Another great Temple football trailer by the TU video staff. Fran Duffy's legacy lives.
In football recruiting, it's one thing to say you are recruiting with the big boys and another thing to be actually doing it.
Judging by the company first-year Temple head coach Matt Rhule keeps, he's doing it.
According to the latest recruiting rankings posted by Rivals.com, Temple is in the middle of a very impressive list of schools.
The Owls' 2014 recruiting class is about half finished and they rank ahead of USC and Stanford and just behind Wisconsin and Arizona, currently ranked No. 43 in the country.
That's about as impressive as these things get at Temple.
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| The hat is worth $150 alone. If it was a Temple '][' hat, it would be worth $200. |
Sure, Bruce Arians was a great recruiter and, on the day he was fired in 1988, defensive end Alonzo Spellman (Rancocas Valley) and quarterback Glenn Foley (Cherry Hill East) de-committed from the Owls to sign with Ohio State and Boston College, respectively. Both became NFL players.
Who knows what would have happened to Temple football had Arians been retained, but my guess is that the Owls would not have entered a 20-year black hole.
Now, thanks to Al Golden, Rhule and, even Steve Addazio, the Owls have climbed out of that hole and show no signs of going back into it.
Addazio got up in front of the assembled press on Feb. 4, 2012 and said that the Owls' No. 54 class was the highest-ranked ever.
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| France checking in. Thanks, France. |
For all of Al Golden's No. 1 MAC recruiting classes, he never had a class rated as high as No. 54 nationally.
If Rhule keeps up at this present pace, the Owls could move up a tick or two or down a tick or two but I don't see him falling as low as 54.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
Rhule had a month to recruit his first class.
He's had a few months to recruit this one.
He's a dynamic, young guy who the kids relate to well.
In assistant Terry Smith, he's got a guy plugged into the fertile Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL).
The next step for Rhule is to sign one of these superstar Philadelphia kids who keep getting away. One of these days a Sharif Floyd won't feel the need to go to Florida or David Williams would rather play in South Philadelphia instead of South Carolina or a Matt Ryan clone would like to chuck it around the pitch at LFF, rather than hand it off to a running back in Boston.
That'll happen, too.
It's just a matter of time.
