Temple football coach Bobby Wallace stood behind a lectern yesterday in the film room at Edberg-Olson Hall, the sparkling new home of the Owls' program.
It was national signing day, and as he talked about his 31-player recruiting class for 2001, Wallace also spoke about the building of a team.
With four wins and seven losses last fall, Temple equaled the number of victories it had recorded during Wallace's first two seasons combined. The Owls finished 2-9 in both 1998 and '99.
"As I tell the recruits, the hard part is over," said Wallace, who inherited a squad that went 8-47 in the five years before he took over. "It's been a hard, hard, tough time. But we're getting to the end of the process.
"Instead of having two seniors on the team as we did last year, we're going to have 25 seniors this year, and 25 the year after that. We're going to have stability year after year.
"Our new recruits came in, got around our players, and felt something good was happening. I don't think a kid thinks, 'I'm going to sign there even though they don't have a chance of winning.'
"We've recruited 75 players in our three years here, and all but 13 are still in the program. And what we can say is that 1998 was an outstanding class, because 21 of those 25 players are still playing or have used up their eligibility."
Though the signing period runs through April 14, Wallace said that Temple had brought in all the players it intended to see this winter, and that he and his coaching staff had completed their work 10 days before yesterday's national signing day.
The Owls had 65 scholarship players on the roster in 2000, but Wallace has a good chance of filling all 85 spots this year.
Not every recruit, and not every player on the team last year, is assured of being an Owl next season, since there can be admission hang-ups for some of the freshmen, academic problems for the others, and even player defections before the 2001 season starts.
If everything goes well, Temple will have all but one starter back, and the team appears to have been shored up on the offensive line and at the linebacker and tight-end positions, the areas Wallace set out to improve when last season ended.
LeVar Talley, a second-team all-Big East Conference selection as a senior last season, will be missing from the defense next fall. But Temple added seven linebackers, seven offensive linemen, and five tight ends yesterday. Immediate help should come from the nine junior-college players the Owls signed.
