No. 2-rated player in state commits to Owls

One spring day in 1980, Wayne Hardin was standing on Geasey Field commenting about his strong stable of running backs at Temple University.
"And then we have Jim Brown at tailback," he said. "Jim Brown. I like that name."
That's the same way I felt this morning when I heard the news that Temple landed someone named Anthony Davis.

Anthony Davis' verbal to TU was all over the Pittsburgh papers.

The Anthony Davis I remember was robbed of a  Heisman Trophy at USC as a running back.
The Anthony Davis Temple got this morning is a cornerback at Gateway High in the WPIAL who is the No. 2-rated player in Pennsylvania, as determined by 247sports.com.
When I walk into a room for a purpose, I sometimes don't remember what that purpose was but I have a pretty good long-term memory about Temple football recruiting and I don't ever remember Temple landing a top 1-2 player from Pennsylvania.
Temple has landed top players from New Jersey, like Kevin Harvey (Paulsboro) and P.J. Walker (Elizabeth), but never someone this high from its own state.
Hardin was a rookie coach at Navy when Jim Brown, the greatest ever to have a ball in his hands, was snubbed for the Heisman Trophy.

No. 2-ranked in Pennsylvania.

Someone named Paul Hornung won it instead for a LOSING Notre Dame team. Brown's omission will go down at the biggest Heisman snub ever.
Snubs apparently are a thing of the past for Temple, though. The recruits keep getting better.
The Owls currently have the No. 43-rated recruiting class in the country and Davis' verbal can only move that ranking up a notch or two in the upcoming days.
Davis plays a position the Owls sorely need to upgrade.
No cornerback has ever won the Heisman Trophy, but there's always a first for everything.
Who knows?
If the first Jim Brown and the first Anthony Davis can get snubbed for the Heisman, then maybe this Anthony   Davis can add one of those snubbed names to the trophy.

Dogbe, Nutile a couple of good additions

Frank Nutile's junior highlights at Don Bosco.

Like the guy in Moneyball, I like stats.
One of the reasons the Oakland A's were able to build a team from low-budget to competitive was that Billy Bean never overthought things.
He'd rather draft guys who put up good numbers in competitive leagues (heck, he preferred top-level college baseball players over high schoolers) and roll the dice that past history is the best predictor of future history.
I've always been one of those people when it comes to recruiting Temple football players.
That's why I particularly like the recent recruiting additions of defensive end Michael Dogbe and quarterback Frank Nutile.

Dogbe was a sack machine playing for Parsippany Hills, a school that produced one-time Temple quarterback Mike Gerardi.
Nutile threw 14 touchdown passes playing for Don Bosco, a program consistently rated in the USA Today's  national Top 10.
To me, the most important stats for a quarterback are wins and touchdown passes.
Fourteen touchdown passes as a junior and an 8-3 mark for a storied program is a pretty good base upon which to build senior stats.
Contrast that to former Temple quarterback Vaughn Charlton, who was handed a scholarship even though he had only nine touchdown passes as a senior playing in a very weak and now defunct Southern Chester County League. On the other hand, Adam DiMichele had 36 touchdown passes as a senior at Sto-Rox.
You know how those two careers turned out.
Dogbe had eight quarterback sacks, which means he was disrupting a lot of offensive game plans.
I'll be watching Nutile and hope he pushes the touchdown totals over 20 this year.
Hopefully, Dogbe will be in double-digits in sacks.
Either way, I think past performance dictates future success for both guys at Temple.



Michael Dogbe's highlight reel. Would have used "who let the dogs out" as the musical track.

Smith: Temple's Gateway to the West

Our first attempt at Adobe InDesign. (OK, we'll get better.)

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis represents the city known as the Gateway to the West.
Move that about 300 miles to the Northeast and put it in Pittsburgh for Temple's purposes.
Former Gateway head coach Terry Smith is proving to be one of Matt Rhule's most productive hires so far.
Look at the list of the six "hard" verbals so far and it is peppered with Smith's Pittsburgh-area ties.
Today is a good day to talk about those ties for two reasons:
Scout.com is reporting today that Lenny Williams, Sto-Rox's outstanding dual-purpose quarterback, is about to commit to Temple and the Owls are coming off their first-ever camp held in the Pittsburgh area this weekend..
That would be great news because Williams would be the Owls' most high-profile recruit out of the Pittsburgh area since Victor Lay signed out of Aliquippa. (Adam DiMichele, also from Sto-Rox, would have qualified but he was technically a Penn State recruit and a transfer from a Florida JC.)

The website 247.com's list of hard Temple verbals.

As a senior at Sto-Rox, DiMichele threw for nearly 3,000 yards and 36 touchdown passes.
Thirty-six TD passes.
By comparison, recent Temple recruits Chester Stewart (DeMatha, Md.) and Vaughn Charlton (Avon Grove, Pa.) had 17 and nine touchdown passes during their senior years.
We'll see what kind of numbers Lenny Williams puts up in the TD-throwing department his senior year, but I'm willing to bet it'll be closer to 36 than 17.
Williams would be the fourth Temple verbal from the Pittsburgh area this season, joining the Gateway duo of Delvon Randall (safety) and interior linebacker Brenon Thrift and Renaissance Christian Academy athlete Troy Simons.
Smith, DiMichele and Rhule all were in Pittsburgh this weekend, spreading the Temple gospel.
Evidently, they found a few believers and that can only be good news for Temple fans going forward.

Coach voted into Hall of Fame

There are more good  TU plays called in these 10 minutes than 2 years of Dazball.

For all of my life, I've simply known him as Coach.
That's what I called him when I first met him as a sports writer for The Temple News back in the 1970s and that's what I called him when I saw him last year.
Now I'll just call him a Hall of Famer.
This morning news comes from Atlanta that  coach Wayne Hardin has been voted into the Hall of Fame.
Probably the best compliment coach ever gave me was last year.
"Mike, I read your blog and it is first-class," coach said.
First-class.

Coach was the man behind greatest helmets in Temple history, although I have seen better Temple hats.

(Doc Chodoff also told me the same thing a couple of years ago and I was just as flattered.)
I like that hyphenated word because that's the way I've always described coach Hardin.
He was a first-class coach and, for the years he was Temple's head coach, the Owls had the best head coach in the country.
Period, end of story.
To me the definition of a great head coach is someone who gets the most out of the talent available to him.
Nobody got more out of his talent than Wayne Hardin.

Wayne Hardin storieson TFF through the years

"We get kidded about our short, fat, kids, but we don't time them in the 40," Hardin once said. "They might not be too fast over 40 yards but, from here to there, they are not too bad and that's all we ask of them."
Meanwhile, he made a nice living out of outsmarting coaches with better players.
Hardin never beat Penn State, but it wasn't out of a lack of wits against Joe Paterno.
"Hardin's outcoaching Joe again," Allentown Morning Call columnist Joe Kunda said out loud in the Beaver Stadium press box as the Owls took a halftime lead at Penn State.
Everybody laughed.

Ukraine checking in for a 3-minute read of TFF.

Everybody knew Kunda was right.
Think about it.
The highest Temple was ever ranked came in 1979, when the Owls rose to No. 17 in both the AP and UPI polls.
The highest Navy was ever ranked (at least in the modern era) was No. 2 in the nation in 1962.
The head coach in both cases?
Wayne Hardin.
No one has ever been more deserving of the Hall of Fame.
Congrats, coach.

Bradshaw's retiring a sad day for Temple football

"Now, Steve, you aren't going to leave me after a couple of years, are you?"

The Catholic Church requires three documented Miracles in order for to qualify for Sainthood.
By those standards, Bill Bradshaw is a Temple football Saint.

TFF and Bradshaw through the years:
A compilation of stories on Temple Football Forever mentioning Bill Bradshaw through the years.

That's why the news of Bradshaw retiring today (effective June 30) is truly a sad day for the program.
When the 2005 Temple president, David Adamany, formed a committee to "determine the future of Temple football" it was with one goal in mind:
To kill the program.
In December of that year, Adamany put the committee together and said "once their report is completed, it will be made public."

Bill puts the myth
of Temple making up
attendance figures to rest.

That report was never made public because the outcome was not the one Adamany wanted or expected.
The Board of Trustees, led by then Chairman Howard Gittis, voted to keep football and strengthen it.
Behind the scene, Bradshaw worked the room for the "pro-football" people.
By the time the vote was in, he was exhausted.
"I didn't know what the outcome would be, but football was saved by one vote," Bradshaw said.
Miracle No. 1?
Check.
Then football was saved again by one trip Bradshaw made to talk to Virginia defensive coordinator Al Golden.
Bradshaw brought with him a yellow legal pad.
When he got out of the meeting, he had four words written on the notepad:
"This is our guy."
Even though the university went through the motions of forming a "football selection committee" Bradshaw steered the committee toward Golden, who was just what Temple needed at the time. A young, energetic football surgeon who would spend 80 hours a week, sleeping at 10th and Diamond if necessary, to resuscitate a dying patient.
"I'm going to build a house of brick, not straw," said Golden, and he did.
Miracle No. 2?
Check.
Getting Temple into the MAC for football was no miracle because the Owls were also being courted by Conference USA at the time, but getting the Owls out certainly qualifies.
When no power conference wanted Temple, Bradshaw pulled the Big East rabbit out of his hat by working the phones and commissioners on TU's behalf. The signature moment that forced the Big East's hand might have been a Sunday trip Bradshaw and  then president Ann Weaver Hart made to the Conference USA convention in Dallas.
Thinking Temple might take the largest available football market to CUSA, the Big East moved fast to lock up the Owls within a week after that reported meeting.

Interesting tweet from Florida's Sharrif Floyd, a No. 1 draft choice.

Sometimes you've got to force the other guy's hand and Bradshaw, a good poker player, knew how to do that.
What happened to the Big East after Temple signed up was beyond Bradshaw's control.
Miracle No. 3?
Check.
When Steve Addazio left after two short years after saying Temple was "my dream job" and that "I could see myself staying here the rest of my career" the program faced another crisis.
Hire another name from a big-time program and risk losing him after a year or right a ship that faced the possibility of losing a head coach every year.
Bradshaw thought about it, listened to the players and parents and decided that stability was needed above all at this point and hired Golden disciple Matt Rhule.
Miracle No. 4?
Only if Rhule is able to produce on-field results like Golden was and the early indications are all positive.
There's still time before the Canonization but, in my mind, Bill Bradshaw is a Saint and, thankfully, a living one.

Bill Bradshaw and Temple football 

Year	Action	Result
2005	Negotiated move into MAC	Gave TU opportunity to compete for automatic bowl bids
2006	Hired Al Golden	First bowl appearance by Owls in 30 years, MAC East co-champs (2009), bowl eligible 3 straight years
2011	Hired Steve Addazio	First bowl win in over 30 years
2012	Move to Big East, expanded football facility with $10 million addition	Gave Temple an upgrade in number and quality of possible bowl bids, solidified future recruiting
2012	Hired Matt Rhule	Stabilized a program hemorrhaging head coaches