Sports: Golden Boy
Temple’s football coach isn’t just turning his historically awful team around — he’s got a vision for North Philly, too
By Sandy Hingston
AL GOLDEN CAN pinpoint the moment he realized he belonged at Temple. He was touring the campus in 2005, smuggled into town via a bit of skulduggery involving the underground parking garage at the Liacouras Center. As his guide led him out of the arts and entertainment center into the chill autumn air, Golden surveyed the scene before him — a mayhem of cranes and backhoes and mounds of dirt and girders of steel and acres of yellow warning tape, all set against a backdrop of the sad, sorry wasteland of North Philly.
Only that’s not what Al Golden saw.
What Golden saw was what would be: Avenue North, a complex filled with tony shops and lively eateries, anchored by the gleaming gem of the Pearl Theatre and surrounded by a North Philadelphia risen from the ashes. And he said to the guide, “If Bank of America, Qdoba, the Pearl Theatre, if all these private investors are developing around the university to the extent of $180 million, it’s time for me to come here, too.”
Never mind that Golden was being interviewed for the job of head coach of a football team that had gone nearly 20 years without a winning season. That had an NCAA Academic Progress Rate so dismal that it was losing scholarships right and left. That had been kicked out of the Big East in 2004 for stinking up the conference with its 14-and-80 record, then went 0-11 in 2005. Al Golden looked beyond the wreckage of Temple football the same way he saw past the chaos of Avenue North’s creation, all the way to the fulfillment, to a team of glorious winners clad in cherry and white. For him, becoming head coach of the Temple Owls was a simple business decision, one with a huge upside.
Once he made that decision, there was never any question his team would win.
AL GOLDEN IS a winner, starting with the genetic lottery, which made him tall and broad and handsome. His résumé is punctuated with the word “youngest”: youngest defensive coordinator in Division 1-A when he was hired by the University of Virginia in 2001; second-youngest 1-A head coach ever when he took the Temple job. Now 39, he speaks in perfectly formed sentences that exhibit a formidable vocabulary. He has a pretty blond wife and two pretty blond kids. As a tight end at Penn State, he was, well, golden, earning three letters and winning the 1991 Ridge Riley award, presented by Joe Paterno to honor scholarship, sportsmanship, friendship and leadership.
You'd like your son to be Al Golden. You’d like to be Al Golden yourself. That’s a big help when he’s trying to coax young men to North Philly. “From the first time we met Al and his staff,” says Kennett Square restaurateur Lou Caputo, whose son Steven is now a Temple lineman, “we liked them. He’s eye-to-eye with you. He’s not above you, he’s not below you. Everything he said, I believed.”
Al Golden insists his job is easy because Temple sells itself these days. Sitting in his office during football camp in August, he reels off a tsunami of plus points: a capital improvements campaign that’s pumping $500 million onto North Broad Street. The nation’s fourth-largest media market. America’s most diverse college campus. The Mid-American Conference’s best attendance last year. And Temple plays its home games at Lincoln Financial Field, on turf hallowed by Brian Westbrook and Donovan McNabb.
“What has happened on this campus in the past decade is incredible,” Golden says. “Temple was a penny stock when I came here. But I knew if people learned about its assets, they would want that product.” Still, for a winner like him to take on Temple football … “It looked like career suicide,” he admits. The attitude of the university toward the team was a profound apathy. It ranked 109th out of 119 major college programs in the nation in attendance, drawing a paltry 12,700 fans a game. Fellow students mocked the players. Faculty wanted football dropped. “There were only a few diehards like me who tried to promote it,” says Temple alum and longtime fan Peter Chodoff. “I have a brother who’s a very well-known psychiatrist, and when I kept on rooting for Temple football, he offered to treat me free of charge.”
Bill Bradshaw, who came on as Temple’s athletic director in 2002, managed to get the board of trustees to commit, once and for all, to keeping the football program. He negotiated a long-term lease at the Linc and landed Temple a new conference, the Mid-American. He drew up marketing plans to increase attendance. Then he turned to the matter of a new coach.
Universities have formal hiring processes in place. In high-profile searches, though, “You throw them out,” Bradshaw says. Applicants don’t want the press or fans to know they’re looking for new jobs; that’s why interviews require secret drop-offs in the Liacouras Center garage. In this case, Temple’s search committee — it included Clay Armbrister, then a university VP and now Mayor Nutter’s chief of staff; faculty rep JoAnne Epps, now dean of Temple Law; university counsel George Moore; and an alumnus and a student, among others — held interviews, then brought three candidates back to pitch their plans to resurrect the team. Half an hour into Golden’s, Bradshaw knew. “We needed a savior,” he says, “and that’s what we got.”
THE NEW COACH'S initial hurdle, in December 2005, was to recruit: “We had 22 scholarships to give, and six weeks to do it in,” Golden says. He and his staff tapped their connections to local high schools to fill empty slots. He combed the campus for ex-players and got them to try out. He promised his sad-sack veterans change was in the air. He bombarded them all with blizzards of paper: mission statements, overviews, cautionary news clips about athletes gone bad, a 300-plus-page “Owl Code” handbook. He told them he was out to win the MAC championship, talked to them about values, honor, tradition. He promised to make them the best they could be.
Then he set out to permanently alter the culture of Temple football. Only he didn’t start with football. In keeping with his business paradigm, Golden began by reshaping his players’ lives off the field. “We had to find things they could be successful at,” he explains. “Measure and reward.” Those who got good grades found their names posted on the walls. So did those who did good work in the community. Golden talked to his squad about the opportunity they’d been given, the sacrifices their families had made for them. He set standards: no gambling, no drugs or underage drinking, no hats or do-rags indoors. His coaches checked that players were in classes. He checked that players were in classes. “We needed to take them somewhere they hadn’t been, socially, academically, athletically,” Golden says. “We had to give them life skills. Football is the residual. Football is the by-product of that.” Lou Caputo’s right: When Al Golden says things like that — and he says things like that a lot — you believe him.
The new commitment is year-round. At spring practice, players are rated in categories like “Makes Good Daily Life Decisions” and “Considered a ‘Warrior’ by Peers.” They’re expected to know the exact number of days until the team’s first game. And Golden stresses community service; last year his “Owl Outreach” had an NCAA-leading 1,000-plus hours of service performed. If players don’t buy in, he replaces them. In 2006 and ’07, he played 42 freshmen — unheard of in Division I-A.
In Golden’s first season, Temple only won once. But! It was homecoming, and it snapped a 20-game losing streak. Last year, the Owls dropped five in a row before winning three straight. Their NCAA defensive rank jumped from 117th to 44th. They had the top-ranked red-zone defense in the nation. Average attendance more than doubled, to 28,858 per game. The team’s final record: 4-8 overall, 4-4 in the MAC.
And they should have won one more. At their road opener against UConn, everyone at Rentschler Field saw wide receiver Bruce Francis catch Dy’Onne Crudup’s tipped pass in the end zone with 40 seconds left. Inexplicably, an official ruled Francis out of bounds. Final score: Connecticut 22, Temple 17. “There was no question in anybody’s mind it was a touchdown,” Golden says, “except for that official.” He shrugs.
After the game, he didn’t blame the loss on the ref, or the call. Instead, “I told the players sure, we had that last chance — but on the play before that, our receiver was wide open, and we missed an opportunity. We missed a double-team block on the play before that. We had the chance to block a long kick. If we had, we could have kicked a field goal to win.” He laid the fault squarely with his team, he says, because unless they took responsibility, they’d never become “agents of change.”
This year, Temple came out with all guns blazing, whomping Army at West Point, 35 to 7, in its first game. Its home opener was against … Connecticut. Beneath the torrents of Hurricane Hanna, Temple lost to the Huskies again, 12-9, in overtime. Late in the last quarter, Temple went for a fourth-and-short instead of kicking it away. After the game, Golden said, “There is going to be a day when we make that yard.”
LOU CAPUTO NEVER played football. He didn’t go to college. He went “from third grade to the mushroom houses” of Kennett Square. But his son Steven, a six-foot-four, 290-pound lineman at Unionville High, was a recruiting magnet. Coaches from big-time programs came after him — Penn State, West Virginia, Pitt, Northwestern, Rutgers, Syracuse.
Lou was hoping, frankly, for Penn State. But after Steven tore his ACL and needed surgery, the bigger schools dropped out. In the end, he was offered scholarships by Buffalo, Delaware, Syracuse and Temple. Lou and Steven made an official visit to Temple. The following week, they headed to Syracuse. “The Big East,” Lou says, a little dreamily. “I was swaying that way.” Steven says, “We had an argument about that.”
They got home on a Sunday night. On Monday, three Temple coaches showed up and sat at the kitchen table with Lou, discussing his boy’s future. “Around four o’clock,” Lou recalls, “Steven comes home from school. And he asks, ‘Do I have to make a decision today?’ I could sense I was the only reason he was holding back. I said, ‘Deep down, you know what you want to do.’ And he said, ‘I want to commit to Temple.’”
Lou had warned him: “You can’t pick a program on the coach.” Steven couldn’t help it, though. “You can tell when coaches are messing with you,” he says. “Coach Golden was always truthful with me.”
Lou couldn’t be more pleased with how things turned out. “He’s happy,” he says of his son. “He has his own locker at Lincoln Field! And he’s with people I respect and believe in. They’ll work in his best interests. Not every Division 1 coach would do that.”
Golden understands the pull of personality. He had a powerful mentor himself. As Philly Mag went to press, he was prepping his team for its annual drubbing by Penn State. (Temple hasn’t beaten the Nittany Lions since 1941.) Luckily, there’s no one Al Golden would rather lose to than JoePa. He sees in him the same values he was brought up with back in Colts Neck, New Jersey, by his dad, a financial industry executive who went to night school at St. Peter’s College, and mom, who emigrated from Italy at age 15. “My parents are the American success story,” he says.
Golden has coached with and been coached by masters of the sport: Al Groh at Virginia, Tom O’Brien at Boston College, Bill Parcells when Golden played for a year for the Patriots. Paterno, he says, is the best: “The impact he’s had on my life is the type I want to have on our student athletes. He’s magnificent with people. Right through the program, from the uniforms to the discipline and toughness, it’s not about glitz and glamour. That’s why he’s been able to endure.” Paterno’s house has had its troubles of late, but for Golden, it’s still the shining city on the hill.
Temple chose its squeaky-clean new football coach (born on the Fourth of July!) for the same reason it picked Penn’s Fran Dunphy to succeed John Chaney and Connecticut’s Tonya Cardoza to replace Dawn Staley. The school isn’t just out to have winning teams. It’s out to have a particular sort of winning teams, the kind that don’t come with recruiting violations, that graduate players, that do it the right way.
But even that’s not enough for Al Golden. He sees beyond a MAC championship to the day when Temple football carries all of North Philly atop its shoulder pads to new heights of glory. “When I come to work,” he says, “I see residential housing and commercial real estate going up everywhere between here and Center City. In the next decade, it’s not ridiculous to think we could be part of Center City. Who would have believed your magazine’s best new restaurant this year, Osteria, would be five blocks from campus?”
IN FOOTBALL, AS in business, it’s not just how you play the game. “Intercollegiate athletics affect the perception of a college,” alum Peter Chodoff says. “A winning team makes people feel loyalty. I care about football because I care about the school.”
Last December, Temple’s newly energized football fans drew in a collective breath when Golden flew out to UCLA to interview for its head-coaching position. “We panicked,” Lou Caputo admits. Golden was accused on Temple sports blogs of being two-faced, of talking a loyalty he didn’t walk. He spun the visit to his team as proof of their new worth: “Coach said those kinds of things put Temple’s name out there,” Steven Caputo says. “And when he turned UCLA down for Temple — that said a lot about him believing in us.” Golden said he hadn’t yet accomplished at Temple what he’s set out to do.
There's one job it’s impossible to imagine him turning down, though: head coach at Penn State. Joe Paterno can’t hold on forever. And with each Temple win, chatter heats up: Could Golden be the Second Coming of Joe? He claims to be unaware of the groundswell. He doesn’t ever go online, doesn’t read newspapers, doesn’t watch much sports on TV. Temple sports P.R. rep Cathy Bongiovi, though, who also went to Penn State, says, “I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that he’d replace Coach Paterno.” Reminded that the odds seem to favor Rutgers coach Greg Schiano, she sniffs: “He’s good, but he’s not an alum. I know how Penn State people think.”
Alumni ties bind, wrap even those of us who may not have loved our schools while we were there in the soft, fuzzy gauze of nostalgia. And football taught Al Golden that relationships are what count. They’re what he loves about the game: the wooing of recruits, the high-fives, the locker-room laughter, the conjunctive ecstasy and grief. That all-for-one-and-one-for-all — “There’s nothing like it in the rest of life,” he says. With every high - school prospect, every potential transfer, every walk-on wannabe, when he talks up Temple football, it’s a relationship he’s selling, weaving a mesh as durable as a practice jersey as he promises: I’ll be here for you.
That’s the paradox of Al Golden. Sooner or later he won’t be, precisely because he’s so good at getting young men to buy what he has to sell.