A New College Football Season Is Upon Us So Here Is The Yearly Plea For a Stadium On Temple’s Campus
Another college football season is finally upon us and I personally cannot wait to spend the first Saturday watching until my eyes bleed. All the signs of a phenomenal college season have already appeared: there’s a new, shitty Imagine Dragons promo song and Desmond Howard has predicted that Michigan is winning at all. We are BACK.
For Temple, Year 2 of the Mountain Dew fueled Geoff Collins era begins against Villanova. Before they even took the field for a game, the Temple football program made headline waves. Penn State and the Owls announced a home and home in the 2026-27 seasons, much to the chagrin of Pitt’s delusional fan base who think they somehow have a rivalry with PSU. Although Pitt is definitely NOT a marquee matchup, fans were critical that Temple isn’t either. Since 2013, Pitt has a 34- 30 record. Since 2013, which includes a dreadful 2-10 season, Temple is 35-30. So why is a team like Temple considered a weak non-conference opponent while Pitt is not? It start and ends with the stadium situation.
A team like Pitt, who is in the ACC, can get away with playing second fiddle in an NFL stadium due to the strength of opponents. When Temple plays fucking Tulane at The Linc, the closest people get to the stadium is Xfinity Live. They are a 20,000-25,000 draw, playing in a stadium made for 65,000.
If you look around the rest of the AAC (aside from USF) most teams have their own state of the art, 35,000 seat stadium. It provides a better sense of home and belonging than this does:
Looks even more aesthetically pleasing on television, lemme tell ya.
Playing in a stadium on the other side of town that you rent out and gets slapped together for your needs day of is a half assed effort when you want students and alumni alike to give a full assed effort to show up. Building a stadium in the proposed location allows kids to walk a few blocks with their friends to get to the games and gives alumni their glorious chance to hit their families with the “when I went here…” stories. As much as I love that Super Bowl champion banner flying outside of Lincoln Financial Field, it doesn’t have the same effect when you’re rolling into the stadium for a Temple matchup with Cincinnati. If I’m going to Temple football game, I’d much rather stroll down the blocks of campus and drunkenly stumble upon a banner outside the Owls own personal stadium with a banner flying that reads, “Temple Football: We Hosted College Gameday Once”.
The “Stadium Stompers”, which may be the corniest name of any advocate group, are a group of idiots. Plain and simple. Their arguments for opposing a stadium on campus make me ashamed to share a degree from the same university with them (even if my degree was from the Business School and could potentially be a sham). Their main arguments against Temple’s stadium include: gentrifying the area and causing a traffic mess. Let me waste a few minutes of my time to dissolve the points.
1)There’s this misconstrued belief that the neighborhood surrounding Temple will be torn down in order to build a stadium. In reality, Temple already owns the land and it’s a giant artificial turf space where they host intramural sporting events. The neighborhood won’t be dying, the memories of my flag football career will be.
2)Traffic will be bad. Ah yes, this city is known for its lack of congestion, I would hate to see one 35,000 multi-purpose stadium built in North Philadelphia change that. Have you ever been to a game at Penn State? They don’t even have parking lots, they drive around on fucking cow patty fields and there’s literally one road out of town. There’s traffic galore with a lot more people drawn in but they seem to make it work. As someone who sits on 76 every day on their commute to work, if traffic is what is holding this thing back, let me know where to send my donations for the stadium to be built.
Look, at this point my cries for an on campus stadium are more like desperate pleas than an argument. Over the past few ears, Temple has absolutely seen an uptick in attendance that probably puts them close to the top for home games in the AAC. Yet, with only the lower bowl of The Linc filled, it looks awful compared to games for other AAC opponents who have their own on-campus stadium to work with. I see what UCF, a relatively new program, is doing and see what the potential for Temple football could be. Building a stadium on campus would not only take the football program next level, but the university as a whole would rise as well.