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For Temple football fans, it's boom, not doom

In her time earlier this decade as a Temple undergraduate, Lisa Campbell confessed, she was not the most devout Owls football fan.

Rich Gabe, right, a serious Temple fan, and his friend Joe Lisa tailgate with friends before the Owls' 47-13 win over Kent State on Saturday. (Ed Hille / Staff Photographer)
Rich Gabe, right, a serious Temple fan, and his friend Joe Lisa tailgate with friends before the Owls' 47-13 win over Kent State on Saturday. (Ed Hille / Staff Photographer)Read more

In her time earlier this decade as a Temple undergraduate, Lisa Campbell confessed, she was not the most devout Owls football fan.

"I didn't know they had a football team when I went there," Campbell said. "The last time they went to a bowl game, I was 10 years old."

Now a Saturday-afternoon regular at Lincoln Financial Field, Campbell was on her way to yesterday's final Owls home game - three decades after that 1979 Garden State Bowl appearance - when she pulled up at a toll booth off the New Jersey Turnpike. The toll taker noticed her Temple Football sweatshirt.

"He was just excited - he was like, 'Oh, they're 6-0 in the conference!', " Campbell said.

An episode of Ripley's Believe It or Not? A fantasy sequence? Campbell sounded kind of surprised herself.

"He was like, 'Go Owls!', " Campbell said in the parking lot before the game.

What to make of this? Yesterday, the Owls won their ninth consecutive football game, beating Kent State, 47-13. In its history, Temple had never won nine straight in the same season.

A bowl bid isn't official yet, but it's coming.

How crazy is this getting?

"Two people got arrested outside for scalping," said a Temple administrator, sounding thrilled at the thought.

Or how about this third-quarter conversation at the top of Section 120?

"Are you going to Detroit?" asked a guy in a Phillies jersey, referring to the site of the Mid-American Conference championship game.

"Yeah," said an older guy wearing a Temple hat.

"And they'll go to a bowl game?"

"Yeah. Yeah."

The Owls still need to beat Ohio on Friday to win the MAC East Division and get to the conference title game.

They are 9-2 overall, and 7-0 in the MAC, but you can't say the Owls have captured the city. Any record in the MAC doesn't resonate in Philadelphia, even if it's proven to be the right league for Temple. A loss to Villanova in the season opener and a failure to stay closer to Penn State in the Owls' only other defeat may have prevented more excitement.

The announced attendance of 21,046 seemed slightly high - maybe old habits die hard. The sections behind Temple's bench, goal line to goal line, were close to full, and the sections between the 20s were full. But there also were virtually empty sections in the Linc's lower bowl. Kent State won't pack the place.

However, in those full sections, you felt as if you were at a college football game.

For the diehards, yesterday was sweet, they said. After decades of being a national punch line, Temple football had turned an obvious corner. Nobody is mocking the Owls. What's that like for the loyalists?

"Oh, my goodness," said Ted DeLapp, a 1971 graduate. "I had all these game tickets all those years and was sitting by myself. In the cold, the rain, watching mistake after mistake. It was just hollow. I kept hoping upon hope it would turn around."

DeLapp has been a season-ticket holder for 20 years, paying for 22 tickets, though not using many of them.

"I couldn't give them away," DeLapp said. "I'd ask anybody. People I didn't even know, really."

DeLapp got used to all the mockery, " . . . constant, from family and everybody - like, 'Why don't they drop football?' "

Some of the mockers were tailgating with him yesterday, DeLapp pointed out.

"We'd get free tickets as students - I never went," admitted Phil Morrison, Class of '94. He was at DeLapp's tailgate yesterday with two of his old roommates who said they used to go to games.

"You did?" Morrison said, appearing genuinely surprised.

One of his roommates, Todd Stanford, who now lives in Selinsgrove, Pa., said: "After we'd get blown out, it was always the same headline in the paper. 'Temple of Doom.' You'd get so tired of that."

Stanford said he called WIP-AM one time to talk about Owls football.

"Oh, get out of here - you're not talking about that," the producer told him, he said, even after Stanford tried to tie in an Eagles point by comparing an Owls tailback to former Eagle Charlie Garner. "They weren't going for it," Stanford said.

Temple longtimers have seen things they can't forget. They remember the dark days of 1992-96, when the Owls were a cumulative 6-49. The nadir could have been Sept. 25, 1993, at Boston College. On their way to a 62-0 victory, Boston College blocked three straight Temple punts in the first quarter. It was the middle of three games the Owls lost by at least 50 points.

Another low point, they all said in the parking lot, was the end of the Bobby Wallace era, after the Owls had been kicked out of the Big East Conference. After Wallace's last game, marking the end of the 2005 season - in which Temple went 0-11 - there was a fistfight in the parking lot over Wallace's tenure.

Temple fans talked of their hope that the Big East would take the Owls back if that league splits between basketball-only schools and schools that play football and basketball.

"Temple was its own worst enemy in the whole thing," DeLapp said of the apathy that caused their departure from the Big East. "Temple deserved what it got. I'm surprised [the league] hung in as long as they did."

Joining the tailgate, Dan Glammer of Jenkintown said he has missed only six home games in 30 years. This for a team that hadn't won more than five games from 1990 through 2007.

"I've traveled all over the country to see them get shellacked," Glammer said. "You'd see temper tantrums on the sidelines. Guys laughing when they were getting killed."

He remembers seeing Bill Cosby laughing it up, trying to entertain people, in the fourth quarter of a blowout at the Meadowlands. That only ticked off Glammer.

"Then I got a flat tire on the way home," he said.

So what is this like?

"I don't think words can even describe it," said Glammer, a 1988 Temple Law School graduate. "Now you're seeing the difference between a program and when you had a couple of good players but you didn't have the hope."

Now, Temple fans are more likely to debate how long Owls coach Al Golden will stay on North Broad Street.

"I think it depends on what happens - if we were to run the table this year, he might be more likely to go," said Rick Gabe, tailgating with DeLapp before the game.

"I heard him say on the radio he doesn't just want to make Temple a top-25 team, but a top-25 program," DeLapp said. "I think he's throwing it out to the administration and the board of trustees. That would be the leverage."

Gabe, wearing a No. 1 Temple football jersey, had similar out-of-body experiences as Campbell before yesterday's game.

At his dry cleaner in South Philadelphia: "Where did you get that Temple jersey?"

Picking up a hoagie tray at Sixth and Ritner: "If they win today, do they go to a bowl game?"

Another sight: Temple students leaving the stadium early because it was already an Owls blowout. That was new, but so was this: The students stopped to gather around a TV monitor to watch a play. They watched the Owls return a punt 52 yards to make the score 40-13. "Ooooooh," one yelled.

Several plays earlier, the Owls had punched one in to go ahead by 33-10.

"Wow," said DeLapp, sitting behind Temple's bench in the 10th row, high-fiving fans in three rows without leaving his seat.

"We're not even jumping now," DeLapp said. "We're getting used to all this."