Rich Hofmann: Temple's move means change for the better

NEW YORK - Three decades ago, Bill Bradshaw was the kid athletic director at his alma mater, La Salle. Times were simpler in Philadelphia. Just about every basketball game was at the Palestra. Most of the players were from the area. The term "shoestring budget" might have been coined in the Big 5 offices. It was a really big deal in a school's life if it found its way onto the ECAC Game of the Week on Saturday afternoon, brought to you by TVS, with Marv Albert doing the play-by-play and Bucky Waters providing the analysis.

Then came the Big East, and Villanova was joining, and there was a great stir in the basketball community. There was a marriage being consummated between this new league and this new cable phenomenon known as ESPN, and the notion that balkanized, backwater Eastern basketball was going to have a league now to rival the Big Ten and the Big Eight and the rest was the cause of much excitement.

Much of the Philadelphia basketball community was hesitant, though, because we grew up in a certain way and, to us, the backwater felt just fine, thank you.

"I remember it like it was last month," Bradshaw said. "Absolutely, there was fear about recruiting, that the [Big East] brand would take away everyone's opportunity to be in the big time in basketball . . .

"The Big East came along, and it was a big machine. It was an intimidating group. It was like you were being left out."

Thirty years later . . .

Then, now . . .

At a press conference yesterday between sessions of the Big East Tournament, it was announced that Temple would be rejoining the league for football in 2012 and for basketball and all sports in 2013-14. It completes a stunning turnaround for the Temple athletic program.

Part of this is fueled by expediency on the part of the Big East, which suddenly needs another football team now that West Virginia is leaving the conference. But there is another reality that needs to be stated. If the Big East had needed a new partner even 3 or 4 years ago, Temple would not have been asked. That is how much things at the school have changed.

In 2001, the Big East voted to kick out the Temple football program. Yesterday, school trustee Lewis Katz sat behind a microphone and said something that might never have been said publicly by a Temple person. That is, "You know, we didn't deserve, truthfully, to be in the football competition in those years. But it's hard to get kicked out."

They did not deserve it. Bradshaw was hired more than a year later, and he said yesterday about the expulsion, "I understood it. I honestly did. From the outside, I understood it. There might not have been the commitment there. There might not have been the performance there."

In the time since, Bradshaw has brought in Al Golden and Steve Addazio as Temple's football coaches and Fran Dunphy as the basketball coach - yet this maneuver tops even those winning hires. Because, yes, football is driving this decision and, yes, the Owls were in the right place at the right time. But getting to that right place was the key.

So the Owls celebrate their greatest day, and rightfully so. Meanwhile, the rest of us sit and wonder about what it might mean for basketball in the city, and for those left behind.

It is the same question as 3 decades ago. But here is the answer: City basketball is better equipped in 2012 to handle whatever might be coming.

If you were of a certain age, and some of your greatest teenaged memories involved a couple of friends and Penn-Lafayette at 7 and Temple-Villanova at 9, there was something to lose back when the Big East first formed, something great and valuable. And we did lose it, bit by bit: fewer doubleheaders and more games at what we then thought of as the soulless Spectrum; then no doubleheaders; then games on campus sites and fewer games at the Palestra; then that bastardized half-round robin thing, and now to today.

I know how I felt about those times, and about some of the things that happened along the way. But as a kid became an adult, and a fan became a columnist, and emotion faded into objectivity, I always came back to the same place:

How can you tell somebody - somebody who competes for a living, by the way - not to try to better themselves?

How can you not celebrate what Villanova became, and what Temple might become?

Because while I loved those old times, the truth is that the Big East and the competition from the outside world has made the sport in Philadelphia better. Many, many more people pay to watch Philadelphia college basketball games in this era than ever before. (Truth be told, there often was plenty of room to spread out a hoagie on the bench next to you at the Palestra, back when.)

There are better arenas on campus and much, much better basketball practice facilities than anyone could have imagined 30 years ago. The coaching in this town remains excellent. There are ceilings of realism placed on each program now, and that is true - but weren't there always, at least in modern times? I mean, they didn't start chanting "The Hawk will never die" because they were expecting to perpetuate a dynasty.

As long as the schools all have a shot at the NCAA Tournament through their conferences, and as long as they all play each other every year, the thread remains intact. That is true, even as Bradshaw acknowledges what the rest of the city must be feeling.

"Whether it's real or it's perception, there will be that kind of feeling that I had in my stomach 30 years ago, probably, for my great friends," he said. "No question."