Collins' debut comes up flat in 49-16 loss at Notre Dame

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- It’s not so much that Temple lost Saturday in its season opener at a sold-out and refurbished Notre Dame Stadium. Conventional wisdom suggested the Fighting Irish were perhaps too talented to not be much better than last year’s 4-8 mark.

At least maybe that’s what the 18.5-point spread was saying.

And the Owls, after all, did lose some talent to the NFL and were making their 2017 debut with a rookie head coach in Geoff Collins and a pair of new coordinators.

So maybe it’s how Temple lost Saturday, a 49-16 blowout that was more reminiscent of the nonconference losses of the past and less like the recent performances that showed just how far the program has come, like when the Owls beat Penn State two seasons ago and almost – and should have – beat Notre Dame in Philadelphia.

As much as anything, Saturday was kind of a perception versus reality thing.

The perception was that a defense that returned several key contributors from last year’s conference championship team would get a boost from Collins’ “Mayhem” style of playing, and that the pressure and blitzes he and new defensive coordinator Taver Johnson dialed up would keep Temple in the game against the likes of quarterback Brandon Wimbush, talented junior running back Josh Adams, a big 6-foot-5 target at wideout in Equanimeous St. Brown and pair of future NFL Draft picks along the left side of the offensive line in left tackle Mike McGlinchey and left guard Quenton Nelson.

The perception out of spring and preseason camp seemed to be that the defense was ahead of the offense, especially with the wide-open quarterback position that didn’t seem to reveal a clear-cut winner to the outside world.

The reality, however, is that starting three new linebackers – Sam Franklin and Isaiah Graham-Mobley on the outside and Shaun Bradley in the middle – does matter, even if they’re taller, longer and maybe have more long-term upside than the likes of Stephaun Marshall and Avery Williams. And the reality is that players like Wimbush and Adams were recruited at a high level for a reason. They’re good enough to make people miss, whether or not those missed tackles were the result of pure athleticism or self-inflicted mistakes by Temple.

“Yes, it hurt,” said junior safety Delvon Randall, who led Temple with 11 tackles, 2.0 tackles for a loss and a sack. “It was very embarrassing. We’re going to clean it up.”

It had been a while since Temple lost like this. The 33-point margin of defeat was the Owls’ largest since 2008, when they lost at Penn State by 42.

“So there have been a lot of fun moments and exciting moments that I’ve really looked forward to in being a first-time head coach,” Collins said to start his postgame press conference. “This one right now and what just happened is not one of them.”

Coming into Saturday, Temple had only given up more than 300 rushing yards to a non-option team once in the last nine years. Notre Dame surpassed the 300-yard mark well before the game was over and finished with 422 on the ground and 606 total. It’s the most the Owls have allowed since their 2-win 2013 campaign.

It took Notre Dame just two plays and 33 seconds to grab a 7-0 lead out of the gate, courtesy of a 33-yard toss from Wimbush to St. Brown and a 37-yard scoring run by Adams. The Fighting Irish led 21-3 after the first quarter, by 28-10 at halftime and were never really threatened.

“I thought we came out slow early,” Collins said. “I told the kids at halftime that I thought I did a poor job early. We had a bunch of rookies playing - especially on defense - that kind of acted like rookies at times, and I told them the truth. I thought I acted like a rookie early. So we got that fixed, got settled in, started playing some really good football, continued through the second half with playing some really good football, and kept going for it on fourth, which was trying to compete. We didn’t come here to win a participation medal, so we came to try to push it and go for it on fourth a bunch of times (twice) in the fourth quarter and we gave up some more big plays to close the game out.”

Notre Dame did some things differently from what it had done in the past, Collins said – a lot of plays out of the Pistol formation, a lot of zone-read stuff with Wimbush keeping the ball.

“Some of the misfits on some of those big plays were killers,” Collins said.

Collins and Randall used that word, misfit, more than once. It means players were shooting into the wrong gaps. That’s the stuff that can get cleaned up, but the reality is the defense still has a lot of work to do, and Saturday was a good litmus test.

There was also the perception that the quarterback position was a wide-open competition. Collins himself said heading into the game that as many as two or even three guys could play Saturday.

The reality was that redshirt sophomore Logan Marchi, who served as Phillip Walker’s primary backup last season, knew at the beginning of the week that he would be getting the nod in South Bend. He started and played the whole game and wasn’t too shabby – 19 of 35 for 245 yards, two touchdowns and no interceptions. He was sacked three times, was almost picked off once, and there were a few throws he’d like to have back.

Marchi’s first touchdown pass, a tight throw to wide receiver Keith Kirkwood over linebacker Drue Tranquill with cornerback Julian Love in coverage, closed the gap to 28-10 with 6:09 left in the second quarter. His second, a quick throw to his right to wide receiver Brodrick Yancy with Yancy doing the rest on an 11-yard scoring pass, helped make it a 35-16 game, but it came with 12:05 to go when the game was out of reach.

Marchi, Frank Nutile, true freshman Todd Centeio and redshirt freshman Anthony Russo had all competed to replace Walker, who was fighting for a roster spot with the Indianapolis Colts before he was released Saturday. Collins said there were packages for all of them and that where Temple started in terms of time, place and field position could dictate who would start.

But that wasn’t necessarily the case, by Collins’ own admission.

“Probably a little too much gamesmanship on my part,” Collins said. “I probably carried it a little bit too far with the quarterback battle, the quarterback situation, but Logan knew he was going to be the guy. Frankie “Juice” knew that Logan was going to get the nod, and then Logan came in and played admirably and moved the offense really well at times, threw some really nice balls and threw some balls that not a lot of kids in the country can make, and I thought the rest of the offense kind of rallied around him.”

The reality was that other than some early no-huddle, Temple’s offense – at least for this week – didn’t feature a lot of new wrinkles or tricks. The Owls ran it 37 times and threw it 35 times. Marchi, who has been praised for his mobility, only ran it once on an option play, and that didn’t amount to much. His minus-21 yards net rushing were largely the result of the three sacks he took.

Although Collins wouldn’t outright commit to naming Marchi his starter for next week’s home opener against Villanova, it’s hard to imagine he won’t be under center Saturday at Lincoln Financial Field.

Marchi, as Collins said, knew he was the starter at the outset of the week. The team practiced that way, with Marchi taking a lot of snaps with the first-team offense.

“I think we played all right,” Marchi said. “I missed a couple throws that were some routine throws. … We’ve got to execute a little more on offense and help the defense out, stay on the field and give them some rest.”

Marchi got some early help from junior running back Ryquell Armstead, who got 60 yards on 11 first-half carries. But Notre Dame held Armstead to just seven yards on eight second-half carries.

Marchi was without the services of junior wide receiver Ventell Bryant, who led the team with 54 receptions and 895 yards last season. Bryant didn’t make the trip to South Bend and when Collins was asked after the game if Bryant’s absence was injury-related, he nodded and said softly, “We don’t talk about it.”

There were a few bright spots. Sophomore receiver Isaiah Wright, in Bryant’s absence, led the team with four catches for 79 yards, including a 29-yarder. Backup defensive end Quincy Roche collected four tackles and a sack in his first college game as a redshirt freshman. Cornerback Mike Jones, the graduate transfer from North Carolina Central, picked off a pass and returned it 43 yards, although Temple did nothing with it after Austin Jones, who got the placekicking nod over Aaron Boumerhi (who handled kickoffs), missed a 36-yard field goal that could have made it a two-score game.

But now the perception vs. reality thing is, for the most part, a thing of the past. Camp is over, the season opener is out of the way, and some of the warts have been exposed. Marchi is the starting quarterback – at least for now and perhaps longer. The young linebackers did get gashed in some long runs, but the reality is they’ll get better.

How they develop, how Marchi develops and how all this fits together under a new coach and new systems will determine whether or not Temple can repeat as American Athletic Conference champions. Winnable games at home against Villanova and UMass await before Temple travels to play USF in Tampa, where the 19th-ranked Bulls needed the fourth quarter to finally put away FCS program Stony Brook.

On Saturday, Temple looked overmatched. Again, that hasn’t been a familiar feeling over the last two seasons. Randall didn’t see it that way. A lot of it, he feels, was self-inflicted and correctible for the future.

Time will tell if that’s perception or reality.

“Don’t get me wrong, it hurts,” Randall said. “This loss hurts. It was embarrassing to me. I blame it on myself. I don’t feel too different because we beat ourselves. It’s our fault.”