PHILADELPHIA — In the annals of crazy Temple basketball days, this one was pretty good.
In the end, what will be remembered, Adam Fisher was offered the job, and Adam Fisher accepted the job.
Your new Owls head basketball coach, Adam Fisher.
Penn State’s associate head coach was the popular choice of Nittany Lions players themselves to replace Micah Shrewsberry. But that wasn’t the move up in State College, and this was more than a consolation prize.
Fisher wanted this one.
He’s got the resume. He was a Miami assistant, and at Penn State, his alma mater, before then. He actually started his climb up the ladder in the Big 5. His first rung was as a graduate manager under Jay Wright at Villanova. He’s recruited locally his whole career.
All you ever hear is, to know him is to like him.
Of course, that’s Adam Fisher, the assistant coach. He’s never been a head coach. Now, we’ll find out if an outstanding recruiter can prove he’s a strong head coach, at a place where the degree of difficulty right now is highest-level.
The top six Temple scorers from this past season are all hanging out watching from the Transfer Portal lounge. Maybe the new coach can convince some to stay. If Temple doesn’t find more NIL money for players, the name or ability of the next head coach is not at the top of the Owls’ basketball problems.
But this will be a popular pick with a bunch of boosters.
“Fisher, Fisher, Fisher,” texted one long-time Temple booster who had wanted this man from the start, even before he was the choice. He was this man’s choice.
The names are being floated for Fisher’s staff — and it should be a good Philly-centric staff — with some head coaching experience in there.
So if folks wanted Fisher, what was crazy about the day? He didn’t get the first call. That went to former Missouri assistant Carlton Young. If Temple folks try to say there was no offer to Young, accept it as spin, an understandable spin, but a face-saving spin.
“They are lying,” said someone close to Young, in contact with him all along.
The ins and outs of that are footnotes now. My own view: I understood the interest in Young, despite his one 43-84 long-ago tenure as a head coach at Georgia Southern. All I heard was that this man would get players. Still, it was an interesting out-of-left-field move.
I also do not believe Young was using Temple, as it’s easy to assume. He didn’t float his name out there. (I heard his name first and tweeted it Monday from a source who doesn’t know Young at all, who heard it from a different candidate for the job.)
Young was interested and visited this week, but let’s face it, visiting the day before the president of the school resigns is an interesting time to visit, and if there wasn’t love at first visit, Temple is better off without Young obviously. Even if he’d succeeded, how long would he have stayed?
What was interesting was that Temple wasted no time after the Young news came and went with a couple of Jon Rothstein tweets. Fisher was a quick hire, with OwlScoop.com getting the Owl scoop. Sources for the previous 24 hours had said it was down to Young or Fisher, or Fisher and Young, with nobody clear where things would land in the end.
Since Fisher had enough support, the twists and turns weren’t the important parts of the day. Rather than let events get completely away from them, Temple folks did the smart thing. They hired the man who really wanted the job.
