At Temple, K.C. Keeler’s plans for recruiting, NIL strategy, and the transfer portal are taking shape

With a change in Temple’s football leadership comes a new approach to the ever-changing landscape of college athletics.

Under Stan Drayton, Temple relied heavily on the transfer portal and saw significant roster turnover each season as a result. After his first season in 2022, Drayton added 50 new players to the roster, and 40 in 2024.

New coach K.C. Keeler and his right-hand man, general manager Clayton Barnes, are bringing a different strategy to North Broad. At Sam Houston State, the pair’s recruiting strategy largely relied on keeping Texas high school standouts in-state. Barnes, who served as director of football operations and player personnel, also said the Bearkats were at the “bottom of the barrel in FBS in terms of resources.”

There are more resources for the two with the Owls. Overall, their plan is taking shape at Temple, where the idea is to recruit more players from the region, entice them to stay long-term, and reward them with NIL dollars. That way, the reliance on the transfer portal will not be so great.

» READ MORE: K.C. Keeler is ready to redefine ‘Temple Tuff’ to build a winner: ‘I have no interest in being average’

At Temple, Keeler and Barnes already have started planting roots in Pennsylvania and the surrounding areas, strategically hiring their coaching staff from areas they covet. Defensive coordinator Brian Smith is a Chester native, passing game coordinator and cornerbacks coach Henry Baker is from Paterson, N.J., and special-teams coordinator Brian Ginn is from Yorktown, Va., all areas that this staff wants to recruit hard.

“We consider New York down to Virginia [and out to] to Ohio our footprints,” Keeler said in an interview last month. “So there was a real conscious effort, because hiring staff is like a jigsaw puzzle, you need the right piece. And I thought we did a really good job putting that staff together. I say we. Clayton Barnes is my general manager, and I lean on him a lot with those kinds of things.”

Added Barnes: “In a way, there’s similarities with Sam Houston and Temple, where there’s a lot of talent in the regional footprint that you’re from. You can really build a great rock from your local talent within a four-hour radius. So that’s going to be a big part of what we do, kind of like we did at Texas. We have to leave the state limits to do that; it’s not going to be just one state at Temple, but it would be New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia.”

This will also be a departure from the previous regime. In Drayton’s recruiting class in 2023, just 11 of the 36 Owls signees came from Pennsylvania, Delaware, or New Jersey, according to On3 Sports. That number was even lower in the 2024 recruiting class, with just nine of the 44 signees from those three states.

Among the recruits that Temple reeled in last month, 12 of the 21 signees in their 2025 class are from one of their targeted recruiting areas, and five of them are from Florida, a state that Keeler said is one of the staff’s lesser priorities.

Barnes plays a key part in the recruiting strategy that will emphasize high school talent and develop players over three- and four-year stretches. He has helped lead Keeler’s staffs in the recruiting and day-to-day program operations dating back to 2020, after he previously interned with Sam Houston State in 2015. He spent three years at Texas State and one year at Georgia Southern before returning to Keeler’s staff in a larger capacity.

» READ MORE: Temple football has a new general manager. Here’s what to know about Clayton Barnes and his duties.

“My passion was player personnel from the recruiting side. That’s where it kind of sparked my interest in getting into this profession, was evaluating talent, putting together rosters like that,” said Barnes, who was 24 years old when he returned to Sam Houston State. “So I did player personnel [with the Bearkats] as well.

“So that was from my title originally, was [director of football operations] and player personnel, and then, just because it was a one-man operation, I had to wear all kinds of hats. Didn’t really have anyone to delegate to, but that was good because I got to experience everything you can think of outside of coaching when it came to how we operated at Sam Houston.”

Barnes lauded the resources that Temple has compared with Sam Houston State. Temple has already built a recruiting and support staff, which was announced in recent weeks.

Now Barnes has the infrastructure in place to execute what he had envisioned years ago with the Bearkats.

“Organizationally, I thought Clayton had a great plan, because it’s things that we talked about at Sam Houston: If we ever had the personnel, we would have player engagement, and this is how we’d have the recruiting department,” Keeler said. “So we talked about it, and I knew we could execute it, because we had the resources here. I think you’re going to see it pay a lot of dividends as the recruiting process goes on over the next three months and also the next three years.”

Added Barnes: “The way college football has gone, it’s no longer a one-man operation and the head football coaching position. It takes a village to run the whole thing, and it takes an army of people to really get it done at this level.”

A sign that Temple’s new staff has committed to being a player in name, image, and likeness in college athletics? The program opted into the House v. NCAA settlement on Feb. 28, which opened the door for revenue sharing on North Broad. Temple will be able to offer benefits directly to its athletes as soon as this fall, and the move allows schools to distribute up to 22% of athletic media rights, ticket sales, and sponsorship revenue to athletes.

Barnes and Keeler hinted at the potential news in previous interviews. For Barnes, it will add another layer of responsibility, with the young coach managing the finances of the program, working with outside parties in relation to player compensation, and divvying up the funds among players.

For Keeler, it was the understanding that Temple needed to invest in the NIL space.

» READ MORE: Temple opts into House v. NCAA settlement, setting the stage for revenue sharing on North Broad

The American Athletic Conference “is going to say, ‘Either you’re all-in or all-out.’ It’s going to be the Power Four and it’s going to be the AAC, and to get that TV revenue, we need a great football team and so that means we need to invest,” Keeler said. “I know it’s something that [athletic director] Arthur [Johnson] talked to me about, that Temple needs to be a player in that space.”

As far as bringing in talent, Keeler did not go transfer portal hunting immediately after taking the Temple job on Dec. 1. Barnes said the Owls proceeded slowly on the recruiting front for two reasons: They wanted the right players in the program and they wanted a full spring to evaluate the team so they had clear needs by the time the portal reopens on April 16. If that means adding more talent from the portal, they’ll have the necessary funds to do so.

Culture is at the core of Keeler’s philosophy as a coach. He believes that “you can’t live in the transfer portal 100 percent,” and that “high school kids, that’s the foundation, that’s your fabric,” and it is reflected in the way the Owls are structured now.

Only one player departed the Bearkats via the transfer portal ahead of the 2024 season, which Keeler says is a testament to what he built during his 11-year stint at Sam Houston State that included a 2020 FCS national title.

“Our hope is, like what we did at Sam Houston, we got a lot of hometown discounts, because the kids love the culture so much. And I told all of them very bluntly, you’re not going to get rich here,” Keeler said. “Can we make your life more comfortable? Absolutely, and we want to do that. But the hope is that they just enjoy their experience here, that we get that hometown discount.”

» READ MORE: Demerick Morris, who left Temple for Oklahoma State after 2024 season, is back with the Owls

Added Barnes: “Our mentality is people are less concerned about how big a slice of the pie you have, so long as everybody has a slice. So we want to make sure that when we do have some movement on player compensation, we want to make sure that everybody gets a piece, that everybody lives a little bit more comfortably.”