A conference can kick a team out. Just ask Temple

The Owls' football program was so miserable in the 90s and early 2000s that the Big East had no choice but to take action. Does it have any relevance today in the era of potential super leagues?

Conference realignment is almost always a game of addition, with leagues trying to bolster their ranks with new schools that bring in new fans, new markets and new revenue streams.

It’s why the major conferences in college athletics have swelled to the point they’re unrecognizable. It’s why the ACC has two schools 3,000 miles away from its titular Atlantic Coast, why the Big Ten has 18 teams – and stretches from one coast to another – and the Big 12 has 16. Say what you will about the SEC, but it’s still at least vaguely southeastern.

As this never-ending game of musical chairs has continued, questions have been raised about not continuing to add teams, but kicking them out and shedding some metaphorical dead weight. If the SEC has become an athletic colossus of college athletics’ most decorated departments on and off the field, why is Vanderbilt allowed to hang around? The same question applies to the Big Ten with schools like Northwestern and Rutgers.

These hypotheticals are largely far-fetched fantasies, but they’re rooted in a kernel of truth – conferences have kicked out members before.

Perhaps the go-to example of that came in 2001, when the Big East booted Temple after the Owls’ ignominious decade-long stint in the conference as a football-only member.

The circumstances that led to Temple ouster were unique and only have so much relevance a quarter-century later, but in some ways, the Owls stand as a poster child for other cellar-dwellers. If you’re embarrassing your conference and conference mates badly enough, you can find yourself without a home.

Why the Big East invited Temple

By the late 1980s, the Big East was coming to terms with realities it could no longer ignore.

What was famously founded in 1979 as a basketball-centric conference was finally addressing football, albeit several years after its fortuitous decision not to invite Penn State and bring Joe Paterno’s dream of an eastern football conference to life.

In 1990, the Big East’s football-playing members – Boston College, Pitt and Syracuse, all of which had been competing as independents – were given some long-awaited support, with the league bringing in reinforcements to build out a football arm. Miami, college football’s reigning dynasty of the time, was brought aboard. Virginia Tech, which had been showing signs of progress in its early years under Frank Beamer, joined the fold, as well. West Virginia and Rutgers, two other eastern independents that were in the Atlantic 10 in other sports, were invited along.

Rounding out the eight-team outfit was Temple, which was the only one of the group that was joining the Big East as a football-only member.

Though the Owls largely exist as a football punchline, in part because of what transpired once they got to the Big East, their inclusion in the group was defensible.

They were bolstered partially by factors that had little to do with football. The Big East’s market-based strategy that was at play when the conference first formed was used with Temple, giving the upstart football league a team in Philadelphia, the nation’s fifth-largest city at the time. While it’s not often thought of as one, at least outside of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Temple’s also an enormous school, with a total enrollment of 30,000 that theoretically gave the Owls a potential fan base.

“It should help us with recruiting, TV exposure, revenue and attendance,” Owls athletic director Charles Theokas said to the Philadelphia Daily News in Dec. 1990, shortly before the formal Big East invitation. “We’re not reinventing the wheel. Any conference that is put together with major markets should be successful.”

On the field, they weren’t terrible, either.

The legendary Pop Warner coached at the school from 1933-38, going 31-18-9 and making the 1935 Sugar Bowl. The Owls were consistent winners in the 1970s under coach Wayne Hardin, who guided the team to a 10-2 mark and No. 17 ranking in the final Associated Press poll in 1979. In 1986, under future Super Bowl champion coach Bruce Arians, Temple produced a Heisman Trophy runner-up, with running back Paul Palmer finishing behind Vinny Testaverde after rushing for 1,866 yards and 15 touchdowns. A few weeks before they received the Big East invite, the Owls capped off a 7-4 season.

What might have seemed like a reasonable choice by the Big East in theory turned out to be disastrous in practice. What had been a solid independent program became a college football laughingstock shortly after joining the conference.

Temple wasn’t just bad, but comically inept. The Owls lost their first 27 conference games. During their first 10 seasons in the Big East, they never won more than four games overall and three in conference play. Of those 10 seasons, they finished with two or fewer wins in eight of them. Their overall record during that time was 19-91, which the only nice thing you can say about it is that it’s a palindrome. That putrid stretch included a 9-58 mark against Big East opponents.

Even their rare triumphs were bittersweet.

In 1998, behind a third-string quarterback and 10 players making their first starts of the season for an injury-ravaged squad, Temple stunned No. 14 Virginia Tech 28-24 at Lane Stadium as a 36-point underdog, earning its first-ever Big East road win and its first victory over a ranked opponent in 11 years.

While Owls coach Bobby Wallace rightfully praised his team for its fight and resilience – in addition to the injuries, Temple had to rally from a 17-0 deficit – its opponent viewed the result through a different lens.

“I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life,” Virginia Tech defensive end Corey Moore said after the game. “I’m shellshocked. We’re the laughingstock of college football right now and deservedly so.”

Not surprisingly, Temple’s flailing football program struggled to generate much enthusiasm or support, particularly in a large city with plenty of other sports and entertainment options.

In 1990, the season before they joined the Big East, the Owls averaged 23,005 fans per game, a number boosted a bit by the 24,785 fans they managed to get to watch a 28-0 win over Division II Austin Peay because of a post-game MC Hammer concert. Only three years later, they were all the way down to 7,712 fans.

Pretty soon, those dreadful results came with consequences.

Why the Big East kicked out Temple

In 1996, the same year Temple had its second-consecutive 1-10 season, the Big East sat the Owls down for an administrative heart-to-heart.

At the time, the league was considering having two of its schools, UConn and Villanova, jump up from Division I-AA (now FCS) to Division I-A (now FBS) and join the league as football-playing members. To accommodate what can be an onerous transition, the conference set up criteria for the schools to meet as they explored the move (UConn ultimately did so while Villanova stayed down).

Laying down benchmarks wasn’t just reserved for potential members, though. It extended to what had quickly become the league’s albatross.

To retain membership in the conference, the Big East put forth criteria it wanted Temple to meet as it related to stadium availability, competitiveness, scheduling, practice facilities and attendance, among other things. Though no official timetable was offered, this was the surest sign yet that one partner in the marriage wasn’t happy and that something that would have once seemed inconceivable – a split between the two parties – was at least a possibility.

The Owls’ record, as we discussed earlier, was horrid. Their attendance numbers were about as bad. In their first nine years in the conference, their average home attendance in a season only twice cracked 20,000 – and in each of those instances, it barely did (20,652 in 1991, 20,771 in 1999). Four times in a five-season stretch, from 1993-97, Temple’s average home attendance in a season failed to reach even 10,000. In 2000, it averaged 18,612 fans, the lowest in the Big East. Every other school in the conference but one – Rutgers, at 24,556 – averaged at least 39,000 fans per game. Those paltry numbers looked even worse in a stadium than on a spreadsheet, with the Owls playing most of their games inside the cavernous, 65,000-seat Veterans Stadium, more than eight miles from the school’s North Philly campus.

And that was only when Temple got to play games inside the Vet. Stadium availability became a huge issue for the Owls, particularly early in the college football season when they were competing with the Philadelphia Phillies for game dates. If the Phillies were set to play on a particular Saturday, Temple had to relocate to Franklin Field over on Penn’s campus. It wasn’t as though the Owls were having to slum it at a local high school – Franklin Field seats nearly 53,000 – but for a conference that had television deals with CBS, ESPN and an independent syndicate, that lack of flexibility on Temple’s end became a persistent problem.

To the Owls’ credit, they began making strides in other areas. In 1997, they hired Wallace, the winningest coach in Division II history at the time he was brought aboard. After some initial struggles, they went 4-7 in 2000, their most wins in a season since 1990. In 2000, they opened a $7 million on-campus practice facility. In 2001, they were set to bring in what was widely regarded as the best recruiting class in program history. They had agreed to a deal with the Eagles to play home games in Lincoln Financial Field once it opened in 2003, removing scheduling battles with the Phillies.

Just when it appeared that a program mired in darkness for a decade was finally seeing some rays of sunshine, that light was quickly cut off.

In March 2001, the Big East announced that Temple was voted out of the league, effective June 30, 2002. The Owls needed support from just two of its seven fellow members, but the Daily News reported at the time that only Virginia Tech sided with them. Pitt abstained, which had the same effect as a “no.”

Dr. Francis L. Lawrence, the president of Rutgers and the chairman of the conference presidents, said in a release that presidents and chancellors “reached the conclusion that Temple’s status as an affiliated football member is no longer in the best interests of the Big East.”

The university threatened litigation and, short of that, did what it could to try to show the Big East it was making a mistake. There was a public push to try to eclipse the 25,000 attendance benchmark in the 2001 season, with the Owls Club and other alumni groups selling more than 25,000 season tickets that spring. They had 26,191 fans for its home opener in 2001, a 45-26 win against Navy. The following week, in a loss to Toledo three days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, they had 19,751 fans. By the final home game of another 4-7 season, there were just 10,060 fans on hand for a 56-7 win against UConn. Despite all the extra motivation to keep their Big East dreams alive, they averaged 18,440 fans per game that season, fewer than they had the previous year.

That September, the same day as the Toledo loss, the Big East and Temple reached an agreement that would allow the Owls to stay in the league through the 2004 season. By the end of that season – and with only a 30-126 record, including 14-80 mark in conference play, to show for it – Temple football was without a home.

What, if anything, can be learned from the Temple-Big East divorce?

The Owls’ trek through the college football wilderness only lasted so long.

They competed for two seasons as an independent, including a winless 2005 campaign, but in 2007, they began play in the Mid-American Conference.

What was an awkward geographic fit helped the football program flourish, at least relative to what it had been in the not-so-distant past. In 2009, under fourth-year coach Al Golden, they won nine games and competed in their first bowl in 30 years. Two years later, this time under Steve Addazio, they again won nine games and won their first bowl since 1979.

By that point, the conference that had thrown them to the curb a decade earlier wanted them back. The Big East was shedding membership, with Pitt and Syracuse fleeing for the ACC and West Virginia headed to the Big 12. It turned to an unlikely savior, adding Temple in March 2012 as a football member starting later that year and an all-sports member in 2013.

"We didn't deserve, truthfully, to be in the football competition in those years. But it's hard to get kicked out," Lewis Katz, chairman of Temple's athletic committee, said at a news conference at the time. "When we started to negotiate to come back in, I thought it was just a wonderful, wonderful way to remove a blemish on our football program. ... We (now) have a real football program. So we think we're going to give the Big East exactly what they deserve, and really they've given us financially the opportunity to run a stable program."

That dream only lasted so long.

During Temple’s first season back in the Big East, Louisville announced it was departing for the ACC. The conference’s seven non-FBS schools broke off to form their own league and took the Big East name with them, leaving their former home to scramble to remake itself as the American Athletic Conference. Even in a league that was drastically different from the one they were ecstatic to rejoin, the Owls continued to excel, winning 10 games in back-to-back seasons under Matt Rhule and even hosting “College GameDay” in 2015. Since then, they’ve backslid, with a 13-43 record since the start of the 2020 season, and are a northeastern outpost in a conference in which no fellow all-sport member is within 400 miles of it.

Temple football of that era exists less as a cautionary tale than historical oddity.

Other Division I conferences have kicked out members – the Sun Belt parted ways with New Mexico State and Idaho after the 2017 season, for example – but it has little bearing on what a league like the Big Ten or SEC could feasibly do if it wanted to get particularly cutthroat and shed members that didn’t maximize the conference’s value.

As a football-only member with just a decade of history in the league, Temple wasn’t shielded in the same way schools like Northwestern and Vanderbilt are in the Big Ten and SEC, respectively. College realignment is a game run at the university level not by athletic directors, but primarily by presidents and chancellors, the kinds of folks who like having prestigious academic institutions attached to them, no matter how historically weak their football programs are. For the schools tasked with kicking a fellow member out, it becomes a manner of self-preservation in many cases. If the Big Ten is willing to get rid of Northwestern, why would Rutgers or Maryland vote for that and set some sort of precedent when they could very well be next on the chopping block?

So while Temple may not offer a roadmap to a restless conference with an ambitious commissioner eager to make moves, it does help provide a valuable, lasting lesson nearly 25 years later – if you fuck around, you very well might find out.

My favorite things I read this week

• My guy

  Kyle Kensing
  over at The Press Break had two excellent pieces this week – one on the college career of emerging MLB folk hero Cal Raleigh and another on the groundbreaking career of the late Dick Groat

• One of the many things I love about the Sun Belt – as I detailed last year – is the petty regional rivalries that have been built into the league’s construction. By adding Louisiana Tech to replace Texas State, they’ve leaned into that identity even more.

  Griffin Olah
  over at SID Sports takes a look at that

• Rodger Sherman
  at Read Rodge examines the question of the US losing the 2028 Olympics – and how we as a country are doing one of the few things that might actually compel the IOC to take action

• I’m fascinated by most things Hugh Freeze and when he’s heading into Year Three at Auburn on the hot seat, that’s especially true.

  Tyler Schuster
  at the Three-Point Stance takes a look at the USGA’s favorite college football coach’s predicament

• Paolo Uggetti’s story on ESPN.com on Rory McIlory very nearly ending up at East Tennessee State was fascinating, particularly for a casual golf fan like myself. The jump from Northern Ireland to Johnson City would have been jarring, to say the least

(Photos: The Temple News, Temple University, Big East Conference)