Temple owes stellar recruiting class to 2015 success
Until the letters of intent piled out of the fax machine Wednesday in Temple's football office, there still were some questions about which new guys would be showing up at 10th and Diamond to play football.
Until the letters of intent piled out of the fax machine Wednesday in Temple's football office, there still were some questions about which new guys would be showing up at 10th and Diamond to play football.
"I'll tell you, from last Friday until now, it was the most assaulted recruiting class we've had, from all angles," said Owls coach Matt Rhule, talking Wednesday afternoon about that recruiting class and how other programs tried to poach players who already had committed to Temple.
That's a good thing, by the way. If Miami is trying to get your player (and fails - which happened), that's a positive for Temple, and even something new.
How many of the newest Temple signees would have gone elsewhere if this past season hadn't created a buzz, if the Owls had been, say, 5-7? Rhule guesses that "a significant amount" could have gone elsewhere.
"I think a lot of those kids sat in the stands at the Penn State game, the Notre Dame game, the Memphis game," Rhule said, mentioning that recruits also saw the national awards that senior linebacker Tyler Matakevich picked up. "They realized you can achieve everything, that this is big-time. Had we not accomplished the things we did, we probably would not have been able to convince those kids of that."
You have to believe that when LSU coach Les Miles flew into town late in the game and sat down in the home of Archbishop Wood quarterback Anthony Russo, Miles probably expected Russo would at least accept his invitation to go to LSU's campus.
That wasn't an offer, not yet, but Russo decided not to make the trip. He committed to Temple. (The rationale seems simple from the outside. Russo has a much better chance of getting on the field at Temple than at LSU.)
"Obviously, we lost Russo to Rutgers early on," Rhule said, mentioning that things changed after the coaching change at Rutgers, when Russo opened his recruiting back up. "I think he always liked Temple. I think he and his family had to be comfortable with - he's a great quarterback, is this going to be a great fit, is it going to be a great program?"
So maybe a coaching change elsewhere benefited Temple in this case. But it made things interesting across the board.
"The Northeast was really a mess," Rhule said, referring to all the coaching changes that caused players to decommit and new staffs to go after players who already had committed elsewhere.
"We had a lot of kids here, down the stretch a lot of people tried to take our kids," Rhule said.
He wasn't asking for any violins.
"We tried to take other people's kids," Rhule said. "It is what it is."
These days, oral commitments mean less than ever. You can't blame a recruit for committing when schools tell them they need to commit or the school will move on to somebody else. But commitment is the wrong word. What's a better term?
"What do they call it when you put a jacket down to save your seat?" suggested a college administrator.
A 10-4 season and a win over Penn State didn't suddenly mean Temple was a top 20 recruiting program. The Owls still lost battles to Penn State, which got a higher-rated class, and lost a committed player late in the game to the Nittany Lions.
But if you look at the list of offers Temple signees got according to 247Sports.com, almost half the players had offers from at least one Power 5 school. Keyvone Bruton from Norfolk, Va., had more than one. His offers included Duke, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest, and Purdue.
According to OwlScoop.com, William Kwenkeu, a linebacker from Waldorf, Md., turned down a late offer from Pittsburgh, and Freddie Johnson, a receiver from North Fort Myers, Fla., spurned a late overture from Miami.
Temple teams of the past produced NFL players, so we're not saying this is all a gigantic sea change. And plenty of this year's signees still were choosing Temple over FCS or lower-tier FBS schools. Rhule always talks of the need for his staffers to trust their own evaluations of future potential. Matakevich had no other FCS offers.
Still, call it significant that Karamo Dioubate, a four-star defensive tackle from Prep Charter, a big-time recruit by any standard, who had decommitted from Penn State and visited Auburn, came down to the Owls and South Carolina, plus reported late interest from Alabama.
Wednesday night, Dioubate chose to stay home and play for Temple.
Would that have happened a year ago?
@jensenoffcampus