jojatk
Helluva Engineer
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Agree AE 87, but only in the short run. Collins, in his defense, only had 2 years at Temple. As a vote for your no. 2 option, seems that some are severely discounting the momentum of back to back 10 win seasons on the entire program and returning players at a school like Temple.
That's a good point about momentum and returning players. There's absolutely the potential for that when you have a coaching transition after a couple of excellent seasons. Unfortunately for Collins the 2017 Temple Owls lost quite a lot of production from the 2016 Temple Owls. For example:
- all three starting LBs gone
- only QB with more than 5 passes in a game gone
- starting center and left tackle gone
- 4 out of their 6-7 DL guys gone, including Haason Reddick who was drafted in the 1st round by Arizona after the 2016 season (they lost a TON of DL production but did rotate 6-7 guys so they did return some production)
- starting RB (though their backup RB was excellent and I would have said that they didn't lose a bit except the returning guy was playing hurt for most of the 2017 year... all week he would be in a boot and not practice or practice only a little and then play so his production was severely limited... the 2018 year he was healthy and showed how good he could be getting back to 1000 yards)
- 2 of their starting defensive backfield
So Collins and his incoming staff had to replace some significant experience on defense and all of their QB production and much of their RB production and the leaders on their OL. These are just facts. From them I draw the conclusion that Collins did a pretty good job getting them to 7-6 and then 8-4. I'll say that the one thing I haven't been able to follow up on with my cousin is why they didn't start the Russo kid at QB in 2017. He was a r-fr in 2017, I believe, and eventually got the starting job part of the way through last season as a r-so. He had a terrific HS career and even though he was a r-fr, as I pointed out neither of the other two guys on the roster had any experience at all. So that's the one mystery to me and potentially something that might have made year 1 at Temple even better.
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