The college football landscape has changed, and not in a way that helps Navy. Players at other schools received an extra year of eligibility after the COVID pandemic, but not at Navy. The transfer portal allows other programs to replenish their rosters with talented and experienced players every year, but not Navy. NIL allows boosters to basically pay athletes to play at their schools. But, once again, not at Navy.
On the other hand, Temple does have the opportunity to use all these things, but it hasn’t done them much good. They have an NIL collective like everyone else. They’ve brought in transfers, too, although the 35 on their roster aren’t nearly as many as some other teams on Navy’s schedule. Either way, they don’t have much to show for it. Rod Carey was let go as head coach after going 3-9 in 2021. New coach Stan Drayton also went 3-9 last year, and at 2-6 heading into Saturday’s game against the Midshipmen, he’s well on his way to another losing season. As it turns out, the transfer portal and NIL aren’t an instant solution to everyone’s problems. For every winner, there still has to be a loser. Even us Poli Sci majors can handle that math.
To declare Temple a loser, though, would be very premature. There is a blueprint for what wins at the school and what does not. Brian Newberry has often called Navy a “developmental program.” Generally speaking, service academies win when they have a team full of seniors groomed for 3-4 years to take over their positions. Winning Temple teams were built in much the same way.
Temple never came close to a winning record in the Big East. It became very difficult to recruit there. Bobby Wallace, Temple’s head coach over the last seven years of their Big East run, became heavily dependent on junior college transfers. He got some talented players; there was a time when Temple was a factory for NFL offensive linemen. But these were two or three bright spots per year on an otherwise unsettled roster. The Owls never won more than two conference games in Wallace’s tenure.
Al Golden, Wallace’s successor, took a different approach. He was 1-11 in his first season, but by year four— when his first class of recruits were juniors and seniors— the Owls broke through and won nine games. To be fair, that was easier to do in the MAC than it was in the Big East, but it was still the program’s first winning season in nearly two decades. More importantly, it was a lasting success. Golden became the head coach at Miami, but the three coaches that followed him— Steve Addazio, Matt Rhule, and Geoff Collins— each posted winning records at the school. The high-water mark came in Rhule’s last two seasons in Philadelphia, when the Owls had back-to-back ten-win seasons, finished in the top 25 both years, and won the 2016 American Athletic Conference championship. They did it with guys like Quincy Roche and Tyler Matakevich— unheralded recruits developed into all-American-caliber players.
This is the path that Drayton is trying to take, and you see it reflected in his staff. The trend in college football is to hire ambitious young coordinators to run offenses and defenses they hope will become the next big thing. Drayton didn’t do that. Instead, he hired teachers. That’s not to say their Xs and Os don’t cut it; it’s just that their experience sets them apart. Offensive coordinator Danny Langsdorf has 26 years of coaching under his belt. He’s coached quarterbacks at five FBS schools, including Colorado, Nebraska, and Oregon State. He’s coached quarterbacks and wide receivers at the professional level as well. Defensive coordinator Everett Withers has 35 years of coaching experience, including three Division I head coaching stints. He was the defensive coordinator for Urban Meyer’s undefeated 2012 Ohio State team and has coached defensive backs everywhere from Texas to the Tennessee Titans. These are the guys you want if your goal is to develop players into the best they can be over four years.
Unfortunately, there is a problem with Drayton’s plan: it takes time. If it’s going to work, it takes dedication not only from Drayton and his staff but his boss as well. Athletic directors aren’t known for being patient, especially when they have to deal with equally impatient donors. You have to believe in the plan. And in Temple’s case, it may take even more time than before.
The program Drayton inherited was in bad shape. Rod Carey and his staff were accused of mistreatment by players, and several entered the transfer portal. The roster was gutted. Even now, the portal makes it difficult for any team that wants to develop players. Nobody wants to wait their turn, and young players who show early promise often decide to move somewhere to win right away. Linebacker Kobe Wilson finished fourth on the team in tackles last year. This year, he leads SMU in tackles. Darian Varner was an all-conference defensive end who was voted team captain as a sophomore and was second on the team in both sacks and TFLs. He’s now at Wisconsin. When it’s difficult to hang onto players, and with a roster that was depleted to begin with, it will take a while to build the team you need to win.
In the meantime, Temple will have seasons where the roster looks like it does now: a mishmash of transfers (including junior college transfers) and younger guys probably getting more playing time than you’d want at this point. The Owls have 14 freshmen or sophomores listed on their offensive depth chart. They have 11 on defense. Their leading rusher is a freshman. Their leading passer is a sophomore, as are three of their top six receivers. Last year, Temple never started the same five offensive linemen two weeks in a row. This year, Temple’s offensive line is one of only two FBS teams to have five freshmen on the depth chart. Three of them have started at least one game, and their 12 combined starts are the fifth-most in FBS for freshmen. As a result, the numbers aren’t pretty. The Owls are 95th in total offense and 119th in both rushing and scoring offense. They are 123rd in total defense, 124th in rushing defense, and 128th in scoring defense, allowing a whopping 38 points per game. It isn’t easy to point to any one thing that Temple does well, at least statistically.
Then again, all the same things could have been said about Temple last year, yet they still took the Midshipmen to overtime before falling, 27-20. As always, the numbers are more complicated than they appear.
Temple is coming off of back-to-back games where they were outscored 100-14. That includes a 45-14 loss to North Texas, a team Navy beat. However, starting quarterback E.J. Warner missed both of those games with an injury. Warner was last year’s AAC Rookie of the Year and was a Freshman All-American. He set Temple’s single-game passing record with a 486-yard performance against Houston, then broke his own record when he threw for 527 yards and five touchdowns in the season finale against ECU. He finished the season with 3,028 passing yards, a school record for a freshman.
With Warner in the lineup, Temple is a different team. If you set aside the two losses against Power Five opponents, the Owls are 2-2 and averaging 31 points per game with Warner under center. I know, I know… You can make plenty of bad teams look good if you ignore half their games. Still, it’s more of an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to a matchup against Navy.
Warner makes Temple’s offense so much better because they can use him to cover up their flaws. Temple is forced to run the ball more when Warner is out of the game. His backup, former Virginia Tech and North Dakota State quarterback Quincy Patterson, is more of a running threat than a passing one. But the Owls’ patchwork offensive line has made running the ball difficult; they average only 3.43 yards per carry.
That’s less of an issue when Warner is under center. When he is, the Owls’ offense operates a lot like a West Coast Offense. They throw a lot and get the ball out of the quarterback’s hands quickly using shorter, high-percentage plays. Only Georgia Southern and Colorado State average more than Temple’s 44.6 passing attempts per game. Against UTSA, Warner threw the ball 65 times. Warner is also dead last in yards per attempt, averaging only 6.4. Like a West Coast Offense, Temple has two big-bodied tight ends to serve as targets in traffic. They have quick wide receivers to act as extensions of the running game when throwing horizontally. And because the ball isn’t in the quarterback’s hands very long, he doesn’t get sacked. Even though they have a shaky line, Temple doesn’t give up many sacks: only 1.75 per game. For a team that throws as often as they do, that’s impressive.
Temple looks for high-percentage throws to keep the chains moving. It puts pressure on individual defenders who have to make tackles, but the tradeoff is that the quarterback doesn't hold onto the ball in the pocket long enough for receivers to get upfield for the big play. For the defense, it may not be worth it to bring pressure too often since Warner will likely get rid of the ball before anyone gets to him.
In this case, I think Navy matches up pretty well schematically. The Mids like to use a lot of simulated pressure, showing blitz at the snap before dropping different guys in coverage. They mix up who rushes and who drops back, making it difficult for the offensive line to know who to block. This allows them to get pressure even when only rushing four or five players. If Warner has difficulty reading the coverage, that can make him hesitate on his throws. If he hesitates, he'll get sacked. If he throws into coverage he isn't expecting, he'll turn the ball over. Short passing is something the Mids usually handle pretty well.
The bigger question for Navy is figuring out what their offense can handle. Right now, it's a mess. The offensive line is banged up, and it was revealed this week that Tai Lavatai is out with a calf injury. Braxton Woodson and Xavier Arline, who hasn't lined up under center since the opener, have been receiving the quarterback reps in practice. Ironically, it was against Temple last year that Arline took over after Lavatai's injury, and he played well in the game, scoring the winning touchdown in overtime. He may get a chance to do it all over again.
Regardless of who starts, it’s unclear what Temple will do defensively. Withers wasn’t an on-field coach last year; he was Drayton's chief of staff. However, I'm sure he was involved in preparing the game plan against Navy. It would be a colossal waste of coaching expertise if he weren’t. Temple still runs a base 3-4, so he could easily use the same plan again this year. And after holding Navy to 224 rushing yards and getting a defensive touchdown last year, using the same plan wouldn't be the worst idea.
Temple lined up in a five-man front and didn't really do anything crazy stunt-wise against the option. Their defensive ends occasionally changed their alignments, moving in and out of a bear front. Their inside linebackers scraped outside sometimes, and the secondary shifted based on the motion they saw in the backfield. Navy's play calling revolved around dealing with each of these factors.
Early in the game, Temple lined up in a bear front, with the nose guard head-up on the center and the defensive ends on the outside shoulders of the guards. When they did, Navy motioned one of the slotbacks over to draw the playside safety further outside, then ran the quarterback off tackle. The DE's alignment made for an easy block for the playside tackle.
Eventually, the DE would learn to recognize the play and shift outside to make himself harder to block. The Mids then switched from running off tackle against the bear front to running the outside zone. The DE would be double-teamed, but since he was already lined up inside, the tackle could break off to get to the second level. The outside linebacker was also left unblocked as the pitch key.
The outside zone was Navy's most dependable play on the afternoon, but unless the defensive end was lined up the right way, it didn’t work. The Mids had to find other ways to move the ball.
They tried to take advantage of Temple's secondary playing man defense on Navy's slots and receivers. Anton Hall's touchdown run was set up by running the secondary out of the play. The play before was a slotback counter trey, and you can see how the safety followed the tail motion of the slotback. Meanwhile, the cornerbacks were in press coverage on the receivers. That set up a pin-and-pull on the next play, where the slotback got the safety moving one way while the cornerback followed the receiver the other way. Hall ran right between them.
By far, though, Navy's biggest struggle was figuring out how to deal with the scraping inside linebacker. They tried releasing the tackle outside, running the fullback off tackle, double-teaming him, running inside zone… You name it. It was maddening. One on-again-off-again scraping linebacker should not have been this difficult to figure out. Eventually, the Mids found their answer in the midline option.
The play is perfect for this situation because anything the ILB does is wrong. If he scrapes, he runs himself out of the play. If he stays put, he'll get double-teamed by the guard and slotback. The play was been mostly absent from the Navy offense last year, but the Mids finally started running it in the second half against Temple. It worked exactly as it was supposed to.
Ultimately, the midline is what won the game for Navy in overtime.
In the fourth quarter, the Mids ran a jet sweep, and the playside guard kicked outside to block the scraping linebacker. The slotback cut inside of the block for a nice gain.
The Mids tried the same play in overtime, but the wide receiver couldn't seal off the outside linebacker, who strung out the play. However, the ILB also scraped, so the Mids ran the midline on the next play. The slotback went in motion across the formation, but this time, the ILB didn't scrape. However, the motion did pull the safety away. When the guard and slotback double-teamed the ILB, Arline had all the room he needed to bounce outside and get to the end zone.
So will we see this again? Your guess is as good as mine. I wouldn’t be surprised, though. This plan relied heavily on stunting linebackers, and that position is once again a strength of the Temple defense. Jordan Magee led the Owls in tackles last year, and he’s back. So is Layton Jordan, who led Temple in both sacks and TFLs and had the touchdown against the Mids. Safety Tywan Francis, a transfer from Colorado State, has been a fine addition to the defense and is tied with Magee for the team lead in tackles. It might also make sense to bring him closer to linebacker depth to get him more involved in stopping the pitch, maybe in the middle of a 3-5-3.
For Navy, it will be good if it even matters how Temple lines up. That means we’re talking about coaching adjustments rather than player mistakes or turning defenders loose. It’s impossible to tell what we’ll see from the Mids on offense. There are just too many questions.
On the plus side, I’m bullish on Navy’s offensive line. They’ve played well for most of the season, and the bye week couldn’t have come at a better time for them. We talked last week about why Air Force is always a tough matchup. While Temple presents their own challenges, it isn’t the same. I would expect the line to bounce back this week.
Quarterback is a whole other issue. There’s a glass-half-full and glass-half-empty way to look at the situation. The pessimistic view is obvious. Woodson is still a freshman and is coming off of a lousy game. Arline only started practicing at quarterback again over the last few weeks. You can’t expect either one to be truly game-ready.
Or can you? The half-full perspective is that there are intriguing possibilities with both players. How much progress can Woodson make with two more weeks of practice? He has all the physical tools and will only get better with time and reps. As for Arline, I was surprised he wasn’t a bigger part of the quarterback picture from the beginning considering how well he played last year. If he starts, I’ll be excited to see what he can do.
We’ve seen each week that there’s more to Navy’s offensive woes than just the quarterback. I’m not sure I’d even call it their biggest problem. Still, there was already room for improvement, and the injuries don’t make the situation better.
On paper, the schedule gets easier from here on out. Navy’s next three opponents are a combined 5-19. Of course, that cuts both ways; those teams look at 3-4 Navy as their own opportunity to get right. It’s a bad time for injuries to pile up, but you can only play the cards you’re dealt. If the Mids want to make something out of this season, they’ll need to find some answers this week.
