Temple's football family hurting today

By Mike Gibson
Once upon a time not so long ago, being a Temple football fan was like being a member of an exclusive club in the Dark Ages.
You'd meet, watch the plague spread, then hope that someday the university would hire a savior to find a cure for the football program we loved.
The group would be so small in selected seasons, maybe down to three or four cars in the tailgate section of Veterans Stadium.

DANIEL H. GLAMMER III
DANIEL H. III, suddenly January 11, 2010 of Jenkintown. Beloved son of Grace and the late Daniel H. Jr. Devoted and loving father of Victoria and Alexandra. Brother of Nancy Gagnon and Steven. Special friend of Colleen Berry. Uncle of Nicole, Elena and Annah. Dan was an avid Temple Owls Football fan. Relatives and friends are invited to the Viewing on Friday eve. 7 to 9 P.M. and on Saturday from 9:00 A.M. until time of Service at 10:00 A.M. at the JOSEPH J. McGOLDRICK FUNERAL HOME, 507 West Ave., Jenkintown. Interment Hillside Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, remembrances may be made to the Breathing Room Foundation, 120 S. York Rd., Suite 7, Hatboro, PA. 19040. Published in Philadelphia Inquirer & Philadelphia Daily News

We commiserated because we all knew what it meant to be a Temple football fan in those days. We all experienced similar pains.
It meant walking into a bar and asking for the Temple game to be turned on just one of the TVs and inevitably bracing for the bartender to laugh at you.
He might turn the Temple game on and he might not.
It was a 50-50 shot.
Then you'd brace for the smart-aleck comments from the patrons asking "who put the Temple game on? ..."
Well, that exclusive club lost one of its most treasured members this week when Dan Glammer passed away at the all-too-young age of 46.
I first met Dan through the message boards discussing Temple football in the late part of the last century, then later at the tailgates.
When there were five (that's 5) left at the Miami (Ohio) pre-game tailgate in 2005, Dan Glammer was one of those fans. I was another one.
Dan was smart, funny (enough to be an award-winning comedian) and kind.
The kindness will always stick with me.
When Temple was playing at Kent State two seasons ago, a rumor got around on the Internet that the game would be on at Chickie and Pete's in South Philly and that they had some kind of special hookup that no other place had.
I was off work that night, so I headed down there.
I was five minutes from home when the cell rang in my car.
Nobody has my cell number, but Dan knew I wanted to see the game so he somehow found it.
"Mike, this is Dan. The game's not on. It's not on anywhere."
"Thanks, Dan. You saved me a trip."
A random, unsolicited, act of kindness and a much-appreciated one.
Dan didn't have to do that.
He just did.
I saw him at the bowl game in D.C. and I remembered thinking I've never seen him look that happy.
Heck, until the unexplainable pick-6, I've never been that happy.
He was sitting (standing, really, the whole game like the rest of us) in the row in front of me.
He knew about the conniption I get every time Bernard Pierce is taken out of the game so, at one point, he turned around and said:
"Preps! Pierce is out. McPherson's in."
"GET HIM OUT!! GET HIM OUT!!" I yelled in the direction of Al Golden. "PUT THE FRANCHISE BACK IN ..."
McPherson then ripped off a 12-yard gain.
Everybody was cheering, going crazy.
Dan was clapping and laughing when he turned around to say:
"Keep talking, Preps," he said.
Those were, sadly, the last words he ever said to me.

Sign Dan's guestbook

Temple delivers a record Philly TV audience

Bars in Philly, unlike Somers Point, were packed last Tuesday cheering on the Owls.
By Mike Gibson
A couple of days ago, I dashed off a note to Inquirer TV writer Mike Klein and asked him to get the ratings for Temple's EagleBank Bowl football game with UCLA.
I thought they'd be high because Temple always did well on TV when Paul Palmer was going for the Heisman Trophy in 1986 and before that when Wayne Hardin put together a string of winning years.

My email to Mike Klein
From: Mike Gibson
To: mklein@phillynews.com

Date: Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 9:20 PM
Subject: Ratings for Temple-UCLA football

Hi Mike,
I don't have access to local Neilsen TV ratings, but you might so I thought I'd ask this question:
Could you please publish in your column the local Neilsen ratings for the Dec. 29th TU football game with UCLA?
I was in Washington, but my guess is that the game did very well.
Thanks,
Mike Gibson
Temple Football Forever

There always has been a lot of interest in a "winning" Temple team.
While the "hardcore" fan base delivered some impressive numbers at RFK Stadium, with 20,000 Temple fans making the trip in brutal cold, the "softcore" fan base also produced last Tuesday.
While there were reports all over the place that several watering holes inside Center City (the game was played during Happy Hour) were packed with people cheering on the Owls, there's nothing like cold, hard numbers produced by the ratings folks at ESPN.
The numbers Klein found were even beyond my expectations and ran in his Inqlings column Tuesday.
I dashed off a similar email to Daily News' columnist Dan Gross, a Temple grad, who wrote me back: "I'll try to get you the numbers, Mike, but I don't think I'll put them in my column."
Klein beat Gross to the punch.
Page under "Owls fly" and Klein's numbers is really the best empirical data supporting the "latent" support and interest for Temple football in the Philadelphia area.

"It would serve the Big East right if a ... competitive Temple team delivered its Philadelphia TV market to the MAC"
_Shelly Anderson
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
in a 2007 story

An estimated 140,000 viewers watched the game, which made it the most-watched ESPN bowl game in Philadelphia since 2007 (Penn State was in the Alamo Bowl then).
All of this proves a couple of points:
A winning Temple football team can deliver the fourth-largest market to any football conference in the country and there is a "softcore" group of fans just waiting to jump on the bandwagon and follow a Temple team that proves to be a consistent winner.
The bandwagon's journey will get underway only with a convincing win over Villanova to start next season but there is enough evidence that there are thousands of people waiting to jump on this Owl Express once that happens.
Warm up those engines.

"So, other than the ending, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

The EBB's MVPs (most valuable persons)=Temple's fans

2010 Recruiting checklist:
1. Long-snapper
2. Pass rushing DE
3. Big-time JUCO QB

WASHINGTON, D.C. _ Walking out of RFK Stadium, I thought about this town just about 150 years ago.
Ford's Theater, the place where Abraham Lincoln was shot, is only two blocks away from the Renaissance Marriott, the Temple team hotel.
I thought about the famous phrase born out of that tragedy.
"So, other than the ending, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"
If we have any Temple fans named Mrs. Lincoln who care as much about the Owls winning as I do, she'd probably say the same thing about Tuesday's EagleBank Bowl game with UCLA.
Liked both the play and the game, but the ending was, err, shot.
Lead?
Check. (Owls were leading, 21-20, 2 minutes, 29 seconds into the final act, err, quarter.)
Fans?

Hardin: 'You always wanted to put your team in a position to go.'

"Cal wanted to exchange films of every game," Hardin recalled. "Usually you just take the first one, one in the middle and the last one. So I said, 'Find out which coaches on their staff want them?' Turned out, it was the defensive coaches. OK. We spent night after night after night, digging and digging and digging. We came up with one or two things we had to do.
"We found out that if we pulled our guards up the middle, we'd end up with one of them going down the field untouched into the secondary. So did the back. Get the hell out of the way. There was no one to block. We had 21 points on the board before we even started. We probably would never have discovered that, had we not graded all the film. That's how things work. You just don't know. They did me a favor. We got into the defensive coach's head."

The Owls outrushed the Golden Bears, 300 yards to 23.


"It's unbelievable," Hardin went on. "The quarterback [Rich Campbell] was taught, which we knew, to read when he didn't see anything [to] throw blindly into the flat to the fullback. I mean, game after game. The fullback was catching the ball and making big yards. So we developed a two-man [pass] rush, which we wouldn't have done. We'd have one guy come up to meet the fullback, whichever way he went, 5 yards deep in the backfield. And eight guys would drop into coverage. So there's nothing to read, except a lot of jerseys.

"The first time they do it, they completed it. I told Vince Hoch, the defensive coach, 'We worked on this. If our kid can't get to the guy, put [somebody else] in there.' I had already told [linebacker] Steve Conjar that he was going to intercept one for a touchdown. The second time, he makes a tackle. The third time, the ball hits him in the hands and he drops it. He would've walked in.

"You always wanted to put your team in a position to go."
Complete Mike Kern story here

Well, 20,000 of the 23,000 were from Temple, so check. Great job by our terrific fans, by the way. Loud and proud and everything I dreamed they would be.
In the seconds before Temple scored that second touchdown, the loud "Let's Go Temple" cheer shook the old stadium so much I thought it was going to collapse.
Jonathan Tannenbaum, in his excellent blog Soft Pretzel Logic, wrote that the roar of the Temple fans after the first touchdown was "as loud I have heard for any" D.C. United soccer goal in that stadium.
D.C. United, by the way, has scored a lot of goals in that stadium.
Maybe three or four thousand.
So Temple's fans deserve my MVP (most valuable persons).
Then the game, like the Mrs. Lincoln's play, imploded.
I don't care too much about theater, but I care a lot about the game, the team and the school involved, that's probably why I walked around the stadium about 45 times before leaving Tuesday night.
"I thought you were still walking around the stadium," my friend, Mark, said when I finally arrived at the team hotel.
Hell, if I didn't realize I was in a supposed dangerous neighborhood (I couldn't tell, but my pre-game briefing cautioned me), I'd probably still be walking around the stadium.
On the train down to D.C., I read a terrific article by Mike Kern on Temple's last bowl game and how Wayne Hardin outsmarted Roger Theder, the then California coach.
Hardin said Cal asked for game films, then made a point to ask his assistants which Cal assistants wanted the films. He gave them three, then tailored the game plan to counter what the Cal assistants would see.

In the seconds before Temple scored that second touchdown, the loud "Let's Go Temple" cheer shook the old stadium so much I thought it was going to collapse.

Pure genius.
Pure freaking genius.
I wasn't surprised. Hardin outsmarted everybody, including Joe Paterno.

Other thoughts walking around RFK:

• On my 24th pass around the stadium, I wondered why it's always TU messing up on center snaps and never another team.
  
• On my 27th pass around the stadium, I wondered why Kee-ayre Griffin wasn't out there at right cornerback (I saw him at the team hotel and he looked healthy and wasn't limping).
  
• On my 29th pass around the stadium, I wondered where was Jason Harper, who defined the term "warrior" all season and someone who can make yards after the catch and refuses to go down.
  
• On my 32d pass around the stadium, I wondered what would have happened had their been a smooth transition of Adam DiMichele to a quarterback with similar skills and toughness and leadership.
  (There wasn't.)
  
• On my 37th pass, I wondered what Chester Stewart did wrong to lose his job over the last month.
  
  
• On about my 44th pass around the stadium, with steam coming out of my ears (I swear it was from being mad TU lost, but it was probably just the cold), I thought about that Hardin story.

Could you imagine Al Golden intentionally deceiving a fellow member of the coaching fraternity so Temple could benefit?
Could you see Al Golden cutting Rick Neuheisel's throat (I mean that figuratively, of course) to win a game?
I couldn't.
Al Golden is a very good coach in every way and a great (and I mean GREAT) CEO/Ambassador of Temple football, but I'm not ready to say he's a great game coach.
Or even a better-than-average one.
I will say that when I see Temple do all the little things (i.e., fix the kicking game) a good team needs to do routinely. I mean, snaps on punts are routine for just about everyone else.
Why not Temple?

Jonathan Tannenbaum, in his excellent blog Soft Pretzel Logic, wrote that the roar of the Temple fans after the first touchdown was "as loud I have heard for any" D.C. United soccer goal in that stadium.

From the Ball State game on, snapping on punts has been a needless adventure and the CEO needed to fix that long before now.
That's what he needs to do before I can call him an above-average game-day coach.
Great game-day coach?
Who knows how long that will take, but I don't think it will be long because Al is a smart guy. Remember, Hardin came to Temple as a head coach with prior experience from a then big-time Navy program. Golden, who was never a head coach before, is still learning on the job.
Hardin was a smart guy and great game coach and he'd do everything short of robbing a bank to win a big game for Temple. That's how much Temple winning meant to him.
Afterward, Al Golden said he hopes the team learns from the experience.
I hope he doesn't exclude himself from doing the same.

I prefer this version of the EagleBank Bowl

This is the way I thought it would play out ...
I'm never going to use this blog to criticize the kids, but let's just say I'm hopeful certain players who had prominent roles last night get diminished ones next year.
I've always said that last year should have been a better year, but this year's gravvy and next year's the year.
If the devil came to me with a contract before the Villanova game and said 9-4, I would have signed off on that.
(Now if he had said 7-5 with a bowl and a win over Villanova, I would have traded for that, but that's another story.)
We'll talk about the X's and O's some other time.
I'm excited to see a healthy Bernard Pierce for a full year.
I'm excited to see that we'll have a Nate Smith or a an Ahkeem Smith or a Nahjee Gibson (no relation) as an option should he go down again.
I'm excited to finally get some balance in our offense.
I'm excited to see what a defensive front four that includes Mo Wilkerson at an end (yes, I'd move him to end) and Levi Brown and Kadeem Custis at tackles can bring.
Heck, I'd go with a 3-4, move Adrian Robinson to RUSH linebacker, put Brown on the nose and Custis and Big Mo at the ends and move Amara Kamara back to his natural linebacker position.
No X's and O's talk today.
Just looking ahead to our next BOWL game.
Villanova.

The EagleBank Bowl Survival Guide

Photos by Ratna
The Eagle Bank Bowl gambled and rolled the dice with weather.
Actually, it's a gamble any outdoor Northeast bowl takes this time of year.
It could have won.
It could have lost.
I will call this year's bowl, at least in terms of weather, a push.
The "average" high temperature for Washington, D.C. for Dec. 29th is 48 degrees.
The high on Tuesday is expected to be 16 degrees below that, or freezing.
Yikes.
It's going to be cold.
It's going to be damn cold.
It might be the coldest Temple football game I've ever attended and I've attended most over the last 30 years.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that there won't be a snowstorm.
So weather, at least in my mind, is a push.
You can play football in it and, if you are a smart fan, you can survive in it.
I consider myself a smart fan, so here's my survival plan:

• Two (2) T-shirts;
  
• Two pairs of sweat pants;
  
• Three (3) pairs of socks;
  
• Two Temple sweatshirts, both hooded (I will wear the zippered one on top of the regular Cherry Temple one);
  
• Ear Muffs;
  
• One light pair of gloves to be worn under one heavy pair of gloves;
  
• One heavy winter coat, to be worn on top of everything (also with a hood);

The all-time low D.C. temperature for Tuesday is minus-2 degrees.
Just be thankful you aren't these girls:

If these girls can be there (and they will), so can you ...

Temple's fans need to respond in a big way

Graphics courtesy of Victory Engineer (I had nothing to do with the incorrect use of the word your, but the graphic is too good to leave it out).
Every morning for the past month or so, I've gotten up and wiped the sand from my eyes, stretched a little bit and sprinted to the door for the morning paper.
I quickly thumbed to the second sports page and checked the bowl pairings.
There it was.
I wasn't dreaming after all.
Thirty years of being bowl-less will play mind games with a person's psyche.
Temple's football team is in a bowl game and the opponent, geez, is UCLA.
Damn.
It's not in Idaho or Kansas, either.
It's in D.C.
It's within driving distance.
How the hell did we not win the Mid-American Conference (err, that would be no pass rush or blitz) and get the marquee matchup of all MAC matchups?
I pinched myself for good measure to see if that part wasn't a dream, either.
I'm so pumped I would walk down to D.C. to see the Owls in a bowl game but, thanks to Amtrak, I don't have to do that.

"I hate to say it but it's doubtful that I will be going ... I don't want to go alone ... secondly, I just can't see myself sitting outside on a December night. ... I can't take the cold ..."
alleged Temple fan Philly Brian on Owlscoop.com

After about 10 days of going through this routine, I logged onto a computer.
Sports message boards are the next stop on the technology train above sports talk radio. You can check the pulse of the sports community by reading these boards and you can even add a viewpoint or two without having to talk to a producer.
Most of the fans were like me, pumped and ready for the trip.
Then I came across a segment of the fan base that pretty much disgusts me.
The posting was entitled "The EagleBank Bowl is pretty much a made for TV game" and the poster went on to say that because "it'll be too cold and I'm all alone I'll be watching this game on TV."
Cripes.
I'm going all by myself and it'll be just as cold for me. Fifty percent or so of the people I know going to this game will be making the trip alone and I'm guessing it will be just as cold for them, too. I know at least four guys driving up to the game from Florida and my guess is that it will be colder for them than all of us.
It's almost fitting that fate would place the Owls in the town of Obama because, for Temple, this matchup is all about hope.
Hope that Temple's football program has arrived to the point it can beat a name BCS school.
Hope that Temple can prove to the nation its fans care.
We'll find out both Tuesday. The Owls must win and they must prove to be a big-time draw.
Conferences are realigning as we speak and nothing would be a better 1-2 punch to the nation that Temple has arrived than winning the game on the field and in the stands. It'll be on national TV. This is a dress rehearsal for the big time in more ways than one.

"Yes, Virginia, there is an EagleBank Bowl. And yes, Temple will play UCLA there on Dec. 29.
Is it just another meaningless bowl? Yes... Will it be the most beautiful football game I've ever witnessed? Yes."
_Todd Stanford, The Daily Item, Dec. 23d, 2009
(Temple grad)

The guy, any guy, who pretends to be a Temple fan and can't even get off his ass to get on a train or a Greyhound Bus or thumb a ride to get down there is really not a Temple fan at all.
This is a time for all Temple fans to answer the Clarion call.
The Temple fan base isn't big enough that we can afford to have even one of the "hardcore base" sit at home and watch the game on TV and I don't care how cold it is. I've always said and I think I'm right that Temple has a hardcore base of 15K and a softcore group of 20K.
In D.C., the entire hardcore base is required to be there and, on top of that, an urgent appeal is being made to many of the softcore fans as well.
In my mind, Temple has two magic numbers to reach to impress people across the nation on Tuesday.
They must draw more than 28,786 (what Navy and Wake Forest drew last year) and they must have more points than UCLA at the end.
I know the football team can hold up its part of the bargain.
The time has come for the fans to do the same.

T minus 1 week: Are you ready for some BOWL football?

I want to see a crowd this big at RFK Tuesday night, wearing all Cherry and White.

Free tickets

ESPN's Harry Mayes (left) will give away free trips (transportation and tickets) to the Eagle Bank Bowl. Listen at 12:45 and call in to 97.5 The Fan
Tuesday and Wednesday

By Mike Gibson

I had to laugh when I read in the Atlantic City Press this week that "this UCLA team might be better than the Cal team Temple faced in the Garden State Bowl."

It was written by someone who did nothing to support her claim other than throw that opinion out there.
I wondered if she was going to use one fact to back it up but, instead, she went onto the next random baseless thought.

First of all, I respect this UCLA team.
I've read up on this UCLA team.
To paraphrase Lloyd Bensten, I knew Cal 1979 and you, UCLA 2009, are no Cal 1979.

This UCLA team is good, but the Cal team the Owls beat in the Garden State Bowl was better.
That Cal team was 25 points away from being unbeaten prior to facing Temple.
That's not many points.
This UCLA team is 83 points away from an unbeaten season.
That Cal team beat three teams with six or more wins.
That Cal team lost to then No. 1 USC (and eventual Rose Bowl champ) by just 10 points.
This UCLA team while good, doesn't have those kinds of credentials.
Still, this is a huge challenge for the Owls and the best team they will face since the Penn State game. That didn't go well because the Owls got atrocious quarterback play in that game. Other than Vaughn Charlton hitting James Nixon in the hands for what should have been a 70-yard touchdown, they got no (zero, nada) plays from the quaterback position in that game. Heck, even against Eastern Michigan (Eastern Michigan, for cripes sake) they were 1 for 9 on third downs. That all comes back to the quarterback position and making plays.
You've got to get more from your quarterback to win games against a quality team.

I think these Owls will have to get exceptional quarterback play to beat this team.

Cal Bears 1979
9/8 @ *Arizona State (6-6) W 17 9
9/15 @ *Arizona (6-5-1) W 10 7
9/22 vs. San Jose State (6-4-1) W 13 10
9/29 vs. Michigan (8-4) L 10 14
10/6 @ *Oregon (6-5) L 14 19
10/13 vs. *Oregon State (1-10) W 45 0
10/20 @ *UCLA (5-6) L 27 28
10/27 vs. *Southern California (11-0-1) L 14 24
11/3 vs. *Washington (9-3) L 24 28
11/10 @ *Washington State (3-8) W 45 13
11/17 @ *Stanford (5-5-1) W 21 14
12/15 vs. Temple (10-2) L 17 28 @ East Rutherford, NJ Garden State Bowl
6-6-0
UCLA Bruins 2009
Sep. 5 San Diego St. W 33-14
Sep. 12 at Tennessee W 19-15
Sep. 19 Kansas State W 23-9
Oct. 3 at Stanford L 16-24
Oct. 10 Oregon L 10-24
Oct. 17 California L 26-45
Oct. 24 at Arizona L 13-27
Oct. 31 at Oregon State L 19-26
Nov. 7 Washington W 24-23
Nov. 14 at Wash. St. W 43-7
Nov. 21 Arizona State W 23-13
Nov. 28 at USC L 7-28
Dec. 29 vs. Temple 4:30pm

They have before.

I think Chester Stewart gave them exceptional quarterback play in the Akron game when he and Bernard Pierce helped put up 56 points.

Stewart's handoffs established Pierce as a big-time threat, then he played off the fear of Pierce with play-action passes all over the field to Temple's other playmakers.

Make no mistake about it.

Temple's got other playmakers.

James Nixon. Joey Jones. Jason Harper. Evan Rodriguez. Steve Manieri. Michael Campbell. Delano Green.

All these guys (with the possible exception of Manieri, sorry Steve) can do special things with the ball after the catch if the Owls are able to complete the intermediate and long passes.

They'll need something like that. Not the 56 points, but that kind of QB play to win this game. Spread the ball around and hit the play-action passes. Keep moving the ball around the field, not just relying on Pierce. Don't use Pierce on the first two downs and put yourself in situations where everybody in the stadium knows you are going to throw the ball on third.
These are simple, basic football idioms that offensive coordinator Matt Rhule proved he could master at Akron.
The Akron game gave Rhule a workable template of an offensive game plan. The Owls used it effectively in a 47-13 win over Kent State, but were forced away from it when Pierce got injured.
I'd like to see Rhule go back with the very same game plan he used against Akron. By establishing Pierce, then spreading the ball around, you make Pierce that much more effective when you go back to him.

But to say this UCLA team is or "might be" better than that California team is pulling something out of your backside that has no resemblance to the facts.
That Cal team had six wins.
This UCLA team has six wins.
That Temple team had nine wins.
This Temple team has nine wins.
The similarities with this game and that one ends right there.
The opportunity for Temple to gain respect nationally with a win on the field and a good showing in the stands is the same and that's important enough.