USA TODAY International Edition
Temple’s recruiting class goes international
Two trips to Europe in the last five years have allowed Geoff Collins and his wife to experience the culture of the Continent. The wine. The cheese. The sights. The history. The football — American football, not soccer.
Temple’s first-year coach, who just capped his debut season with a Gasparilla Bowl win against Florida International, spent those offseason trips in part as a guest clinician with the British American Football Association, the sport’s national governing body in the United Kingdom. In return, Collins has been part of coaching staffs that have hosted a number of European coaches during spring drills or fall camp.
That experience, along with certain ties his staff of assistants hold to football clubs across Europe, helped Collins sign a recruiting class unique across the Football Bowl Subdivision in one respect: Temple’s 25-man group includes six signees who hail from outside the USA, with all but one along the offensive and defensive lines — forming what should be known as college football’s International House of Pancake Blocks.
“It was fun to get all the different kinds of cultures,” Collins said in a phone interview with USA TODAY.
Two signees, lineman Oskar Andersson and Isaac Moore, are Swedish imports. Andersson, a 6-6, 298-pound lineman from Karlskoga, starred on the national team that claimed the most recent Under-19 European championship in Copenhagen. Isaac Moore, from the inland hub city of Orebro, grew up playing soccer until he outgrew the sport and “had to find another outlet for his athleticism,” Collins said.
Temple’s connections to the two recruits came via offensive line coach Chris Wiesehan. One of Wiesehan’s former players is involved with the Swedish football recruiting network and helped to arrange trips for Andersson and Moore to several satellite camps, with the pair eventually making their way to Temple’s campus for an offseason visit and tour.
They’ll both exceed everyone’s expectations, he said, adding that if they were American prospects they would have at least 40 FBS scholarship offers.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, but recruited out of Dakota College in Bottineau, N.D., defensive end Nickolos Madourie landed with the Owls thanks to another happy coincidence: Temple defensive backs coach Cory Robinson’s wife is Jamaican, and she and Madourie’s mother “hit it off at a level you don’t see every day.”
Another positive twist of fate: Lancaster, Pa., receiver Jose Barbon was born in Havana to parents who “don’t speak very much English,” said Collins, so the home stretch of Barbon’s recruitment was a team effort involving Collins; linebackers coach Andrew Thacker, a Spanish major at Furman University; and the wife of a Temple quality-control coach who speaks fluent Spanish and helped to serve as the interpreter.
Rounding out the international group were Lakewood, N.J., offensive lineman Jean Paul Rodriguez, who was born in Lima, Peru, and offensive lineman JD Gomez of A.S.A. College in Hialeah, Fla., who hails from the Dominican Republic.
When it came to his first full recruiting class at Temple, which through the early signing period ranks among the top half of the American Athletic Conference, Collins knew that being a developmental program demanded that his staff find untraditional prospects. Temple has rarely landed immediate-impact prospects; more often the Owls’ recruits need to be broken down and rebuilt before turning into contributors.
“The big thing I learned from being at Mississippi State for four years is that it’s a developmental program, so you learn to look for the height, the weight … the football background has to be irrelevant,” he said. “You’re looking for physical characteristics, mental makeup, character, intelligence — all those things that project to be a big-time college football player. And we have a process that we go through.
“Because a lot of these programs in college football, they want the cookiecutter image from the pedigreed high school and the pedigreed coaches and the pedigreed background. And that’s all fine and good. But everybody’s going after those. So we have to find another niche to differentiate ourselves.”
Collins cites the example of former Mississippi State star Benardrick McKinney, now a stalwart in the middle of the Houston Texas defense. Once a 6-5, 200-pound quarterback with one scholarship offer, McKinney developed into an all-conference middle linebacker before departing after his junior season and being drafted in the second round.