Moments after his team was handled in a 52-6 blowout loss at Tulane Saturday evening, third-year Temple head coach Stan Drayton talked, in part, about the difference he saw between the two programs.
“This is a very good football team,” Drayton said Saturday of Tulane. “I mean, they've invested in some players. So, yeah. You could just tell. They're physically very, very strong. Functionally, very, very strong. We had a hard time tackling them. We had our guys around the football at times, and we’ve got to make plays. I'm not going to sit here and sound like I'm making excuses here, but we were outmatched in a lot of spots, and we’ve just got to find a way to play better to equalize that.”
During his weekly Monday session with reporters, Drayton was asked to expand more upon his remark about Tulane investing in its players. It led to a larger conversation about Temple’s NIL efforts and why Drayton feels the Owls could be positioned to accomplish what Tulane has.
The Green Wave advanced to last season’s American Athletic Conference championship game and at 8-2 this season are in great position to do the same. In 2022, Tulane went 12-2, won the AAC championship in a rout of UCF and then went on to beat USC in the Cotton Bowl.
It was a remarkable turnaround for a program that had gone 2-10 as recently as 2021. Tulane joined the American as an all-sports member back in 2014. Ten years later, it found itself rejecting interest from the Pac-12 and reaffirming its commitment to the AAC back in September.
“You sit there, and you look at that Tulane team and the size, the physicality, the strength, and you look at their roster and where they're pulling guys from,” Drayton began. “I had a chance to talk to their head football coach (Jon Sumrall) and talk to them about how they're investing in their players and the result that they're getting because of it. And it started with (former Tulane head coach Willie) Fritz. He really started that roster, and they inherited some good football players, no doubt. But Tulane has made the commitment to invest in bringing in good players into the program, and it's definitely showing on the football field. There's no question about it.”
Drayton was then asked if he sees Tulane as a benchmark for the Temple program.
“I look at Tulane as being one of the top teams in our conference,” he said. “Obviously we saw Memphis last year, and SMU was in our conference a year ago. And you look at those teams and how they're investing into their programs, and you see the product that they're putting on the field. There's definitely a gap there if we don't catch up in terms of the investment piece of it. There’s no doubt about it. And they are setting the standard, the type of body type, the type of football player that is coming into this conference, and we absolutely need to level up to be competitive with those type of teams, for sure.”
Temple Athletic Director Arthur Johnson hired Drayton to replace former head coach Rod Carey after the 2021 season. The Owls went 3-9 in each of Drayton’s first two seasons, and they’re 2-7 after Saturday’s loss, which ensured the program would not be bowl-eligible for a third consecutive season.
Temple has a chance to get back in the win column Saturday when it hosts FAU, a similarly-struggling program that also brings a 2-7 record into the game at Lincoln Financial Field. The FAU Owls are coached by Tom Herman, who brought Drayton to Texas as his associate head coach and run game coordinator when he was the Longhorns’ head coach back in 2017.
At an event last week in Media hosted by the Temple Alumni Office, Johnson told those in attendance that he felt he could have done more in the NIL space when the university hired him in October of 2021. Former Owls basketball coach Fran Dunphy was serving as the acting interim athletic director when Pennsylvania introduced its NIL legislation three months prior.
At that event, Johnson also praised the efforts of Andy Carl, the executive director of the TUFF Fund collective that has helped students on the majority of Temple’s sports programs sign NIL deals. Carl runs the collective on a volunteer basis.
Drayton said Monday that he was aware of Johnson’s remarks and saw it as a good thing.
“The fact that he put it out there is all positive, in my opinion,” Drayton said. “Let’s go. This is what it is. This is today's world of college football. And I want this place, and he wants this place, to be competitive. Our players want to be competitive when we go against these opponents, and we see the American Conference elevating. Tulane was a clear picture for me, watching that team roll out there, the size, the type of athlete that they had. I'm like, ‘OK, it's time to level up.’ And if NIL got that program looking the way it is from two years ago, only winning [two games], if that can do that to that program, it can do that to this program. But people have to be real about it.”
Drayton is aware of the team’s record, his overall record at Temple and the results on the field. In continuing to answer the question about Johnson’s remarks, Drayton said he’s aware that talking about NIL might be perceived as making excuses.
“I've been very, very quiet, and I've been very reserved and talking about it, because I don't want it to sound like excuses,” said Drayton, who said Monday that he's lost several players to the transfer portal because of NIL. “When you're not having a whole lot of success on the football field, the words that come out of your mouth, people are paying attention to it. ‘Like, is he going to make an excuse for this and this and that?’ I'm not that kind of person, but what I am is I'm a realist. I'm a realist, and this (NIL) ain't going away, all right? We need to be in conversation. We need to do something about it. We need to be creative, but we definitely need to level our thought process up and think forward and get into this game, because this place deserves it. We can be competitive if we do it right.”
In addition to talking about NIL, Drayton also provided some injury updates on center Grayson Mains and wide receiver Dante Wright and spoke more about what he’s expecting in Saturday’s matchup against FAU.
You can listen to the full interview from Monday’s press conference here.
