Temple football: Oh, the pain

By Mike Gibson
Back in the 1960's, a character named Dr. Smith on the TV show "Lost in Space" had a stock line:
"Oh, the pain. The pain."
I've thought of Dr. Smith often this fall _ usually at halftime of Temple football games, walking out of whatever stadium the Owls are playing, because there is only so much pain I can take.

Judging from the stream of fellow fans wearing Temple garb following me out the door, I have plenty of company.
The score halftime score of a recent Saturday's monstrosity against Bowling Green at the Linc was 42-9.
The halftime score of the opener against Virginia was 30-0.
At Maryland, it was 28-0.
Bad guys in the lead every time.
Before I can even get comfortable in my seat, the game is over.
Football is a relatively simple game. Fundamentals are paramount. You block. You tackle. You harass the other guy's quarterback. You keep the other guys off your quarterback.

At Temple, the game recently has been made out to seem like a class taught in one of those advanced mathematics courses on Liacouras Walk.

The current coach, Bobby Wallace, came to Philadelphia from North Alabama, a place where he won three Division II national titles by using a triple option offense.

Not long into his tenure on North Broad Street, he scraps the triple option for a much more complex spread offense.
Simply put, the idea is to spread the field with receivers, creating matchup problems with the defensive backs.
It seems to work everywhere but Temple.
Temple can't protect its quarterback in that offense. The "bad" guys are in so frequently on Temple quarterbacks that they can't even make the simple decisions necessary to advance the football.

On the other side of the field, the Bowling Green quarterback sits there is the same offense and surveys the Temple defense with all the urgency of a bird watcher on Hawk Mountain.

All the time in the world.
The Owls have hit rock bottom. Consider:
Temple has lost, 45-17, to a Toledo team that gave up 63 points to both Kansas and Minnesota. Bowling Green put up 70 on the Owls, a week after losing, 32-14, to that noted power Northern Illinois.

The losses to Maryland, 45-22, and Virginia, 44-14, fall into the expected category.
Certainly, the coaching staff shares the largest part of the burden here. Maybe all of it.
If Temple had never won in football, maybe an argument can be made that winning in this sport is impossible there.
That argument just cannot be made because Temple has won and won impressively in the past. Temple is sitting on a gold mine if it can win at the Linc.
As recently as 1990, the Owls went 7-4 and defeated Virginia Tech, 31-28, and won at Wisconsin, 23-18. (The same program that beat Penn State last week.)

Between 1970 and 1982, under a mastermind named Wayne Hardin, the Owls won 80 games, lost 52 and tied three.
In 1979, Hardin's team went 10-2, losing only to Penn State (22-7) and Pitt (10-9) and finished 17th in both major polls.

All of this was accomplished with virtually no facilities, no great stadium, no conference affiliation. The practice field was a rock-strewn one on land now occupied by the brand new Student Pavilion.

Hardin proved winning can be done at Temple even under extreme adversity.
Now Temple plays its home games in arguably the most spectacular football stadium in the world, has a $7 million practice facility built in 2001 exclusively for football with a new $500,000 state-of-the-art turf practice field installed in August. The alumni and friends of football have paid for the facility and the turf.

So far, all that has bought them is a whole lot of pain.
Right now, there is a university-charged task force studying both what can and should be done with athletics at Temple, specifically football. The findings come out in January.

If they are not into pain, hiring a coach as capable as Hardin was seems like the most logical recommendation they can make.

This story first appeared in the Philadelphia Metro, a daily newspaper, in Oct., 2004.