheet: Some law and order restored

Sometime between the end of last year and a couple of months ago a lot of Group of Five football fans must have come to this conclusion.

E.J. Warner (third from left) at his dad’s Hall of Fame induction. Above, he throws a touchdown against Rutgers nine years later. Maybe Temple wins that game this year.

“Why don’t we cheat? The NCAA won’t enforce its rules anyway.”

There was some logic to that opinion but a couple of things happened in the last week to counter that argument.

As Blazeman pointed out in an earlier comment, the NCAA now has the power to crack down on some of the NIL (NLI?) nonsense and that should help–above all–the G5 teams who have unfairly been placed in a position where they cannot compete with the P5.

How much?

Doubtful it will make that much of a difference but unregulated cheating is never a good thing.

Another instance of the NCAA influence is the recent Northwestern hazing scandal.

Head coach Pat Fitzgerald was suspended due to an independent investigation. Had the NCAA not had the power to enforce its rules, a lot of universities would never hold similar investigations and policed themselves. (In 1986, Temple policed itself by voluntarily forfeiting all 11 games due to one of its players signing with an agent but there was no evidence the NCAA would have handed down such a harsh penalty. The Owls would have probably gotten a year bowl ban.)

Baby steps, but steps forward and not backward like we’ve seen since the portal and NIL came into play.

The next step for the G5 in general and Temple, in particular, is to win. The Owls have something no other G5 team can offer the P5: A Top 10 TV market. If the Owls win, they go a long way toward filling seats. If they fill seats, the only available top 10 market in the FBS becomes an appealing carrot that the Temple administration can dangle to a potential P5 suitor.

A big market with an empty stadium does not have much appeal but a big market with proven TV ratings (which Temple already has) makes Temple a viable P5 commodity.

A strong NCAA oversight of this new Wild Wild West makes both possible for Temple and recent evidence seems to suggest that rumors of the NCAA’s enforcement demise may be premature.

Friday: The Ultimate X and O’s vs. Jimmy and Joe’s Game

Monday: What if “they” are right?

07.07.23
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Numbers crunching: Hope and Change

By Mike Gibson

Not for nothing, some numbers could mean big things for Temple football fans.

Hopefully sooner for some than later.

The Powerball for Saturday night is $610 million. I’m playing a lot of numbers pretty close together because they are the most important ones for Temple football this season.

I will take 15-6-10-7-24 with 13 as the Powerball and take my chances tomorrow night.

The reason is that I think those are the five most important numbers of players for the 2023 Temple football Owls. (Unfortunately, a lot of Owls who are just as good including tight ends David Martin-Robinson and Jordan Smith have numbers too high to qualify as Powerball numbers.)

If they don’t come through with the $610 million, my fervent hope is that even a slight improvement of their 2022 numbers will mean the Owls’ bottom line will be the best since 2019 when the number on the left was greater than the number on the right.

Let’s go through it and, for the record, I’m predicting the production for every single one of these players improves the Owls’ chances of winning.

You heard it here first: Layton Jordan will be the AAC Defensive Player of the Year.

15-WR Amad Anderson. The Purdue transfer had his best season for the Owls a year ago when he caught 38 passes for 348 yards and four touchdowns.

My hope: He gets that number up to 60 catches, 700 yards and 8 touchdowns. My prediction: 514 yards, 6 touchdowns.

6-LB Jordan Magee. Last year’s stats: 86 tackles. My hope: 123 tackles. My prediction: 100 tackles.

10-WR Dante Wright. Called by one non-Temple person as “the steal of the portal” this guy is the most explosive wide receiver Temple has had since All-Pros Steve Watson and Leslie Shephard. He was a first-team freshman All-American at Colorado State where he caught 57 passes for 805 yards and four touchdowns. My hope: 1,000 yards and 10+ touchdowns. My prediction: 1,000 yards and eight touchdowns.

7-CB Jalen McMurray. The sophomore-to-be is easily the most talented CB to play at Temple since Rock Ya-Sin transferred from FCS Presbyterian. He already owns a Pick 6. My hope: He gets another Pick 6 and raises his interception level to his number (7). My prediction. He leads the team in pass breakups with 10 or more and picks off four passes.

24-RB Joquez Smith. Smith is the most heralded incoming running back at Temple since Al Golden signed state indoor 100-meter track champion Bernard Pierce out of Glen Mills. Pierce proved himself right away at Temple, getting over 1,000 yards freshman year, including a 268-yard, two-touchdown game in a 2009 27-24 win at 10-win Navy. Smith has a much higher ceiling than returning starter Edward Saydee and, if he wins the job, it will be a good sign. His best season was his junior year at high school when he went for 1,883 and 27 touchdowns for unbeaten Florida 6A state champion Tampa Jesuit. My hope: 1,500 yards, 15 touchdowns in his first season at Temple. My prediction: 943 yards, 11 touchdowns. Either way, it’s an upgrade over Saydee’s 639 yards and six touchdowns.

Temple’s Powerball: 13: E.J. Warner and Layton Jordan

For the first time in 15 or so years, Temple’s two best players are not wearing single digits (yet) but are wearing the same lucky number: 13.

If you live in Pennsylvania and your house rep is a Republican, dash off an email urging for them to vote to release these funds. Martina White, I’m looking at you.

A lot of people are predicting a sophomore slump for quarterback Warner. I’m not one of them. The simple reason is that this guy lives in the film room at 10th and Diamond and is getting great coaching not only from inside that building but from an NFL Hall of Fame quarterback. Joe Burrow from LSU went from 16 touchdown passes his junior year to 60 his senior one. Do I think Warner can go from 18 true freshman touchdown passes to 60? Not this year but it’s not out of the question he could hit 40. My hope: 40 touchdown passes, 10 or fewer interceptions. My prediction: A Temple season record 30 TD passes with the same number of interceptions he had last year (12).

Jordan is a remarkable playmaker with 18.5 tackles for losses, including a TFL that resulted in a touchdown in the checkered end zone at Navy. He had nine sacks and three defensive touchdowns. The grad student will earn his football Ph.D. at Temple with double-digit sacks, 20 TFLs and five defensive touchdowns. If he does all that–and I think he will–he will be a first-round NFL draft choice, joining former Temple Owls Haasan Riddick and Mo Wilkerson. He will also be the AAC Defensive Player of the Year, joining former Owls Tyler Matakevich and Quincy Roche in earning that honor.

That’s both a hope and prediction. Hitting all of those numbers tomorrow night would but a nice bonus but I will gladly setting for hitting the numbers associated with those numbers no later than the AAC title game.

If the hope outperforms the prediction, Temple will be one of the teams in that game.

Monday: Cheat Sheet

07.03.23
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What could go right: Uttering a three-letter word

This headline caught my attention last week. Temple football should have the same sense of urgency.

My buying the paper routine has changed in the last 15 or so years, ever since the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News downsized on both quality and quantity of local coverage.

Usually, I’ll page through the paper and if there’s something that interests me, I will pluck down the three bucks.

It might be once a month.

The other day I saw a major Temple head coach utter a word I haven’t seen a major Temple head coach say in about eight years.

“Win.”

I immediately purchased the paper.

It was new basketball coach Adam Fisher and he put the word win out there and it was right away, not three years down the road. I like the way this guy thinks and maybe the leaders of the other major sport at Temple should incorporate that level of urgency.

Win is a three-letter word but, to hear recent major Temple head coaches speak, you would think it’s a four-letter one.

Temple has to get back to those days when others expected the Owls to win and they went out and did.

Stan Drayton had a press conference in December of 2021 and the closest he came to mentioning the word win or winning was this quote: “And we will develop a trust that will form an unbreakable brotherhood and once we develop that, we’ve got championships coming to Temple.”

No timeline just an abstract promise of championships to come. He didn’t say 2022 or 2023 but “to come.” There was a lot of “we want to be tough” and “we want to compete” but the word win was noticeably absent.

Understandable in that Drayton didn’t want to promise too much too soon but this year should be different. The facts are that the Owls came close to beating Rutgers, East Carolina, and Houston exactly one year after not coming close against any of those three teams the prior year.

Now the goal has to be holding serve on the three wins they got the last couple of years and breaking serve by turning those three losses into wins. Maybe picking up one or two more. (They don’t play Houston this year but beating a similarly good team like UTSA at home would suffice.)

Right away, not next year or two years down the road.

They have a playmaker at the most important position on the field in quarterback E.J. Warner and seven starters back on defense. They’ve given Warner an important weapon in wide receiver Dante Wright and that’s with the second-half improvement of receivers like Amad Anderson and Zae Baines.

It’s OK to expect to win and raising expectations to win should be one three-letter word that the Owls should no longer treat like a four-letter one.

Friday: Numbers crunching

06.30.23
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What could go wrong? The buddy system

Stan Drayton himself was the beneficiary of the buddy system, going from working for Texas football to be hired by the former Texas football directior of operations Arthur Johnson.

One of the benefits of being a 50-plus-year Temple football fan is seeing what worked and what did not.

From my observation, the best Temple football coaching staffs had only a small element of guys who were past buddies and a larger composition of guys who applied for the job and were interviewed and hired by a head coach who really didn’t know the guys elsewhere before.

The staffs that qualified under the former were the ones of Wayne Hardin, Al Golden, and Matt Rhule.

You know how that worked out.

At least a couple of favorite Temple football coaching hiring stories come to mind.

Vince Hoch met Hardin at high school football coaching clinic in South Jersey. Hoch approached Hardin and asked for five minutes of his time then laid out defensive coaching philosophies. Hardin was so impressed he hired him on the spot. Hoch might have been the best DC ever. Hardin didn’t know Hoch from Adam.

A young assistant from West Carolina drove five hours to 10th and Diamond and asked Temple aide Nadia Harvin if could wait two more for Al Golden to be finished from his meeting. That assistant, Matt Rhule, wasn’t hired on the spot but he made such an impression on Golden that when the first spot opened Al hired him.

It helped that they both played at Penn State but Al didn’t really know Matt until then.

The rest is history.

Matt Rhule drove five hours and waited for two more outside Al Golden’s office to ask for a job at Temple.

The other staffs who failed here were the guys Rod Carey loved (an entire NIU staff pretty much), the Geoff Collins staff and, to a far lesser extent, the Steve Addazio staff.

At least with Addazio, he brought with him from Gainesville, Fla. significant pieces of the national champion Florida Gator team he left behind. Absolutely mind-blowing that a DC who Urban Meyer credited for half a national championship one year was in the same spot at Temple the next. Less mind-blowing but still impressive was that Tim Tebow’s quarterback coach (Scot Loeffler) turned Chris Coyer into the first Temple bowl-winning quarterback since Brian Broomell.

If Everett Withers posts consecutive shutouts his first season as DC at Temple like Chuck Heater did in his, a lot of Temple fans will be shocked out of their minds (most of all me).

What happened under Chuck Heater:

His Owls posted back-to-back shutouts. A Temple team hasn’t done the same since then.

What does that have to do with this year’s prospects?

If Stan Drayton’s Owls were to post even as memorable a season as Daz’s first Temple team did (8-4), it would be to buck a 50-year Temple football trend because the staff Drayton has put together includes three assistants from a couple of 2-10 Texas State teams and a head coach of that same team (Everett Withers) who never shut out anyone when his sole job was as a DC.

Drayton’s staffs pretty much mirror the staffs of Carey and Collins and probably aren’t even half as accomplished at Daz’s staff.

What’s that famous Bill Parcells’ quote?

“You are what your record says you are.”

The flip side of that coin is that Drayton’s resume as an assistant is as impressive as his aides are putrid.

This isn’t the 1987 Frankford High era when one head coach (Al Angelo) and one assistant (Tom Mullineaux) can lead a team to a 12-0 season without the help of a single other coach.

Or even 1950 Penn State where the only two coaches were Rip Engle (head) and a young assistant named Joe Paterno.

Drayton might be the head chef but he did not do himself a favor by hiring those who have surrounded him. There are a lot of cooks in this kitchen and one overcooked or undercooked meal could ruin the bowl prospects of a team without a large margin of error. They may be nice guys and he may be comfortable with them but familiarity can breed contempt if the bottom line isn’t met.

He will go to war with the devils he does know and it’s obvious he’s comfortable with it now. Let’s hope this staff is an exception to a well-documented Temple football past.

Monday: What Can Go Right?

06.26.23
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Optimism, pessimism, and somewhere in between

Bill Connelly was right on the money here.

After picking up all of the preseason college football magazines and seeing the Temple football Owls picked for near the bottom of the league the last few years, something stands out this year.

There is more optimism than pessimism for the Owls’ chances in the reformed AAC with the truth probably resting somewhere in between.

Connelly’s breakdown of the top of the league this year. He has the Owls finishing ahead of a team that has tormented them recently, East Carolina.

The Owls were picked as high as fourth in the league by the website “Underdog Dynasty” and as low as eighth by Athlon Sports.

The in-between part–where I kind of think the truth lies–belongs to ESPN and numbers cruncher extraordinaire Bill Connelly, who has the Owls tabbed for sixth.

Stan Drayton really rolled the dice bringing back his old buddy Everett Withers to be the DC.

Pretty impressive because in my mind, at least when it comes to the Owls, Connelly has a pretty good track record.

He was the ONLY outsider who, in 2019, picked Temple to beat Maryland and the Owls won that game, 20-17. How impressive was that pick? The week before Maryland had dropped 60 on the No. 21-ranked team, Syracuse, and entered the game at Temple ranked No. 23.

If Connelly is right about the Owls, they will finish sixth in the league standings this year and go bowling for the first time since that Maryland prediction. Connelly, unlike Athlon does his homework. (Athlon had Layton Jordan transferring to Wisconsin. Jordan is still here. Darien Varner is the DE gone to Wisconsin.)

This is what he writes about Temple: “Temple has gone just 7-24 over the past three seasons, with an average SP+ ranking of 114.3, but the Owls not only return a healthy amount of experience but also take on the easiest schedule in the AAC; SP+ gives them a 59% chance of bowling for the first time in four years.”

I will take 59 percent over the zero percent I saw over the last three years.

I personally would love for the Owls to win the league title but they haven’t significantly improved a porous running game that held them back last year and there are some questions about the new defensive coordinator, even though seven starters return on that side of the ball.

Victor Stoffel is the only offensive lineman with significant playing time returning although a strong argument can be made from a sheer talent level that the OL coming in is more talented than the one going out.

We’ll see.

Of course, as fans, we root for optimism over pessimism but, at least this year, somewhere in between offers a tangible reward at the end of the Cherry and White rainbow.

Friday: What Could Go Wrong?

Monday: What Could Go Right?

06.23.23
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Owls ready for Prime Time?

In exactly one month and a day from now, the AAC will be holding its Media Day in Arlington, Texas.

I’ve seen the Temple football Owls picked anywhere from fourth in the league to eight and the anticipation for the season is the highest since the 2019 Owls finished 8-5.

Great interview with E.J. Warner here.

That’s a tip of the hat to the way Stan Drayton had the Owls competing in games for the first time since then. It might be at least one of the reasons that Temple already has three prime-time games lined up for television.

The folks at the networks do not want to be burned by a non-competitive game under the lights and the way Temple played bowl teams East Carolina and Houston late in the season was enough to convince them that Temple was a pretty good risk for that hour.

If the Owls beat Akron and Rutgers and play Miami tough, more moveable prime-time games are sure to follow.

Right now, they have all the ingredients for success in that they have a quarterback with the “it” factor in E.J. Warner. The “it” factor simply is this: You look at a quarterback and know he can make positive plays regularly. That’s a rare factor and only about 10 percent (or less) of college football quarterbacks have it. Warner, particularly over the last few games, showed he can do that. It also helps that he is the son of a Super Bowl-winning NFL Hall of Fame quarterback and gives play-by-play and color guys another talking point to hype the game.

Plus, Drayton has done one of the better jobs in the Group of Five holding a team together. Of the 20 players who left for the portal, only three have landed at FBS schools. The other 17 dropped down a level and that’s an indication that, overall, the Owls have a better roster. Meanwhile, those 20 have been replaced largely by P5 and FBS players.

The first of the three-night games currently on the schedule is at Rutgers at 7:30 on the Big 10 Network. The Owls lost that game last year, 16-14, but that was Warner’s first full game as a college quarterback and, although he battled through it, he was 10x a better quarterback five games later than he was then.

The next two are at Tulsa Sept. 28 and home to SMU on Friday, Oct. 20.

If Temple is able to field a competitive team, the ratings should follow. The highest-rated prime-time college football game in the history of Philadelphia involved Temple (Notre Dame, Oct. 31, 2015).

Considering the fact that three prior Penn State vs. Notre Dame games were also on prime-time TV in Philadelphia since 1986, that’s an indication that Temple, when competitive, is the best draw in the nation’s fourth-largest market.

There is only one top 10 TV market not having a Power 5 team and that’s the fourth-largest one. The fact that Temple was the X factor in a game against Notre Dame proves that only Temple can deliver huge numbers in that market.

Winning a championship is, of course the goal, if not this season but next. Still, getting national folks used to the notion that Temple football is back is the first step toward that. Winning in prime time would certainly help

That’s a big reason why the TV people are gambling on Temple to be good again. From their lips to God’s ears.

Monday: The most optimistic projection so far

06.19.23
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What’s the Deal: Hopefully, all Cherry and White

An Open Letter to John Donahoe

CEO Nike

Beaverton, Oregon

Dear John,

Another June 19th has come and the crooked number next to my name ticked up a year.

After, say, 40, that’s almost never a good thing. It’s all downhill from here in more ways than one. My birthday was never a national holiday as a kid but I was always aware of the importance of June 19th because I looked it up even as a 7-year-old. Very proud to share it with this important and positive day in U.S. history. #Juneteenth

The only good thing that’s come out of it so far has your name (Nike) on it in the form of gifts I unwrapped yesterday.

Temple grad and CBS radio host Zach Gelb celebrates Father’s Day with dad and legendary Mike and the Mad Dog producer Bobby Gelb by wearing Under Armour versions of Cherry and White.

Just read that you renewed your deal with Temple University as the official footwear, apparel, and equipment provider for all 19 of Temple’s intercollegiate athletic programs. I was the beneficiary of some sweet Nike Temple wear today being gifted a football jersey, a Temple T-Shirt, and a Temple golf shirt.

The colors were Cherry and White with the T-Shirt and football jersey and the golf shirt was white.

Perfection.

To me, those are the best colors in college sports.

How Temple got lucky enough to wear those colors, I will never know but I am grateful.

I have one small request.

For the football team only, please supply only Cherry and White game jerseys this season.

They can practice in blue, green, purple, and gray but please make the gamers Cherry and White.

There are a couple of reasons for that.

One, the abovementioned “opinion” that Cherry and White are the best colors in all of sports, let alone college football.

The second is a more factual one.

Temple almost never wins football games wearing anything but Cherry and White.

Statistically, it’s not just bad luck, it’s terrible luck.

Since Temple began regularly wearing colors like black and gray in football games, the Karma of rejecting Cherry and White is there in, well, black and white.

We’ve tracked the Temple football record since they started wearing other colors post-Al Golden Era and the numbers are not good. The Owls are 2-18 wearing black, 1-1 wearing gray, and 55-45 wearing some combination of Cherry and White.

That alone should be enough for Stan Drayton and company to demand only Cherry and White uniforms but if that’s all you supply, that solves the problem right there.

Don’t do it for my birthday.

Do it for all of the birthdays of all of Temple’s fans.

Your sales will go up, I promise.

Thanks,

Mike Gibson

Friday: The Temple TV schedule

06.16.23
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This year, the cliche is true about first games

I’m not touching the Temple game but I really like Northwestern getting 6 at Rutgers right now.

The odds came out this week for the first college football weekend of the year.

Temple opened as a 10-point favorite over visiting Akron in the opener and that immediately dropped to nine the next day.

While it’s nice that Vegas set the Owls as a double-digit favorite, the public wasn’t buying it.

The old cliche is that your most important game is your next one is especially true about Temple hosting Akron this season.

If the Owls win, they are off and running and probably bowl-bound.

If Joe Dickhead, err, Moorhead can beat Matt Rhule with Fordham talent, he can certainly beat Stan Drayton with Akron talent. I’ve had a lot of low moments as a Temple fan, including suffering through a 20-game losing streak but this post-game tailgate was definitely the worst.

If they lose, some serious questions arise about whether they will be 3-9 for the third-straight season. Or whether they have the right leadership going forward.

Make no mistake about it. Akron CAN beat Temple.

Whether it will or not is another question.

Put it this way. The Akron team facing Temple in 2023 will be a lot more formidable one than the Akron team that lost to Rod Carey in the otherwise forgettable 2021 season, 45-24.

First, the Zips have a big-time coach in Joe Moorhead. There is no question he can beat Stan Drayton because he took lesser talent and beat an objectively better coach than Drayton (Matt Rhule) in 2013 when he took an FCS Fordham team into Temple and came away with a win.

Since then, Moorhead became a head coach in the Power 5 (Mississippi State) before Drayton did and fell victim to the unreasonable expectations that come with P5 fan bases.

Last year, in his first one at Akron, his team got better as the season went on and it finished with a 44-12 thumping of a Northern Illinois team and almost beat a better Buffalo team the next week, losing by just a point. That Buffalo team finished 7-6 and beat Georgia Southern, 23-21, in the Camellia Bowl. (Yes, the same Georgia Southern that beat Rhule’s current Nebraska team earlier in the season.)

Here’s why I think Temple will win. Akron needed overtime to beat St. Francis last year and St. Francis lost to a Lafayette team Temple hammered, 30-14. Also, the Houston and ECU teams Temple hung with in the latter half of the season were probably significantly better than Buffalo and NIU. Probably, but I don’t know for sure.

Not much evidence to go on since both the learning curves for Temple and Akron went up significantly as the season progressed.

Not enough evidence to bet the house and farm on the Owls so they have to make sure they cross the I’s and dot the T’s on a solid game plan over the next three months. The first film to dissect is the Fordham at Temple film of 2013.

The Owls will have to make sure they are ready for everything and anything Moorhead will throw at them and, hopefully, they did not bury that game film.

Monday: What’s The Deal?

06.12.23
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An Award Temple football fans can get behind

Two weeks after Maryland beat Al Golden’s Miami team, 32-24, Bill Bradshaw congratulates Steve Addazio here for beating Maryland, 38-7. It wasn’t that close. After Maryland scored a late fourth-quarter garbage touchdown, Daz had the Owls take three knees inside the Maryland 5 instead of winning 45-7.

Nobody knows how many mistakes an athletic director is allowed to make but, at a place like Temple, the margin of error is smaller than others.

On Sunday, a guy who hit AT LEAST .666 on Temple football coaching hires got the most prestigious athletic director honor that can be awarded: The James J. Corbett Memorial Award is a US award given annually by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA). It is presented “to the collegiate administrator who through the years has most typified Corbett’s devotion to intercollegiate athletics and worked unceasingly for its betterment.”

Pretty precise language when it comes to Bradshaw’s contribution to Temple football.

When you’ve had collegiate football since 1984 (and the school was founded 10 years earlier), and you hire two of the best four college football coaches at said school, you’ve done a remarkable job.

Bill Bradshaw’s photo at the ceremony on Sunday. He seemingly gets younger with each season.

Very few people can argue that Al Golden and Matt Rhule were two of the best four hires in Temple history. (The other two are inarguable: College Football Hall of Famers Wayne Hardin and Pop Warner.)

For one AD to hire half, that’s a job well done and, at least at Temple, fit the criteria of “devotion to intercollegiate athletics and (working) unceasingly for its betterment.”

Put it this way: Compared to the three hires his successor made, Bradshaw knocked it out of the park. Pat Kraft hired, in order, Geoff Collins, Manny Diaz and Rod Carey. The less said about those three the better.

That also applies to the more said about the three prior football hirings: Golden, Rhule and Steve Addazio.

Pretty good for a guy who was a baseball player at LaSalle and came from a place (DePaul) that didn’t have college football.

To put it in Bradshaw’s best sports terms, Golden and Rhule were upper-deck home runs. Daz was certainly not a strike-out or fly out but the argument can be made that he was at least a gap double (first bowl win in over 30 years) or a hard-hit single off the wall while being thrown out at second (his 4-7 season the next year).

Bill sets the record straight on TU football attendance.

Although Collins won a bowl game with a worse record than Daz, he never quite fulfilled his promise (Mayhem) here and Diaz struck out looking while Carey was a swinging strikeout.

Bradshaw’s gift in my mind at least was a knowledge of Philadelphia (he went to LaSalle) and common sense.

He took a yellow legal pad with him to Charlottesville to interview then Virginia DC Golden, watched Golden pull out a binder of East Coast recruiting and coaching contacts, listened to what he had to say, and, on the way home, jotted down: “This is our guy.”

With Rhule, who finished second to Daz the first time, Bradshaw listened to all of the Temple players but still kept his options open. When Mario Cristobal asked for directions to Temple from the Philadelphia International Airport, Bradshaw had second thoughts. Everyone from the Temple police to the players to the cafeteria people met and loved Matt Rhule, who knew every nook and cranny of Temple. Then he ran into Temple icon (and assistant AD) Al Shrier in the hallway of the Liacouras Center.

“Bill, listen to me. Hire Matt Rhule.”

That was all he needed to hear.

Temple was off and running in football again, surpassing what even Golden had done. If you had Temple being unbeaten and hosting College Football Gameday (and then grabbing the all-time single-highest prime-time TV rating FOR ANY COLLEGE FOOTBALL game in the history of the nation’s fourth-largest market), then you might have been the only one. I never saw that coming. That was a day and night we might never see again for Temple football.

A large part of the credit for Oct. 31, 2015 goes to Bill Bradshaw.

For those of us who benefited that day, the Corbett Award is the least he deserves. Sainthood could be in his future, but let’s hope that is many years away. What he did for Temple football was perform the requisite three miracles.

Friday: That First Weekend

Monday: What’s the Deal?

06.09.23
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The game Temple should have never turned down

Twenty-two days after the Giants won this NFL title Temple lost to Tulane in the Sugar Bowl.

Not quite a century ago Temple was approached by the New York Giants and the Mara family (who still own the team) and asked to play a game to “legitimize” in the mind of the public that the NFL game was at least the equal of good college teams.

Temple rejected the idea out of hand.

Haven’t seen the Temple football team called “Husky” in my lifetime.

Yeah, it happened long before you and I were born and probably before anyone else who has ever read this space, but wouldn’t it have been neat if the Owls accepted the November 9, 1935 game? Hell, since it was the Giants’ idea in the first place it would probably have been played at Temple Stadium.

The Temple coach, Pop Warner, wanted to keep the date as a “breather” for his team (called a bye nowadays) but the accepted truism then was that a good college team like Temple would have beaten an NFL team.

Pop, what the heck were you doing?

My, how times have changed.

Now even crazy Georgia fans are called nuts when they think they can play with the worst NFL team, let alone the best one.

Let it be known, though, for the rest of all time that the only NFL CHAMPION to ever challenge a college team was the New York Giants and the only COLLEGE team to ever be challenged to a game was the Temple Owls.

Kinda surprising because the Owls were not even the Georgia or Alabama of their day that year. They finished 7-3 and beat national powers Vanderbilt and Texas A&M but maybe the Maras were banking on the good publicity they would get beating a respected college team not that far from where the Giants played. Probably the fact that Warner was the most high-profile coach of the 1930s also factored into the offer.

Just think, though, if Temple had accepted the challenge. The Owls could have struck a blow for the college game or, on the other hand, helped legitimize the NFL years before it beat out baseball and became the national pastime. It was a win/win situation for Temple because no one would have blamed a team of amateurs for losing to a team where everyone got paid.

We will never know.

But we do know this: The New York Giants could have challenged Miami,, Rutgers, Penn State or Georgia.

They chose Temple.

No other NFL team chose anyone else.

Somewhere in Heaven, if Pop was honest, he’d probably be as curious as the rest of us how it might have turned out.

Monday: Rating The Hires