Temple’s firing of Stan Drayton should open the door to dropping the football program

It says something about your football program when you fire the head coach after a win.

It says the program probably needs to go away.

Temple beat Florida Atlantic on Saturday by a field goal in overtime, an unsurprisingly ugly affair between a pair of two-win teams on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. About 18 hours later, the school’s athletic director, Arthur Johnson, a former associate AD at Texas, announced that his handpicked coach, Stan Drayton, Texas’ former associate head football coach, was fired.

This is the only way Drayton’s tenure would ever end. Asking an outsider with paltry ties to the Northeast to recruit to a crippled program with no local support whose closest conference foe, East Carolina, is more than 400 miles and four states away — it was foolish to think it would work.

Defensive coordinator Everett Withers will run the team in its final two games of the season, against UTSA and North Texas, both 5-5, with UTSA surging and North Texas foundering. Notably, both are beatable by Temple, and it’s easier to fire a 3-7 coach than a 5-7 coach. That, of course, is splitting hairs when the coach in question has nine wins in three seasons.

» READ MORE: Stan Drayton out as Temple football coach

Which again brings into focus the existential questions regarding football at Temple:

Why does it even exist?

Should it continue to exist?

The failure of this latest attempt at the program’s salvation should provide the obvious answer:

No.

The continued death throes of the program must be having an influence on Temple president John Fry, who was president at Drexel until this past July. In a 2016 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Fry celebrated that institution dropping football five decades earlier rather than engaging in “spending binges that sap resources.” Fry now has a chance to lead a football purge, because, like most football programs, Temple football loses money. Will he take it?

This feels a little like punching down, and it feels a little mean-spirited, because so many good people have, for so long, tried to make this a good program. Lots of people behind the scenes have committed decades to the cause. But Temple hasn’t sniffed a bowl game since before COVID. Most of the program’s best players either wind up at Temple by accident or they wind up getting good at Temple by accident. Temple has had two NFL first-round picks in the last 37 years. Try selling that to Johnny High School All-American.

The program has seldom been able to perpetuate competence, much less success. Which makes it all the more incredible that, as part of his farewell statement regarding Drayton, Johnson said:

“With the changing landscape of college football and the playoff format, the opportunity for Temple football has never been greater.”

That, simply, is untrue.

This statement is true for programs with robust alumni support, deep pockets of NIL money, first-class facilities, hardy and invested student bodies, and strong recruiting bases. Temple has none of those; in fact, its student body has shrunk by almost 10,000 students since 2019 (though it got an enrollment boost this fall).

» READ MORE: Who could become Temple’s next football coach? Here are four options the Owls should consider.

Even when it was fit to bursting, with around 40,000 students, it never had any of the perks of more competitive programs. That’s why, before Rod Carey replaced Geoff Collins in 2019, Collins and his three predecessors at Temple all left for far greener pastures.

None of them had to deal with NIL pressures or the transfer portal that are chasing coaching legends from all sports into retirement. To ask any coach of any sport in Philadelphia — a pro town with a cute little Main Line college basketball team — to thrive is just unrealistic.

Asking a football program on life support to compete for recruits against schools whose football programs run those schools is absurd. Al Golden, Steve Addazio, Matt Rhule, and Collins wouldn’t have done what they did at Temple if they coached in today’s college football environment. Hell, Nick Saban and Bill Belichick couldn’t have succeeded at Temple today.

To expect success from a guy like Stan Drayton, or, frankly, from anyone else, is just too much to ask.

» READ MORE: Would John Fry try to kill Temple football? He wrote an op-ed that may offer some hints.