Tag Archives: Temple football

03.20.20
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Uncertainty is the word of the day

temple football fans,

Hopefully, someday this will be a return to normalcy

Got a call a couple of weeks ago from my new season-ticket representative.

“Mike, this is (named withheld) new season-ticket representative. How are you today? Just wanted to touch base if you want to renew your season tickets?”

“I think I’m going to hold off until after Cherry and White Day,” I said.

Then the next day came the news that there would be no Cherry and White Day on top of no March Madness on top of no opening day and that Temple football spring practice would be pushed back for two weeks.

Penn State fans and over-reaction

The opposite of social distancing

In the ensuing days after that, we’ve heard that there would be no spring practice, no spring sports and we might not see baseball until June.

Uncertainty is the word of the day and we are now faced with the real possibility that the season itself could be delayed.

The best-case scenario is that “the curve” of available treatment for the coronavirus will be flattened so that the health care system is not overwhelmed by the summer. That means increased social distancing in addition to constant washing of hands. This virus is super contagious so if you turn the light on to wash your hands, then wash your hands, then turn the light off, you can catch it with the second touch if you didn’t clean the switch surface.

Crazy.

So you’ve got to be constantly aware of your environment.

The most important thing is not sports now but getting to the other side and keeping as many of us healthy as possible. So if you can, quaranteen. If you can’t, wear gloves as much as possible and be aware of cleaning surfaces as well as hands.

That said, I can always renew the season tickets in August. The only good thing about Temple football in a 70K stadium is that practicing social distancing won’t be as hard this fall as, say, at Alabama.

Monday: Business As Usual 

 

03.16.20
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Temple football’s moving parts

NCAA Football: Florida at Miami

Scott Patchan was available for Temple until six days ago, when he decided to join Steve Addazio and Todd Centeio at Colorado State. At least Daz seems to have mastered the portal.

While the Temple football Owls could have replaced Don Bosco (and Temple) grad Matt Hennessy and AAC Player of the Year Quincy Roche with a couple of standouts from this year’s opponents in the portal, Rod Carey has decided to move some chess pieces he already had to replace the ones he lost.

According to OwlsDaily.com, the Temple head coach has moved tackle Adam Klein to center.  That makes right tackle, a position of strength, weaker. Since Hennessy is an NFL player, that also means center is weaker.

It also doesn’t do much for your depth chart.

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Not much depth, but Owls will have the best coaching sweatshirt in the league.

Seems to me that getting Mike Maietti, another Don Bosco guy who made 33 Big 10 starters for Rutgers, would have stabilized the center position and allowed Klein to progress at right tackle, but that might be injecting too much logic into the planning.

As far as Quincy Roche’s replacement goes, Carey seems to be putting all of his eggs into the Emmanuel Walker basket. Walker played in five games for Wake Forest in a three-year career. Scott Patchan, who was still in the portal until six days ago, started 19 games for the Hurricanes and had 5.5 sacks last year. He probably would have relished the opportunity to outperform Roche in the Sept. 5 opener at Hard Rock Stadium but he, like Maietti, is water under the dam now.

Damn.

Since the Owls also lost Dana Levine and Zack Mesday, who started a lot of games, they are also thin on the other side with only Arnold Ebiteke having extensive playing time at the other end.

Presumably, that’s an area where the Owls will move some defensive players around to fill depth. Hopefully, the coaching staff knows what they are doing but, in the Owls’ Daily article, Carey said reaching into the portal is still a possibility.

Let’s hope so.

Friday: Uncertainty ahead

03.13.20
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Coronavirus puts Temple football on hold

Cherry and White kickoff now at 10 a.m.

Assuming the world hasn’t ended in a month, by the time Cherry and White Day would have been, the entire sports world is probably still stopped.

Temple has suspended classes and probably will have none by then. One of the first indicators of its impact on the sports world came a few days ago when the Ivy League jumped the gun and canceled its basketball tournaments, even though they could have played them in empty arenas. At the time, my initial reaction that it wasn’t fair to the Penn kids who had to fight their way to get to the No. 4 spot in the playoffs only to see the rug pulled out from under them. Then that became moot yesterday for Penn because the entire NCAA Tournament has been canceled, too.

If this makes certain we are all healthier in a month its all worth it as would be the decision by Temple to suspend its events.

The calendar will say Cherry and White Day occurred in 2019 and 2021 but list an open date in 2020. One hundred years from now kids will look at a Cherry and White program and ask their grandads what happened way back in 2020 and those guys will have to explain the coronavirus.

Screenshot 2020-03-13 at 12.40.43 PM

From the Temple football alumni page, and administrator Joe Greenwood

I should know. I covered the 1984 Central and Northeast football game as a 20-something youngster and noticed the game started in 1884 but had no result in 1918. After filing the story, I went home and asked my dad at Thanksgiving Day dinner about what happened in 1918 and he said basically half the city died with a flu epidemic that year and all kinds of things were canceled. He was exaggerating, but not by much.

Maybe the powers-that-be are exaggerating now. Maybe not. We’ll leave that to the medical experts.

I know because of last year I won’t miss Cherry and White as much as I used to because it’s gotten more watered-down with each and every year.

Cherry and White Day has changed a lot since the days even of Al Golden and Matt Rhule. In those days, like the ones before it, there was an actual game being played and you could identify guys who had a chance to do something in the fall.

As recently as the 2017 “game” Jadan Blue caught three touchdown passes and had over 100 yards in receptions so those of us who were there were not surprised by his 2019 breakout season (after sitting out 2018).

Not much could be garnered from the Rod Carey approach of running a controlled practice last year, but what is important now is getting this thing back ontrack in a few weeks.

Miami has also suspended its spring practices, but they got a full week in compared to one day for Temple.

Hopefully, that’s not the difference come Sept. 5. Nor is the fact that Quincy Roche is playing for the bad guys instead of the good ones.

Monday: Surprising Newcomers

03.09.20
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5 Goals For Spring Practice

practice

Someone in the coaching office conference room is a yellow legal pad with a list of goals for spring practice that begins tomorrow.

Right now, we don’t know what’s on it or how many bullet points need to be covered but we hope it includes this five items, in no order of importance:

Generating a Pass Rush. With Quincy Roche on one end and Gregory Rousseau at the other end, we know that Miami is going to have one of the best edge rushing games in the country. It would be nice if the Owls could counter with an impressive one of their own in the opener. Hmm. Roche and Rousseau vs. who? Right now, Nickolos Madourie and Arnold Ebiketie/Manny Walker look like the starters with not much behind them. Owls are pretty set up the middle with Dan Archibong, Kris Banks and Ifianyi Maijeh. Maybe moving Archibong to his first position at Temple, end, will help.

Temple summer practice, football,

Game planning for Miami. With that kind of opening opponent looming, it’s never to early to have a game plan for them. Better now to design quick passes ,wraparound draws, and screens to mitigate that pass rush and catch the Hurricanes flat-flooted.

Establishing the run. What worked at NIU (err, RPO) does not necessarily work at Temple. Matt Rhule and Geoff Collins recruited this team to establish the run and make big plays off play-action fakes and Rod Carey should think long and hard about developing an approach suited to the personnel already here. Ray Davis is probably the second-best running back in the league (only behind Memphis Kenneth Gainswell) and should be more featured in this offense.

Fixing special teams. Carey will tell you that the special teams were not a disaster last year, but Temple fans have eyes and they have ears. From what we saw, they were a disaster. Temple needs to improve both the return and kicking aspects of special teams, although the coverage was passable. Will Mobley is a reliable short-range kicker but do you trust him when you need a 50-yarder to win and the game is tied, 14-14? Temple had the special teams’ player of the year, Isaiah Wright, in 2018 and turned him into a fair-catch artist in 2019. That’s a head-scratcher. Temple needs to make the punt return an offensive play again.

Clock management. If the coaching staff is honest watching film from 55-13, 45-21 and 63-21 losses, they were the direct result of stopping the clock on incomplete passes, giving teams with far greater speed a lot more plays to do damage. In the past, particularly under Matt Rhule and Al Golden, the Temple offensive philosophy has been to chew up the clock with a running game and extend the game into the fourth quarter. That worked pretty well with Temple TUFF players. Clock management and an effective running game go hand in hand and the earlier this staff realizes that, the better the chances to avoid those kind of blowouts in 2020.

Friday: The Case for Cherry and White

 

03.06.20
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Spring Depth Building

rodster

“If I could ever figure out a way to run an offense without an RPO, I think we could turn the Lincoln Financial Field scoreboard into an adding machine. Establish the run, play action fakes to Ray Davis and guys would be open all over the place.”

One of the things some Temple fans did to pass the time deep into the third quarter of the bowl game when the realization that going to Annapolis was a wasted trip was to thumb through the official game souvenir program ($10).

Raising my hand here and putting all of the possible backups in bold below. The caveat here is that there are always other spring names who surprise will will not be listed.

spring

Even with the unexpected departures, the Owls are not completely screwed in the depth department.

They have their starting quarterback (Anthony Russo) back, but lost second-teamer Todd Centeio to the portal and Colorado State. Still, a number of people remarked how good Trad Beatty has looked so Centeio might not be a big loss.

On the offensive line, they have both left tackles (junior Isaac Moore and sophomore Victor Stoffel) back as well as both right guards (seniors Joe Hooper and Leon Pinto) and both right tackles (junior Adam Klein and sophomore David Nwagowugwu). The backup center (Griffin Sestili) returns as does the backup left guard junior J.D. Gomez.

That means Beatty will have to be ready and the Owls need to find a backup to Gomez and Setiili if indeed those two earn the starting jobs. Remember, Vince Picozzi–an outstanding guard who was injured in November–could return as the starting right guard or starting center, helping build depth elsewhere.

beatty

Trad Beatty (11) is one play away from being needed.

The receivers (Jadan Blue and Branden Mack) are perhaps the best ever at Temple and the depth is also outstanding (Jose Barbon and Randle Jones).

Both tight ends (David Martin-Robinson and Aaron Jarman) return.

There is a depth problem at running back as the Owls are set with starter Ray Davis but it would have been nice to pick up a portal as insurance and to take some of the load off Davis. That’s probably not happening now, so someone will have to emerge from a group that includes or is not limited to Tayvon Ruley, Kyle Dobbins and Edward Saydee.

On defense, the starters probably will be Manny walker and Nickolos Madourie (ends), and Dan Archibong and Ifeanyi Maijeh (tackles) with linebacker starters of Isaiah Graham-Mobley, William Kwenkeu and Audrey Isaacs. One of the safeties should be Cheltenham grad George Reid with the other probably being Amir Tyler. Christian Braswell, Ty Mason and Freddie Johnson return.

But depth on defense could be a problem as only Kris Banks (tackle) and Arnold Ebiketie (end) seeing significant playing time along the front wall and nobody at linebacker behind the current projected starters. Keyvone Bruton has plenty of playing time at safety and will return and also Linwood Crump Jr. returns at cornerback after an injury that kept him out of the North Carolina game.

As with most Group of Five teams, the Owls are in good shape among the first 22. Spring practice, which begins on Tuesday, will be all about building a respectable second 22.

Monday: Five Goals of Spring Practice

03.02.20
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Flip side: Why 2020 Could Be a Step Forward

The Rutgers Al of Miami, coach Coop, is still not completely sold on Manny.

From the moment the season ended, it’s been nothing but bad news for the Temple football program.

Other than the expected losses, players with returning eligibility left for the NFL (2) and other FBS teams (2).

Pessissmism, not optimism, have understandably reigned.

Still, all is not lost. There are several reasons for optimism left in no particular order and we’ll go with just five names:

disclosure

Manny Diaz. Despite having three top 10 national recruiting classes in the last six years, Diaz took that talent and lost six games, including crosstown rival FIU (which had six classes rated lower than Temple prior to last season). If Diaz “coaches” Miami (with D’Eriq King at quarterback and Quincy Roche at DE) to a loss against visiting Temple, the season momentum could be off and running for the Owls.

Anthony Russo. Even in an ill-suited offense (for him), Russo improved from 14 touchdowns and 14 interceptions to 21 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. If he makes even the same kind of improvement this season, that will be 28 touchdowns and eight interceptions. No Temple quarterback has ever had that kind of season, even in a 10-2 season (Brian Broomell), a 10-3 season (P.J. Walker) and a 9-1 season (Steve Joachim). Gotta think that 28 touchdowns and eight interceptions get the Owls at least 10 wins.

russo

Ray Davis. Maybe 900-plus yards from a true freshman running back will convince this coaching staff to put more emphasis on the running game, even with an RPO approach. If it does, that sets up success in the passing game.

Jadan Blue. Three years ago, Blue had over 100 yards and three touchdown receptions in what might have been the last “true” Cherry and White game of the century. People who saw that performance knew we had something then. His record-breaking season in 2019 cemented that perception. If Blue even has a “slightly” better season in 2020, he could be a first-team All-American. His style of play reminds me a lot of Gerard “Sweet Feet” Lucear, a former great Owl wide receiver from Georgia. With him as the “speed” receiver and Branden Mack as the “possession” receiver (with a whole lot of speed), Temple’s passing game could be lethal.

Nikolos Madourie. Who? At Temple these days, you’ve got to check the official roster daily to see if the guy’s still here. (Madourie still is.) He could be the impact pass rusher Roche was. For comparison’s sake (recognizing the levels of play are different, though), Roche was named AAC Defensive Player of the Year with 13.5 sacks. Madourie, a 6-6, 240-pound player from Sunrise, Fla,., had 15.5 sacks his last year of JUCO ball. If he gets, say, 13.5 this year, he will be more than an acceptable replacement for Roche especially since guys like Dan Archibong, Ifeanyi Maijeh and Kris Banks are going to provide a good push up the middle.

You want optimism? That’s the best we can do now, a week before the start of spring practice.

Otherwise, we live in Philadelphia but our mindset is in the Show Me state of Missouri.

Friday: A Look at Depth

 

02.28.20
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Why 2020 Could Be a Step Back

 

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In our last post, we’ve noted that ESPN college football analytics guy Bill Connelly is likely to stick a 6-6 prediction on the 2020 Temple football Owls.

After consecutive eight-win seasons piggybacked on top of consecutive double-digit-win seasons, that’s just another step back after a pretty good run.

From the perspective of this fan, it’s hard to argue with Connelly.

A lot of things happened since the end of the year, including four pretty valuable players with Temple eligibility left giving up that eligibility for, in no particular order, the NFL, the first Temple opponent on next season’s schedule, and Ole Miss.

It’s hard enough for a team to overcome expected losses (senior leadership) when you pile on top of that the four best juniors on the team.

When there are only 129 FBS teams and ESPN predicts you to be the 72d-best one, you don’t have to be Andrew Yang to know that you are closer to the bottom than the top. That’s a pretty bitter pill to swallow after 36 wins in the past four seasons so, yes, that’s a huge step back after steps forward.

On top of that, the head coach, Rod Carey, in a recent interview said nothing would fundamentally change in the offensive and defensive philosophy of the team. When asked in that same interview if he was concerned about the number of talented players jumping ship, he brushed it off by saying: “We want people who want to be here.”

Extrapolate that logic just a little bit by imagining this: If your entire first team left for “greener” pastures and the scout team wanted to stay, are you really better off?

Err, no.

For 2020 expectations to rise, the talent pool has to get better and the Owls went from an Olympic-sized one to a kiddy pool. An awful lot of good coaching will be needed to overcome those losses.

Monday: Possible Reasons for Optimism

02.24.20
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TU Football: How Others See Us

 

Screenshot 2020-02-23 at 11.54.08 AM

Bill Connelly not only nailed this prediction in 2018, he got the exact regular-season record right (8-4) and predicted the Owls would finish second to UCF

There are certain truisms when it comes to Temple football.

Rutgers fans will always see their program as better than us, despite evidence to the contrary. You even had one RU fan on their website deny after losing to Maryland, 48-7, (and Temple beating the Terps, 20-17, three weeks prior) that RU was still better than Temple.

I know.

Shaking my head.

Screenshot 2020-02-23 at 11.52.47 AM

Connelly’s conference breakdown. The single digits rates his conference rankings for 2020; the second single-digit number represents his final rankings for 2019.

On the other hand, UConn fans went through the entire pyramid of stages of grief, from saying that they were a much better candidate for the P5 than Temple seven years ago, to (mostly) posts now there on their website: “Why can’t we be like Temple?”

Different strokes for different folks.

Then there’s Bill Connelly.

I always try to give credit where it’s due and this guy is uncanny.

The former Sports Nation writer now working for ESPN of all of the outsiders has one of the best handles on Temple football prognostication out there of all the outsiders. In 2018, he predicted in August that the Owls would finish the regular season 8-4 and they did just that. In 2019, he predicted the Owls would finish 7-5 and they did just one game better.

Pretty good for a guy who doesn’t follow the team like we do.

Connelly can best be described as an analytics guy and has numbers for offensive and defensive efficiency and even throws in some special teams numbers.

Connelly has not come up with a record prediction for the Owls but currently ranks the Owls as No. 72 nationally. Only 80 teams make bowl games so, while Connelly has yet to set a record, it’s pretty clear that he will have the 2020 Owls as 6-6 come August.

That might make the players, fans and coaches of this team mad, but it’s hard to argue with his past record and it’s up to them to prove him wrong.

Friday: Why 2020 Could Be a Step Back

Monday (3/2): Why 2020 Could Be a Step Forward

02.17.20
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TU Recruiting: The Ones Who Got Away

eo2

You could muster a lot more optimism around here if Ricky Slade, Scott Patchan and Michael Maietti were joining the family for spring practice in a few weeks.


Temple doesn’t need wide receivers
or quarterbacks or defensive backs,
but it certainly needs centers, tight ends,
defensive ends, and running backs.
The fact that this coaching staff
addressed non-issues and ignored
real issues should be setting off
all kinds of alarms

Assuming Rod Carey is done recruiting, at least three players–perhaps more–who could tangibly help Temple football have gone elsewhere or will go elsewhere.

Michael Maietti, a center from Don Bosco who started 33 games in the Big 10 and was good enough on an awful Rutgers’ team to be named to the Rimington Watch list (best center in the country), signed with Long Island University.
 
Long Island University. I’m only aware they have a football team because they played Villanova last season.

Now the Owls will probably have to move guard Vince Picozzi to a position where he never played before coming off a surgery that will force him to miss the entire spring. Maybe Leon Pinto or Wisdom Quarshie. Nice players, but do they have the credentials and the experience of a Maietti?

Err, no.

You can want to be here all you want but it’s the coaching staff’s job to upgrade the talent that is here.

Maietti was so excited about a rare (only) RU touchdown against Maryland, he inadvertently punched his quarterback in the face last season. Maybe Carey didn’t want to sign him because he was Maietti would knock out Anthony Russo.

Screenshot 2020-01-09 at 4.45.17 PM

Josh Pederson would have represented a huge upgrade at TE from Kenny Yeboah and add a large family to the Temple fan base

The thought here is that with the uncertainty at the center position facing Temple this season, Maietti would have been a better replacement than anyone on the current roster, but that’s on Carey.

So, too, are the failures to address depth at the running back position. As of this writing, Ricky Slade–formerly the No. 1 running back recruit prospect in the nation–is still stuck in the portal after telling Penn State coaches he was entering it in late January.

Scott Patchan, a defensive end from Miami with multiple starts in the ACC and would have filled an area of need for Temple, is still in limbo. Do you think this guy would be motivated to outperform Quincy Roche at Hard Rock Stadium on Sept 5?

Josh Pederson, a tight end from Louisiana Monroe, entered the transfer portal and would have been a nice replacement for Kenny Yeboah in that he had more catches, more yards and more touchdowns than Yeboah last year but, after getting no interest, decided to remain at ULM. Do you think he would have liked to play a year in his dad’s stadium in front of family and friends?

A quick check of their twitter feeds late Sunday afternoon indicates that both Patchan and Slade still haven’t signed elsewhere.

Who knows if Carey even reached out to these guys, but he would have been derelict in his duty if he did not. Nobody can really believe a Big 10 player would have signed at LIU if Temple was an option, especially considering that Big 10 player saw what Temple did for former Don Bosco teammate Matt Hennessy, who will be entering the NFL draft.

If Carey did not reach out to Maietti and will can now assume he did not, he probably didn’t reach out to Slade or Patchan. Manny Emmanuel, a DE who did sign with Temple, was much less productive at Wake Forest than Patchan was at The U.

Would Al Golden, a Penn State grad and former Miami head coach who probably knows of Slade and Patchan and who can walk into Don Bosco and everyone knows who he is, have done his homework on these guys? Probably.

Would a Midwestern-based staff without those kinds of New Jersey and Pennsylvania recruiting connections be so inclined? Probably not.

Temple doesn’t need wide receivers or quarterbacks or defensive backs, but it certainly needs centers, tight ends, defensive ends, and running backs. The fact that this coaching staff addressed non-issues and ignored real issues should be setting off all kinds of alarms.

Friday: Spring Practice

Monday (2/24): How Others View Temple

 

02.14.20
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LFF Deal kills the on-campus buzz

Screenshot 2020-02-13 at 2.41.44 PM

If Temple built the stadium here (enough room if the Maxi’s row and Sullivan Hall behind it were knocked down), the entire stadium would have been inside Temple’s footprint and the neighbors would not have been affected.

Whenever a deal is signed, it’s always advisable to look at the fine print.

To me, what to look for in the most recent Lincoln Financial Field extension Temple signed this week was that option.

A five-year deal with no option probably meant that Temple University was close to putting up a stadium of its own. A five-year deal with a five-year option probably meant not close.

The fine print suggests not close.

In Marc Narducci’s Philly.com article–that somewhat surprisingly made the front page of the Inquirer’s sports section–the key words to me were this: “the deal includes a five-year option for the Owls beyond the first five seasons.”

The architect for the earlier project, Moody Nolan, says it should take no more than three years from the time the first shovel is put into the ground to opening day and noted that the typical stadium construction is usually no more than 12-18 months.

So do the math.

If Temple’s administration thought they needed an additional five years on top of the five years they got, it means they are not even close to a shovel-in-the-ground date. If they were close enough to announce a date in, say, the next couple of years, they would have probably shunned the option.

What’s it all mean?

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A future stadium that looks like this with the fans right on top of the field would be more of a home-field advantage than the original concept of Moody Nolan.

The good news is that the ugly Moody Nolan concept is probably a thing of the past and that a new stadium in another place on campus gives Temple a chance to go over some more attractive stadium concepts than the glorified high school stadium look Nolan presented.

The bad news probably means there won’t be a stadium on the campus for another decade if that. Temple is no longer in a hurry to get this done.

That’s bad news for those of us who want to live long enough to see a real home-field advantage for Temple. You know, the kind where the opposing quarterback looks over to the sideline and tells his coach “I can’t hear.” I remember that as a young kid at Temple Stadium only on a couple of occasions–the 39-36 win over West Virginia and the 34-7 win over Boston College in the 1970s.

Other than that, Temple’s really never had that kind of home-field advantage and that’s kind of sad.

At the Vet and the Linc, while it could get loud, it wasn’t the same as what the Owls experienced on the road in places like Cincinnati last year and ECU when the Pirates first came into the AAC.

Maybe someday, but a decade is a long time for a lot of us.

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The original glorified high school stadium design

As Martin Luther King once said, “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.”

Temple might or might not get to the promised land, but the talk of this stadium that began well over a decade ago will continue to be talk for another decade and there are a whole lot of us who might never get to that promised land. It’s a shame because if the stadium had been built where the library is now and the library put at 15th and Norris, the neighbors who have held up this project for so long would have had no say.

That’s what you get when you hire two guys from Bloomington to run a Philadelphia university as CEO and CFO. Hopefully, the university has learned something from that mistake.

Monday: The Ones That Got Away