The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
McCaffery
dium at Broad and Norris, even with the neighbors essentially ready to run a blocking scheme against the bulldozers, concluded that it would be better to turn a basketball program in a high-level conference over to an assistant who has never coached a game. Better still, it would enable a full season where the players would be thrust into a mist, not knowing whether to listen to the outgoing coach or to schmooze the one in the in-box.
For decades, Temple has been trying to figure things out, usually on the fly, never quite understanding that it will never regularly play football to rampaging popularity or why its basketball games seldom attract substantial crowds. Even when it was coached by Hall of Famer Harry Litwack, Temple needed to play doubleheaders, where two or three other teams might, just might, have been able to fill the 9,000-seat Palestra. Hall of Famer John Chaney needed to have the No. 1 team in the nation to fill McGonigle Hall, capacity 3,900, or what some other programs easily could draw for an open scrimmage. Few on-campus college basketball facilities are as ideal as the Liacouras Center. But if no one goes there, that is not Fran Dunphy’s fault. Temple has never been a basketball draw.
The cranky fringe that tries to rule the collegebasketball coaching industry behind internet camouflage used two ordinary seasons to re-imagine Dunphy, 69, as too old to matter. But Duke has a coach who is 71, not that he doesn’t win a basketball contest from time to time.
If Temple’s basketball program seems stalled, then Temple can blame Temple. Even if the larger checks typically arrive through a robust, major-college football product, the way the basketball program has been made to join that bumpy ride is unfortunate. The Owls were ideally placed in the Atlantic 10, a highlevel conference centered in the East with some long rivalries, including two within one SEPTA transfer-pass away. But the administration was determined to push the football program up a notch and was promised a Big East slot which, after a football-basketball split, left Temple in the convoluted American Athletic Conference. Suddenly, Temple was required to play unfamiliar teams, plenty with a different view of how recruiting should be handled. Suddenly, instead of hosting Massachusetts or Richmond, the Owls were trying to interest Philadelphia customers into paying to watch Tulsa or Tulane. The Big 5 remained a draw for nearby recruits. But the ECU-USF-CFUSMU American Conference mouthful had to be enough to confuse fans, players and parents of recruiting targets.
In six AAC seasons, the Owls went to the NIT Final Four, an NCAA Tournament and another NIT, and from 2014 through 2016, they were 47-23. That’s 2016. That recent. Suddenly, though, Temple was in a hurry to hint at blaming the coach for not immediately dominating a more difficult conference.
It’s almost impossible for one athletic department to so thoroughly misread the Philadelphia market. Brazenly annoy neighbors by trying to ram a football stadium into their compact, residential streets, while simultaneously de-valuing a Big 5 Hall of Fame basketball coach with multiple generations of ties to the area basketball community.
Imagine polling the entire Philadelphia sports market, which is where Temple would have to reach to sell either football or basketball tickets, and generating an approval rating. What would be more popular: An arearaised basketball man untainted by scandal with 557 career wins and 16 NCAA Tournaments, including nine in the last 14 years? Or a stadium with little expressway access less than eight miles from the Linc for a football team last caught in the Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl?
Ah, but it’s too late for that. Temple is making its moves. So let the next college basketball season begin for the 350 Division One teams with one coach. And let it begin, too, for that one program with twice that many. Contact Jack McCaffery @jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @ JackMcCaffery