Tag Archives: Temple football

12.31.21
by

Drayton hiring: Maybe logic doesn’t apply

Stan Drayton will always be a Texas guy hired by another Texas guy until he starts hiring TEMPLE guys.

There is no doubt that a significant portion of the Temple football fan base believes Temple made the right call by hiring Stan Drayton as a head coach but what he has done the first couple of weeks certainly has defied conventional wisdom.

First, he recruited a defensive lineman (no names, please, he’s just a kid) who had exactly one sack in his last full season as a high school player.

Then, he supposedly hired a co-defensive coordinator from Villanova without (officially, at least) hiring the other co-defensive coordinator.

That struck me as odd because the “other” rumored guy is someone who hemorrhaged points as a DC at various stops on the FBS level and might (err, probably doesn’t) even know or is sympatico with the philosophy of the Villanova guy. They might not butt heads once they get in the same room but what if they don’t get along?

That’s a headache Drayton doesn’t need.

No doubt in my mind Ed Foley would come back to fix Temple’s putrid special teams if Stan Drayton makes a phone call to Matt Rhule. That would put a lot of anxious Temple fans’ minds at ease.

You are allowed to question whether this guy knows what he’s doing, at least on the CEO level.

Put it this way: Drayton was a position coach all of his life and had limited responsibility. Now, he’s overseeing the entire operation and is a little like a guy fumbling around for the light to a room he first entered.

Excuse me for having the feeling that, say, Al Golden would have had this CEO part of the job locked down. If he liked the Villanova defensive guy, he would have named him sole DC and handed off the keys to that third of the team to him. He would have put the other third of the team, specials, on autopilot by adding old buddy and Temple lifer Ed Foley before tackling the final third.

Instead of a DL guy who had only one sack, Golden might have been able to recruit a Pennsylvania Big 33 sackmeister MVP like Adrian Robinson. Oh wait. He already did and Arob made a huge impact at Temple (rest in peace). Somewhere in that Al Golden binder of Mid-Atlantic recruits, I have to believe he already had the second coming of AR in mind and that kid might have produced double-digit sacks in a good high school league.

Golden would have known all the nooks and crannies of every room at the E-O without having to turn on a single light.

For now, at least in this space, Drayton will remain a Texas guy hired by a Texas guy until he starts hiring Temple guys and that hasn’t happened. Even Miami’s Manny Diaz hired four Temple guys right off the bat.

Maybe, though, that approach is wrong. Only time will tell.

Watching the Pitt-Michigan State game last night, I was able to give Drayton (and by extension President Jason Wingard and new athletic director Arthur Johnson) the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe the game has evolved (err, devolved) to the point that logic no longer matters.

Follow me here: Michigan State ONLY beat Pitt in the Peach Bowl because former Temple commit Kenny Pickett opted out. The teams that win league championships and bring home great bowl game trophies in the future might be coached by guys who get the PLAYERS to buy into his system and not the logic CEO guys. Drayton could overcome a lot of these early miscues by proving to be the player’s guy Rod Carey wasn’t. Because MSU coach Mel Tucker got his players to buy in and Pat Narducci didn’t get all of his players to do the same, the MSU fans came home happy and the Pitt fans were crying.

It’s a short straw, but it’s the only one I’ve got so far.

Fortunately, most of my fellow Temple fans are buying into the hire. For this shaky initial start, my body is in Pennsylvania but my mind has moved to Missouri.

Show me.

Unfortunately, those results won’t be in for another 11 months.

Winning the great majority of football games, getting AAC championships, AND not going 6-6, not chasing greatness, is the only barometer that really matters. You have to demand greatness and be great, not just chase it.

Just win. It’s that simple and that hard.

Monday: The AAC

Friday: The Quick Fix

12.26.21
by

Drayton seems to have won half the battle

Chuck Heater was so popular with Temple players he received this post-game Gatoraid shower after leading the Owls to their first bowl win in 30 years.

There are plenty of battles ahead for a team that finished 1-6 and 3-9 in consecutive shocking seasons, but new Temple football coach Stan Drayton seems to have won half the battle in just two short weeks.

He applied the tourniquet and seems to have stopped the transfer portal bleeding. No significant players have announced they are leaving and that’s something that couldn’t be said in this same two-week period a year ago.

That’s something that cannot be minimized because former head coach Rod Carey took a figurative knife to work every day and there was more bleeding at the E-O than in the movie Psycho.

The players didn’t like him, and their dislike for him never seemed to bother Carey. In the era of the transfer portal, that kind of indifference is a death sentence.

Not surprising that you needed a bucket to clean up all of the bleeding of the players who went out the door.

The other half of the battle is assembling a good staff. Without mentioning names, there is some discussion of bringing in a guy from Kansas and Colorado who allowed more than 30 ppgs in high-profile DC jobs.

Drayton promised at his opening-day press conference to attempt to bring in staff members with ties to Temple and Philadelphia but, so far, the new DL coach has a tie to Lafayette and a recent job at Colorado State. Bringing in Chuck Heater as DC would seem to me to be a no-brainer since Heater was the new CSU guy’s boss AND was the last DC at Temple to post back-to-back shutouts (2011). Math was never my best subject, but I’ll take a guy who allowed zero points in consecutive games AT TEMPLE over one who averaged 30ppg any day of the week and Heater is available, seemed to enjoy his time at Temple (biking to practice every day from Center City) and understands Temple TUFF as well as any outsider.

Chuck Heater went over to Marshall and had success after leaving Temple

The staff evaluation will have to wait until Drayton’s full Gang of 10 on-field assistants are assembled, but the early returns in that area are not good.

Most of the staff remains to be picked so, if Drayton has as good a second half this week as the Eagles had yesterday, everybody in “Temple Philadelphia” and not “Lafayette Philadelphia” will be happy.

Drayton’s first message to the team indicated a good sense of evaluating the film and this quote was particularly telling:

“The little bit of film that I did see, I saw some quit show up,” Drayton said.  “And we talked about what greatness is.  Greatness has no quit in it at all.  And that showed up.  And that bothers me.  However, if as a football team we can face that as a reality, accept it for what it is, then I know we can move forward.”

That’s something just about every Temple fan noticed post the Memphis game and even some players alluded to it.

It appears he will be moving forward with the bulk of this year’s roster buying in and the first step toward program health is stopping that bleeding and maybe as much as half the battle. Don’t know if choosing assistants can be called the other half, but it’s at least the first quarter.

Friday: Areas of Need

12.25.21
by

Merry Christmas from Temple Football Forever

EDITOR’S NOTE: Instead of JUST a Yule Log this year, we’re going to republish a story of ours that appeared at the top of the Philadelphia Daily News Op-Ed page on Sept. 25, 2003. We wish all of our readers (even the haters) a very Merry Christmas and a lot of Temple wins in 2022 but, more importantly, good health.

By MIKE GIBSON

I’M A TEMPLE football fan – and I’m going straight to heaven when I die. All Temple football fans will.
I say that because we are doing our time in hell right now.
“Temple football fan?” St. Peter will ask. “Go right ahead. You’ve suffered enough.”
Suffered through a dozen straight losing seasons, where many of us had just been beaten down too much and just gave up.
Not me.
Hope is all I have.


Hope . . . and suffering.
Suffering from being a fan of a school that’s the only one in history to be booted out of a major conference.
Suffering through the agony of not knowing until Aug. 13 where – or if – we would have a home field for a season that started on the road later that month.
Suffering, too, when newspaper estimates noted up to 10,000 fans turned away because of Temple’s poor ticket service at the first game at Lincoln Financial Field. (Lord knows, we need as many fans as we can get.)
But that suffering pales in comparison to what we go through watching what transpires on the field.
Take the last two games, for instance . . .
Please.
In the 106-year history of Temple football, there have been only two overtime games – the last two.
Two excruciatingly painful overtime losses, the first to a city neighbor, Villanova, that plays its ball in Division IAA, a full classification lower than Temple’s. Temple blew a chance to win in overtime when it had two consecutive false starts and then lost in double overtime.
If that weren’t bad enough, we Temple fans had to deal with that sour taste in our mouths waiting two full weeks for the next game.
That game, on Saturday at unbeaten 13-point favorite Cincinnati, finally came. So, Temple’s kicker missed field goals from 37 and 24 yards. Temple, with a 24-10 fourth quarter lead, threw a bomb on 2nd and 2. Incomplete, of course. The Owls also threw three passes when they had a first-and-goal on the Cincinnati 2.
INCOMPLETE, of course. Lost in three overtimes.
No one fully understands the searing, deep-in-the-stomach, pain that causes – other than a long-suffering Temple fan.
I should know. I’m the football fan a certain weekend sports talk-show host is referring to when he says, “My friend, Mike, the Temple football fan, says . . .”
My “friend” the talk-show host uses the word “the” for a reason. It’s his friendly dig at Temple fans, calling me the only one.
But I’m not.
More than 30,000 came out for the first Temple game at the Linc. And, judging from the cheering, more than three-quarters were pulling for the Owls.
Many of us remember the halcyon days in the ’70s of Wayne Hardin – the coach who went 80-52-3. And many of us have been waiting for a similar savior to come along to return us to the Promised Land. But while we remember, most others have forgotten.
Our suffering goes beyond the field to vague areas like perception, outdated stereotypes and beliefs.
With each loss and the thousands of ways we seem to find a way to lose, the suffering becomes more intense.
So excuse us when we bypass you in that long line at the Pearly Gates.
This story first appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News, Sept. 25, 2003.

12.24.21
by

Temple’s Drayton trying to buck history

The best Jeopardy question ever.

If Temple football ever had a question on Wheel of Fortune, the letters might fill in something like this:

What school had a football team that no head coach from there ever won here?

Temple University.

Technically, yes, at least in the last 20 or so years, although the “from here” part is loosely up for debate.

Al Golden,, from Colts Neck N.J. with a binder of Mid-Atlantic area recruits?

Close enough, especially when you throw in the only Temple player of the year from its short time in the Big East was Colts Neck native Dan Klecko.

Matt Rhule?

Anyone who was born in New York City (a short 90 miles away) and played at rival Penn State AND drove up from Western Carolina to knock on Golden’s door begging for a job at Temple?

Definitely from here.

So the two guys who were credited for a) performing CPR on a dead patient and b) getting that patient from the rehab center to winning track meets? Definitely from here.

Jerry Berndt, Ron Dickerson, Bobby Wallace?

Definitely not from here and it showed in their abysmal Temple numbers.

Stan Drayton?

Not so sure.

Does coaching at Penn and Villanova qualify from here?

Not to me, sorry. Having lived in Philadelphia all of my life, I’m 100 percent convinced that both Penn and Villanova are as Philly as Cal Berkely and Boston College, in that order.

Temple is Philadelphia.

Bringing back Ed Foley would immediately fix Temple’s broken special teams.

So Stan starts from behind the eight ball.

Love the endorsements from all of Stan’s ex-players and other coaches who worked with him about Stan but, to me, the best indicator of his future success is the amount of “Temple” guys he surrounds himself with. We’re not talking Penn guys or Villanova guys, but Temple guys. Temple is a special place, much more special than Villanova or Penn.

If Stan’s moves prove to the fans that he understands that, he will hit the ground running.

Losing Gabe Infante was a negative that could be offset by bringing back Ed Foley to hand the keys of the special teams. Bringing in the Texas recruiting coordinator would be nice but adding a defensive coordinator like former Temple LB coach Mike Siravo would be nicer.

I don’t know what Stan Drayton will decide in the next few days but being from there and trying to win here was something Rod Carey tried to do.

He fell flat on his face but, in doing so, gave Stan Drayton a blueprint for success. Stan only needs to follow it. Keep the outside guys outta here and concentrate on how the Temple guys can help.

That’s a much faster way to re-establish the “Temple TUFF” culture than bringing an all-star staff from Texas and Ohio State.

That other way has been tried and failed. The Temple Way is tried and true.

Final college football picks of the year: Would love to pick Cincy getting the 13.5 against Bama but, like all G5 football fans, will watch that with a rooting interest only. Only three games jumped out to me:

EAST CAROLINA getting 3 against BC in the Military Bowl. ECU beat Temple, 45-3 and BC beat Temple, 28-3; MICHIGAN STATE laying the 2.5 against Pitt without former Temple commit Kenny Pickett (opting-out) in the Peach Bowl (hell, freaking WESTERN Michigan beat Pitt with Kenny); UTAH getting 6.5 against Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. Utah has been a completely different team since losing to BYU in the Holy War.

Record for the season: 28-25-1. Hopefully, we will hit the 30-win mark by the New Year.

Tomorrow: The Log

Monday: Upgrading the roster

12.20.21
by

Now Drayton starts the hard work

Getty Images

There were plenty of things to like about Stan Drayton’s opening press conference and what he said.

What he did not say was how hard the work he starts this week will be so what happened on Sunday night added some context.

Props to Scott Grayson of Fox29 for the kind of sit-down interview on Sunday night with a new Temple head football coach we used to see the night of the hire.

Channel 6’s Ducis Rodgers did more of a “stand-up” interview at 11:45.

Better late than never.

The Sunday night show on the other two major Philadelphia channels featured a rehashing of the NFL’s decision to postpone the Eagles’ game with Washington.

Yawn.

Temple legends Ed Foley, Matt Rhule, and P.J. Walker.

At least Philadelphia fans were exposed to Temple, which is also a good thing.

What Drayton didn’t say at the press conference, he touched on in the interviews–which was how tough the task will be to clean up the mess left by Rod Carey, without mentioning either the mess or Carey’s name.

“I’m in the process of interviewing coaches; I’m in the process of recruiting players and talking to my own players,” Drayton told Grayson. “Recruiting will be the lifeblood of any program.

“We’re sitting in a hotbed of talent … there is a pool of talent. There is enough for more than just Temple. Temple has to build that culture right here in that backyard.”

At the press conference, Drayton used the term “chasing greatness.” Geez, since everyone “chases” greatness, I wish he said something more definitive like “we’re going to win championships and bowl games.”

Matt Rhule mentioned that in his presser. Steve Addazio promised “multiple bowls wins” even though he delivered just one.

That’s nit-picking, though, compared to the work ahead.

To me, the first thing should he should do is what Manny Diaz did in his short 18 days–commit to a Temple-centric staff that then included Ed Foley, Adam DiMichele and Fran Brown. Diaz was credited with hiring Gabe Infante. Now Drayton can shore up a lot of recruiting by keeping Infante to lock down the Pennsylvania side of the river and Preston Brown the New Jersey side.

Carey’s biggest mistake was bringing an entire Northern Illinois staff to Temple, and easing out Temple guys like DiMichele, Foley and Fran Brown. He did hire Preston Brown, but it was too little, too late.

It’s a positive that in the Sunday interviews Brown reiterated his desire to bring in “Philadelphia” coaching connections but hopefully, that emphasis is on “Temple Philadelphia” and not “Villanova Philadelphia” or “Penn Philadelphia.”

The first move would be to bring Foley back. Matt Rhule is in trouble and rumors are that he will be fired. Getting the best college special teams coach in the country would be a major coup for Drayton who, if he watched the film over the last two years, knows that Temple’s special teams have been a joke. Foley would also help with local recruiting.

Other than that, you can expect Drayton to build a staff based on his 28 years of contacts at several schools. Let’s hope he keeps his promise about Philadelphia connections and, specifically, knowledge of and appreciation for Temple itself.

Friday: Quick Turnaround

12.17.21
by

Drayton Presser: Hope for the best …

Another five or so years pass another Temple football incoming head coach presser.

Those of us Temple football fans approaching the half-century mark of these (meekly raising my hand here) know the drill.

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

Jerry Berndt on his signing day in 1989.

It’s a hard lesson taught by Father Time.

Stan Drayton seems like a very nice guy and he, like so many first-time Temple head coaches, said all of the right things.

Yet I can’t get out of my head that this was another crony hire and neither of the past two cronies worked.

If former Texas Director of Football Operations Arthur Johnson hired anyone else other than a Texas assistant coach for the Temple job, I would have felt a little better today because the past two Temple ADs who tried the same thing fell on their faces.

This is what we wrote here a couple of days after Rod Carey was fired.

LaSalle University second baseman Bill Bradshaw hired his old shortstop, Fran Dunphy, to follow John Chaney, tossing underhanded the storied basketball franchise. Dunphy pivoted and threw that ball over the dugout for a run-scoring error.

Indiana football player and 2000 grad Pat Kraft hired another Indiana former football player and 1995 grad Rod Carey and that was a fumble picked up by the bad guys and run the other way for six.

Now you tell me that of the dozens of qualified people who applied for this job, Drayton was hired NOT because he knew Johnson at Texas but because he was the best man for the job?

Hard to believe, Harry.

Pretty much the day after Carey was fired, I wrote in this space that I had the “sinking feeling” that Drayton would get the job because of the proclivity of Temple ADs to go for comfort level rather than getting the best guy for the job.

This was our blog post on the day Temple hired Manny Diaz. We were off only about 348 days.

That was three years after and BEFORE Manny Diaz got the Temple job that I had a “sinking feeling” that Diaz would get it because I knew Pat Kraft was enamored with the “hot coordinator” hire. Then, when Kraft was dumped by the hot chick, he went to the comfortable 2 a.m. drunk option: Carey. Before Kraft could turn on the lights and see the ugly person he was sleeping with, he put on his pants and headed off to Boston College.

Thanks for the visual, Pat.

Now, like with Jerry Berndt, Ron Dickerson, and Bobby Wallace, we can only hope for the best with Drayton.

Geez, I hope the guy wins a national championship–or at least an AAC one–but I’ve seen this rodeo before.

When Peter J. Liacouras hired Dickerson in 1992, Ron said: “I think I can do for Temple football what coach (John) Chaney has done for Temple basketball. We want to be nationally prominent.” Dickerson finished 8-47 at Temple.

When Jerry Berndt was hired in 1989, he said at his presser: “The potential here is too good to pass up.” Berndt finished 11-33 at Temple.

Our comment post SIX DAYS before Diaz was hired. We were right about Manny then, we hope to hell we’re wrong about Stan now.

All of you who follow this space know I was for the “sure thing” hire and, to me, that was Al Golden.

I was not a big proponent of Fran Brown but seeing the support for him from recent Temple alumni (and almost all of the guys currently in the NFL from Temple), I thought getting those guys behind the program was more important than satisfying the new AD’s comfort level. Drayton’s hiring was panned pretty much by every current Temple NFL player who chimed in on Twitter Thursday. All-time quarterback P.J. Walker tweeted simply: “Temple coach, LOL!” Numerous area high school coaches, like the current one at Northeast High in Philadelphia and the current one at Lakewood (N.J.) tweeted that Temple blew it with this hire, knowing that Brown wanted the job.

I’d rather have P.J.’s support than not. You can toss in Sean Chandler, Haason Reddick and pretty much every prominent ex-Owl. I’d rather have local high school coaches screaming their support of this hire on both sides of the river. Instead, opposition or stone-cold silence was the pervasive reaction on Thursday.

Call me crazy, but that’s the logic.

Drayton will be swimming upstream against all that but he will have Johnson pushing him in a motorboat against the initial tide.

For all Temple football fans, let’s pray to God that’s enough.

Monday: What Stan did not say

Friday: Quick Turnaround

Monday (12/28): Stopping the bleeding

12.12.21
by

TU Announcement: Avoid High Risk at all Costs

New Temple University athletic director Arthur Johnson probably had plenty of time to pull out a book while watching one of those boring 52-3 or 49-7 football losses his team had this fall.

Or maybe it was the 44-10 one or the 37-8 one?

Hopefully, he read Bob Reiss’ 2000 book, “Low Risk High Reward,” which should be must reading for any Temple athletic director and it particularly applies to the current search for this school.

Reiss played basketball on an unbeaten Columbia University team in the 1960s and applied much of his competitiveness to the business world.

Simply put, Reiss argues against the “High Risk, High Reward” theory that has been accepted by some. He advocates that low risk can produce high reward as well.

A lot of these assistant coaches Temple seems to be wooing come under the theory of “High Risk, High Reward” and, if Reiss was part of the search firm hired by Temple, he would probably present a compelling reason why that’s not the way to go for the university at this time.

Reason No. 1: There are a couple of “low risk, high reward” candidates out there so there’s no need to go the high-risk route. Reason No. 2: If the high-risk assistant proves The Peter Principle (rising to his level of incompetence), then Temple football will be sentenced to a Dark Age where they will have no choice of honoring a bad contract for the duration. Bob Diaco, the National Assistant Coach of the year who fell flat on his face at UConn, is the perfect example of a highly-regarded assistant coach not being able to handle the headset on gameday. He basically killed the UConn program.

Temple can’t afford to pay off Rod Carey, pay the next guy millions and then find out a couple years into a five-year contract that the new guy is Rod Carey 2.0.

Places like Miami and USC have the wherewithal to replace a bad coach every couple of years. Temple’s quota is one firing every generation.

They will have to suck it up and lose big for five years and that might be the death knell of the program.

The solution is simple: Lower the risk by getting a proven winning head coach (no matter what the level) who comes with an intimate knowledge of Temple and how to produce a high reward in this specific job.

Al Golden is such a guy. If he’s not interested, Gabe Infante and Preston Brown are proven head coaching winners whose time at Temple gave them an outline of what needs to be done to turn things around here.

Anyone else is a crapshoot and Temple doesn’t have the chips to play craps with this hiring.

There’s no need for the risks associated with hiring a Texas running backs’ coach or a Texas A&M defensive line coach, a current NFL assistant or even another MAC head coach.

Temple has the chance over the next couple of days to prove to the world that the lower the risk the higher the reward.

Friday: Reaction to the Hiring

12.09.21
by

TU coaching search: Checking all the boxes?

Had an interesting text back-and-forth with a longtime observer of Temple football who mentioned Candidate X (we won’t say who his name is) and added confidently, “he checks all the boxes.”

Hmm.

“Where’s the box for prior head coaching experience?”

“Err, all the boxes except that one, I mean.”

“That’s a box, too, and a pretty important one.”

“You mean like Rod Carey?”

“No, Temple needs to find a guy who checks all 10 boxes, not nine of the 10 boxes. Carey checked the head coaching box, but didn’t check the other nine boxes (things like knowledge of the recruiting footprint, Temple personnel, etc.)”

My point was that if you can get a guy who has head coaching experience, knowledge of Temple personnel and recruiting footprint and all the other boxes, why not go for the 10 boxes, not the nine?

If someone like that wasn’t out there and available, that would be one thing but there are a few.

Our post from Dec. 3 … I still have that feeling and I hope to hell I’m wrong.

Hopefully, the Temple administration gets a guy who checks all the boxes and, in my opinion, that eliminates all but a very few top candidates.

Al Golden checks all the boxes. Gabe Infante checks all the boxes and, to a lesser extent, a guy like Chris Partridge (Ole Miss DC) checks all the boxes due to his one year as head coach at Paramaus High. Lesser extent is the key phrase here. In fact, Preston Brown’s two seasons as a regional South Jersey championship head coach catapults him over Partridge in the all-important head coaching box. He already has him beaten in the knowledge of Temple and recruiting department. (Although Partridge does have a rudimentary knowledge of Mid-Atlantic recruiting.) Golden and Infante, like both Fran and Preston Brown, are popular with the players (and the players’ families) and have the added bonus of being winning head coaches.

Golden, Infante, Patridge and Brown pairs the guys who check all of the boxes to just four. Dan Mullen checks the head coaching box, as does Eastern Michigan’s Chris Creighton, but getting a guy who understands Temple in and out are the top boxes. Mullen and Creighton strike me as Carey 2.0. While all of the other high-profile head coaches have gone to the big power schools, Temple does have a chance to hire one head coach who would be better for Temple than all of them.

Head coaching experience might not be the most important box, but it needs to be on the “all boxes” list. It would be nice to have a coach who locks down special teams, who has an attacking defense (and not a slogan like Mayhem) and a ball-control offense that keeps your own defense off the field.

That comes with experience calling the plays and being a CEO of a successful program. College experience is preferred, but if you’ve proven you can be the CEO of a championship program at a lower level, that’s better than a running backs coach who has not.

Why do I get the feeling that Temple will hire someone who checks some of the boxes and not all?

That’s because the names I’ve been hearing, like Texas connections Elijah Robinson (A&M line coach) and Stan Drayton (Texas RB coach) keep popping up.

If the search committee serves as a guardrail in place so that another crony hire doesn’t blow up in Temple’s face (like Pat Kraft and Rod Carey and Bill Bradshaw and Fran Dunphy), it will have served its purpose.

Hopefully, they’ve got a list that doesn’t miss any boxes and they check them all off.

Monday: The Announcement

12.06.21
by

Carey’s failure should be a warning for Temple

“Why don’t the guys like me, Anthony?” “Well, coach, you are pretty aloof, you don’t care about special teams and I’m not a running quarterback and you are trying to get me killed in this RPO. Other than that, they like you just fine.”

Somewhere, a few hundred miles apart, a couple of men are scratching their heads and asking a single question over and over again.

“What went wrong?”

One guy, Pat Kraft, lives in Chestnut Hill, Mass.

Rod Carey’s tenure at Temple would make a great 30-for-30 someday.

The other, Rod Carey, was last seen packing boxes onto a pickup truck in Haddonfield, N.J.

The answer to the question should dictate how Temple hires its next head coach and it’s a pretty simple one: The game as currently constituted has passed coaches like Carey by and he probably will have trouble getting another one simply because of his personality.

When Kraft hired fellow Indiana University alum, Carey, it looked good on paper because Carey had a 52-30 record as a head coach on the FBS level with presumably lesser talent than Temple.

Geoff Collins holding an impromptu outdoor practice in the snow 2/17/17, making football fun 365 days at Temple. Owls need to find someone who gets along with the players like Collins did with the gameday coaching ability of a Wayne Hardin or a Gabe Infante.

Then the transfer portal stepped in and ruined it for all old-school coaches like Carey.

The transfer portal, which really hit the Temple program at the end of the 2019 season, robbed Temple of the AAC defensive player of the year, Quincy Roche, and that opened up the floodgates for everyone else to leave the program.

Carey was an old school “my-way-or-the-highway” guy who was quoted back then as saying “if you enter the portal, you are off the team.”

He wasn’t known as the type of guy who got close to his players or whose players were comfortable confiding in him so they viewed that pronouncement as a threat and took him up on it.

In that way, he was different than his predecessor, Geoff Collins, who was close to his players and they to him. Collins has failed at Georgia Tech because he has been exposed as a subpar recruiter who took from Temple a mostly FCS-level staff but there can be no doubt that the Temple players responded better to his “type” than Carey’s. Say what you will about Collins but he cared about special teams and special teams were a three-year problem at Temple after he left.

I’d really doubt we’d have the mass bleeding in the transfer portal if Collins remained here and that’s half the battle.

The coaching on the field is the other half.

Carey also tried to force feed his NIU run-pass-option system onto players Matt Rhule mostly recruited to play another system. Had Carey tailored his schemes to the talent of his players and not the other way around, the Owls could have avoided the 63-21, 45-21 and 55-13 losses they suffered in Carey’s first season.

That was a huge red flag to the fans and the players saw it, too.

What does that mean for the next hire?

Temple has to pick someone with the personality of Collins, the gameday coaching ability of Wayne Hardin and the flexibility of someone like Rhule, who proved that he was open to change after his second season. (It was then he dumped Marcus Satterfield and the spread and went to a more NFL type offense with Glenn Thomas.)

Hard to do, but not impossible.

There is that guy out there and plenty of other G5 schools have him in Luke Fickell, Jamey Cantwell and Hugh Freeze, who possess all of those qualities. It’s naive to think that only those three and a few others have the complete package.

Finding him is difficult and, if it takes much more time than the hasty search conducted by Kraft after being burned by Manny Diaz, it will be worth the wait.

Friday: Guardrails in Place

12.03.21
by

Lesser than (Al) Golden: The other Temple HC candidates

Even the outside world realized Rod Carey was a panic hire.

Familiarity breeds contempt is a phrase ascribed to Geoffrey Chaucer way back in the 1300s.

At Temple, familiarity has bred some bad marquee head coaching hires and contempt from Owl fans toward those who made those hiring mistakes.

Like Manny Diaz, I have a sinking feeling that this is the guy. I hope Arthur Johnson can take a step back and realize that just because you are comfortable with the guy, it doesn’t mean he is the right guy for your school. See Bill Bradshaw and Pat Kraft hiring mistakes.

Bill Bradshaw, the second base part of a LaSalle University double-play combination with shortstop Fran Dunphy, hired his old pal Dunphy to be head basketball coach at Temple.

Indiana football center Pat Kraft hired another Indiana football center of roughly the same era, Rod Carey, to take Temple football from Temple TUFF to Temple SOFT in three seasons.

Can’t be too hard on Bradshaw because he hired the two best Temple football coaches of the last two decades, Al Golden and Matt Rhule.

Now new Temple AD Arthur Johnson is faced with a dilemma: Follow the familiarity formula and hire someone like Tom Herman or Stan Drayton or conduct an open search tailored to the specific needs of his new university?

I don’t see the connection between Johnson and Herman as much as I see it between Johnson and Drayton and that’s a red flag.

As former ADs Bradshaw and Kraft demonstrated, cronyism is a powerful lure in hiring.

and so has Temple. .. ” Six days before Diaz was hired I wrote this comment. I hope that we don’t see Stan Drayton hired six days from now.

To me, there are a lot of good candidates and one great candidate and that great candidate is the same guy, Al Golden, who breathed life into Temple football when it was declared brain dead in 2005. Now all he has to do is perform CPR on the same patient who has fainted and that’s a much easier football medical procedure.

It’s a heavy lift, but about half as heavy as it was 15 or so years ago.

Now we don’t know that Golden is even interested in the job. There are plenty of reasons not to be but he was linked by some pretty good sources to the UCONN job and, if he gave out feelers for that one, even he knows the Temple job is a far better one. He might be playing three-dimensional chess while we’re all playing checkers in that he likes living in Cincinnati and might hold out for that job knowing that Luke Fickell could be moving on up. Maybe he’d prefer being an NFL coordinator for half the Temple salary but I’ve never seen him as anything other than a CEO and maybe he doesn’t either.

Who knows?

All that said, I have a sinking feeling that Stan Drayton is going to be the guy when all the dust is cleared.

Why do my sinking feelings even matter?

On the day Manny Diaz got the Temple job for 18 glorious days, I wrote this:

This was our blog post on the day Temple hired Manny Diaz. We were off only about 348 days.

It wasn’t because Diaz had a prior relationship with Kraft (he didn’t), it was because Kraft was lured by getting the “hot” assistant coach.

In that piece, I said I was 100 percent against Diaz because his dad was the Mayor of Miami and he would be back at Miami in a year and Temple football would suffer because Diaz was “learning” on the job.

Well, Golden has already been in the same job and he has a graduate degree and finished first in his class.

Other candidates I’ve heard are former Golden assistant Mike Siravo, Ole Miss aide Chris Patridge, a Pitt wide receivers coach (Kenni Burns), a Minnesota running backs coach (Brennan Marion) and an Ohio State wide receivers coach (Brian Hartline). Partridge, who has had exactly one year as a head coach (Paramus High), is intriguing, as is Siravao.

Those are just a few names. There are many more.

Between Partridge and Gabe Infante, who he succeeded as Paramus head coach, I’d rather have Gabe. There’s even a good possibility that Infante, a more polished head coach than Partridge, would be able to lure Ohio State five-star quarterback Kyle McCord (with who he won three state titles) to Temple since McCord is stuck behind another freshman at OSU, C.J. Stroud.

Still, none of those guys being hired will sell 1/10th of the season tickets Al Golden will on his name recognition alone. Forget the fact that he has already proven he can perform the SAME EXACT job at the HIGHEST LEVEL possible.

Everybody else is a crapshoot. Golden is knowing you are rolling a pair of dice that only ends up in sevens and elevens.

All along I’ve maintained that Fran Brown needs to go somewhere else (FCS perhaps) and prove he can coach on the field before Temple hands the keys to a $17 million vehicle to him.

Between Marion, Burns and Hartline, though, I’d take Fran Brown any day of the week.

Hire any of those no-names from anywhere other than here and Temple fans will say: “Who?”

No thanks.

Guys like Burns, Marion and Hartline would be impossible sells to a fan base suffering from PTS after watching a two-year trainwreck. Golden would be the best sell by far and Brown would be better than these other assistant coaches.

Drayton might be the guy who Johnson is most comfortable but it would be as wrong a choice as Bradshaw picking Dunphy and Kraft picking Carey.

If Johnson can avoid that temptation, he will make a great hire for Temple.

If my sinking feeling never comes to pass, Arthur Johnson will prove that he’s able to make the best decisions for Temple and not for his comfort level and he would be a hero to all current Temple fans for that.

PICKS THIS WEEK: WESTERN KENTUCKY +2.5 vs. Utsa, APP ST. -2 vs. Louisiana Lafayette and WAKE FOREST +3.5 vs. Pitt (mainly because that game is in Charlotte).

Update: Waited until the last week of the season to suffer our first losing week and it was a doozy, going 0-3 with losses thanks to Wake, App. State and Western Kentucky. Finished the regular part of the season 28-25-1. Will pick and choose the bowls better.

Monday: Where Carey went wrong

Friday: Guardrails in place