Golden is the motivation behind Temple’s turnaround

Temple’s football program was a competitive black hole and a professional graveyard when Al Golden took a chance four years ago and became its head coach.

Everything was a mess. No direction. Marginal talent. Academic disarray. And absolutely no local interest in a perennially bumbling program.

“It was in tough shape,” Golden said. “The academic structure was awful. We lost nine scholarships [for failing to hit the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate]. Basically, everything you read or learned about which leads to catastrophe in the business model, we represented that.”

Not anymore.

The Owls (9-3), who will face UCLA (6-6) in Tuesday’s EagleBank Bowl at RFK Stadium, have spun one of the better tales college football has to offer this season. After uncorking a nine-game winning streak, Temple — yes, Temple — will play in the postseason for the first time since a 1979 appearance in the long-defunct Garden State Bowl.

Not bad for a program cut loose by the Big East after the 2004 season. Or for a team not long removed from losing 28 of 29 games. Or for a school in the midst of its first winning season since 1990.

“When we first got here, the locals were throwing rocks at us, and everyone thought we were the laughingstock of college football,” senior tight end Steve Maneri said. “We kept our mouths shut and tried to get better.”

Of course, the Owls were a laughingstock, playing in front of infinitesimal crowds at Lincoln Financial Field. After eviction from the Big East, they played the role of punching bag in 2005. Two days after clinching a losing season with a 38-7 loss to Maryland in monsoon-like conditions, coach Bobby Wallace announced he would resign at the end of the year.

But who would want a piece of an apparent mess? Try Golden, who played at Penn State and spent five seasons as Virginia’s defensive coordinator.

“There’s a lot of jobs that you can’t put your personal stamp on; everything is in place,” Golden said. “That wasn’t the case here. There was a real good opportunity.”

It would just take time to create a turnaround, something Golden acknowledges he believed had an outside chance of unfolding within three years. But he was taking over a program with only 54 scholarship players, far below the maximum of 85 the NCAA permits.

Bodies were welcome, but so were the right minds. In a program accustomed to losing, it was going to take time to build a team filled with capable and disciplined players.

“When I came here in 2005, there wasn’t really a lot going on as far as football, no real leadership or anything like that,” safety Dominique Harris said. “Now we have more leaders and more players that want to do the right thing on and off the field. That’s what the difference is.”

The change started with Golden, particularly with his philosophy on how Temple could find its niche in the college football pecking order. He said 40 percent of the nation’s population is within a four-hour drive of Temple’s North Philadelphia campus, ensuring a recruiting net stretching from New England to the D.C. area to Pittsburgh.

More importantly, Temple found a home in the Mid-American Conference. The Owls were no longer in a league with Miami, Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech and West Virginia, and they clearly were not at the same level as Penn State. But they were still a step up from the Division I-AA powerhouses, and Golden believed he had found a marketplace in which Temple could succeed.

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