Let's assume for the purposes of our discussion that the team really is terrible. How do we know? Well, we have 5 Elite Eight banners, and we got the most recent one 14 years ago. Our current coach Dunphy is in his 10th year, so we must be terrible, at least by comparison to the previous coaches.
Themes like this are repeatedly posted by a subgroup of posters who unfortunately seem to write the same message over and over again. I wish that they would explain why we think the team is so terrible, and then we might have something interesting to discuss. I will offer two hypotheses.
The first hypothesis is that Coach Dunphy is completely incompetent and only has his job, with its concomitant 7-figure income, because of the "old boy" network that he and Bill Bradshaw are part of. If we could just get rid of Dunphy and find a reasonably competent replacement, then we would go back to the glory days of Temple. Who knows, we might even move up from having the 6th most all-time wins to having the 5th most all-time wins. I don't believe in this hypothesis myself, but I throw it our there so its backers can argue for it.
The second hypothesis is that coaching college basketball has become a lot harder than it used to be and schools have to develop new strategies to keep up. In the John Chaney glory days he got to compete against coaches like Norm Stewart of Missouri who couldn't strategize his way out of a wet paper bag and we could count on the wins. There was a good list of other coaches who were nearly as bad as Stewart. Today's coaches are clearly better and it is hard to find bad coaches like Stewart who actually make it to the NCAA tournament.
Moreover, more schools are taking basketball seriously now and even so-called "mid majors" are trying to recruit good talent. Therefore, the coaches are now better and more numerous. Unless a university is willing to invest in its basketball program it is going to fall behind. Does anybody know how much Temple spends on recruiting each year? How does our recruiting budget compare with that of comparable schools? How much do our assistant coaches get paid? How do those salaries compare to the schools that we compete against?
In the story about firing Mike Rice from UNLV I noticed the references to what the "big donors" wanted. Do we have such big donors at Temple? If not, does that have important consequences for our recruiting budget?
Look, I would like to return to the Chaney glory days. I can't make it happen though. The next best thing would be at least to understand why we aren't there. Is it because Dunphy is terrible or because the university doesn't spend enough money the right way on basketball. I'd love to hear from anybody with knowledge or opinions on this subject.
