27-10: The fan experience

Editor’s note: OwlScoop is taking a 10-year look back at Temple’s 27-10 win over Penn State, the program’s first over the Nittany Lions since 1941. The victory at a sold-out Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2015 set the Owls on their way to a 7-0 start and an eventual visit from ESPN’s College GameDay ahead of Temple’s ABC’s Saturday Night Football Game against nationally-ranked Notre Dame.

Friday’s story is the seventh part of the series. You can read the first six below. 

Part I: Some divine intervention from Epic Church … and Herb Brooks

Part II: ‘It was the most important game because it was the next game’

Part III: ‘We might be down 10-0’

Part IV: ‘He called it’

Part V: ‘Hey, man, where’s your belly flip now?’

Part VI: Exorcising 73 years of frustration

The reporting and writing from this series comes from 1-on-1 interviews OwlScoop editor John DiCarlo conducted in 2016 with several of the key players and coaches from that team, including head coach Matt Rhule, defensive coordinator Phil Snow, tight ends and special teams coach Ed Foley, linebackers coach Mike Siravo and director of player development Adam DiMichele, along with quarterback P.J. Walker, left tackle Dion Dawkins, linebacker Tyler Matakevich, running back Jahad Thomas and center Kyle Friend. The series also includes a quote from DiCarlo’s interview with the late Hall of Fame coach Wayne Hardin, the man who patrolled Temple’s sidelines from 1970 to 1982 and received a game ball in Lot K from Rhule after the 2015 win over Penn State. 

Part VII: ‘Finally’

The locker room, as one might expect, was ecstatic. Reporters on the other side of the wall waiting for Matt Rhule to conduct his postgame press conference and talk about Temple’s 27-10 win over Penn State could hear the celebration. Ed Foley, as he had done after wins in a tradition started during Al Golden’s tenure, led the team through a rousing rendition of Frank Sinatra’s High Hopes. 

“I can remember so many things about that day,” running back Jahad Thomas said. “Looking into the crowd and seeing how happy the fans were. In the locker room, it was pure joy. Some of the guys were crying.”

At one point in what had long been a one-sided series, a young Rhule had enjoyed some fun at Temple’s expense. A picture exists of Rhule, wearing No. 98, on his left knee on the Giants Stadium turf with his right fist in the air after he and a teammate sacked former Temple quarterback Pat Bonner in the late moments of a 41-0 drubbing back on September 21, 1996. The Owls were three games into a 10-game losing streak and finished with an unsightly 1-10 record that season. Bonner had a look on his face that day similar to the expression Christian Hackenberg wore as he disgustedly threw the ball to the ground at the end of the game.  

To this day, though, Rhule still mentions little of making the day and the moment about him and beating his alma mater. When he was asked in the postgame press conference if the win meant anything extra to him because he played at Penn State, Rhule addressed it quickly and moved along. 

“To a degree, maybe, just with everything surrounding it,” Rhule said. “But really, and it sounds corny, I know, I really love this team.”

Foley and Siravo, however, wanted to see what it meant, even if Rhule wasn’t talking about it. Foley, especially, had been with Rhule most of the way in rebuilding the Temple program, and Siravo jumped at the chance to leave Boston College – his alma mater – and return to Temple when Rhule got the head job in 2013. 

“The kids did such an unbelievable job of remaining focused after that win,” Foley said, “and you could see in how we played against Cincinnati the following week, beating them and then going on the run we had leading into Notre Dame. And again, that’s a tribute to Matt and his leadership. The kids were celebrating, but they were shouting ‘What’s next?! What’s next?! They were already getting focused for the following week.

“But at one point, I looked over and I saw Julie (Rhule) walk over, and you just saw the tears in her eyes as she hugged Matt,” Foley said. “They deserved that. You go through so much as a coach, and I’m just glad I got to see that moment and that they got to experience that together.”

“I’m glad I got to see that,” Siravo said. “It’s not my alma mater, so I just kind of wanted to take it all in and see what it meant for him. Because, again, you’ll never hear Matt make any of this about him.”

“And a big part of what comes out in that moment,” Siravo added, “is just the faith you put into the process, because sometimes you say, ‘I hope we’re right. I hope we’re right.’ Sometimes the world is telling you to go left, and the program and the process is telling you, ‘No, no, do this. Go right.’ So all of the faith and all of the sacrifices that these kids make, that’s what comes out at that moment, thinking about 2-10, thinking about our first spring here, our first season here. No one ever really thought as much about Penn State and the 70-plus years we hadn’t beaten them as much as we had finished on the big stage and the big moment. What we had built in three years had worked. That was probably the biggest part of that day.

Less than 24 hours later, as Foley said, the players had already left the win in their rearview mirror and set their focus upon Cincinnati. But Temple’s 27-10 win over Penn State was a remarkable moment for a long-suffering fan base, too. 

Andy Carl, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Temple in 2007 and 2010, respectively, organized a pregame tailgate that drew more than 1,000 fans to Lot K outside Lincoln Financial Field. Carl, who later went on to start Temple’s first NIL collective, the TUFF Fund, poured more than $2,000 of his own money into the effort, which included a 200-pound pig roast, what seemed like an unlimited supply of alcohol, a band, and even a 100-pound ice luge in the shape of the Temple T logo. 

At places like Alabama, LSU and Penn State, there are about 100,000 fans like him. At Temple, Carl, who saw Temple win just four games during his time as an undergraduate, was emblematic of a growing young football fan base that took its lumps but was starting to see its patience pay off in the way of wins and a true college football game day experience. 

Carl grew up near cornfields outside Reading. With his family and friends rooting for Penn State, Carl grew to hate the Nittany Lions similar to the way Eagles fans hate the Dallas Cowboys. He went the opposite route of “what seemed like half of my graduating class,” he said. 

“I enrolled in the anti-Penn State,” Carl said. “I picked Temple – the inner-city, grimy, diverse, blue-collar school in the middle of the rough inner-city neighborhood that lacked a blue-blooded football program.”

And all he wanted to see was a Temple win over Penn State.

“I told a friend I’d rather go 1-11 and beat PSU than go 11-1 and lose to them,” Carl said. “It was that personal. I had been the butt of jokes for over a decade. ‘You’re a Temple football fan?!’”

With about a minute to go in the game, Carl’s wife, Jenny, turned to Andy and said, “They did it.” At that point, Andy put on his Ray Bans. 

“I couldn’t let section 121 see a 30-year-old man openly weep with happiness,” he said. 

Players like linebacker Tyler Matakevich said they had an inkling of that type of emotion from the fans when they looked up into the crowd before heading to the locker room, but they didn’t truly experience it until some of them made their way through Lot K, the prime tailgating spot for Owls fans. Matakevich always made a habit of going out to see his family, who would make the trip down from Connecticut, after each home game. 

“It literally took me almost 45 minutes to get from the locker room to where my family was,” Matakevich said. “And typically, it’s just a five-minute walk. Everybody’s just stopping and hugging you. You see some of the guys you played with before who had graduated and you get to see them.”

Before he adjourned to the South Philadelphia Tap Room to celebrate with a couple of fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then home to meet up with his coaching staff and his family, Rhule wanted to get to Lot K, too. He wanted to see Wayne Hardin, whose long and varied Hall of Fame career led him to Temple from 1970 to 1982. Hardin, who passed away a little more than two years after Temple’s 2015 win over Penn State, won 118 games during those 12 seasons but never managed to beat Penn State in eight tries. There were some close calls, including two one-point losses in 1975 and 1976, and a three-point loss to a No. 3 Penn State team in 1978. 

“He wanted to give the game ball to me,” Hardin said in a 2016 interview. “It was super. They beat Penn State, something I didn’t do. I’m not ashamed of the way we played, by any stretch, in those games when we played them during my time, but it was a special day. I was happier than heck for him. It was a great thing. There’s nothing like winning.”

Hardin was still getting to just about every Temple home game at that time, and his affable nature still endeared him to so many of his former players, including former Owls linebacker Steve Conjar. The two-time Associated Press All-American played for Hardin from 1978 to 1981 and was the Owls’ all-time leading tackler before Matakevich himself bested his record by one, finishing his career with 493 tackles to Conjar’s 492. 

Matakevich, like his head coach, made his way over there, too. 

“Steve and all the guys he played with, those guys were emotional,” Matakevich said. “Some of them were saying, ‘Listen, I don’t care if you guys win again this year. Beating Penn State, that meant everything. I don’t think I truly knew what Temple vs. Penn State meant to the fans until after that game – until I saw the fans and spent time with them.”

Like Siravo, Matakevich enjoyed the spoils of the win after the season. In his case, those moments came as he prepared for the NFL Draft in Florida with Matt Ioannidis. Training with them were Carl Nassib and Austin Johnson. Johnson went in the second round of the draft to the Tennessee Titans, and the Cleveland Browns took Nassib in the third round. Ioannidis went in the fifth round to the Washington Redskins and Matakevich, waiting longer to hear his name called than most expected, went in the seventh round to the Pittsburgh Steelers. 

“We would always bust their chops,” Matakevich said of Johnson and Nassib, “and they would get legitimately pissed off about it. They’d be so mad. It’s just funny. You can’t help but enjoy it.”

And after Matakevich got to Pittsburgh, he eventually met tight end Jesse James, who played at Penn State. 

James, Matakevich said, responded similarly. 

“We were just talking about the game,” Matakevich said, “and then he says, ‘That should never happen. There’s no way that Temple should beat Penn State. Ever.’ The way he was talking, you could tell he 100 percent meant it. The fact that that team lost to us, you could tell that he was kind of looking down on that team like, ‘You guys aren’t Penn State.’ To see how those guys felt about us beating them, it will always stick with me. It really starts to feel like a rivalry when you can finally hear that.

“Finally.”