Temple football had just ripped off the first of two consecutive 10-win seasons under coach Matt Rhule, and the school’s athletic department leadership was thinking big.
The time was right to start pushing for a football stadium for the Owls, who were — and still are — playing their home games at Lincoln Financial Field, the 67,594-seat home of the Philadelphia Eagles.
Then-athletic director Pat Kraft gave chief of staff Sean Padden an assignment: Find a blue blood, a traditional power, one of those programs with easily recognizable helmets, to agree to play a road game against Temple so they could tell school and city officials, “If you build it, they will come.”
“I called all over the place,” said Padden, who now works for Rhule at Nebraska. “I called USC. I called UCLA. I called Alabama. I called Florida. The guy from Florida, I can’t remember who it was, but he was the only one that was most honest with me. He was like, ‘Sean, you just won 10 games. I don’t know what’s going on up there.’”
Padden found an enthusiastic taker in Oklahoma, fresh off the first of four College Football Playoff appearances in five years as Big 12 champions, and in June of 2016 the schools announced a “two-for-one” series: The Owls would open the 2024 and 2028 seasons in Norman, and the Sooners would play in the City of Brotherly Love on Sept. 13, 2025.
Coming off a huge home win against Michigan, the seven-time national champion Sooners now turn around to play Temple of the American Conference on Saturday in maybe the oddest-looking game of the entire 2025 schedule, a date set under very different conditions than exist today in college football and an arrangement that might not happen many more times in the future.
The Owls are certainly not what they were when that contract was signed nine years ago. Temple won only 13 games from 2020 through 2024. First-year coach K.C. Keeler has the Owls off to a 2-0 start after encouraging blowouts against UMass and FCS Howard.
Keeler is excited for the challenge and trying to use the OU game to build enthusiasm and interest in the program — always tricky in a pro sports town.
“This is an opportunity for us to kind of see how good we are,” Keeler said. “We’re going to be playing some big-boy football this Saturday.”
Keeler threw out the first pitch at the Phillies home game against the New York Mets on Tuesday, which was Temple Night at Citizens Bank Park, across the parking lot from the Linc. There will be a pep rally on campus this week to drum up excitement among students.
Temple athletic director Arthur Johnson said he started working on ways to capitalize on the Oklahoma game from a marketing perspective in May.
Oklahoma received a 4,000-ticket allotment, more than usual for Temple’s opponents. Temple held back on making single-game purchases of Oklahoma game tickets available until mid-June; Sooners fans who wanted to buy tickets in advance to watch their team play in Philadelphia also had to purchase a ticket to another Temple game.
The Owls drew a combined 27,220 fans for their first two games of the season. Johnson said he is hopeful they will surpass that total for Oklahoma, even with the upper deck at the Linc closed off.
“Obviously the great start for our team under Coach Keeler has been incredible,” Johnson said. “That has helped with that plan.”
The Owls’ often sparse home crowds are expected to get a sizable boost as Oklahoma comes to town. (Gregory Fisher / USA Today)
Oklahoma officials were under no illusion that a new stadium in Philadelphia was guaranteed to be built in time for this game, but the deal still made sense for the Sooners.
“We were talking to other schools about perhaps playing a two-for-one matchup but playing (the road game) in an NFL stadium,” Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said.
Unfortunately for Oklahoma, the defending champion Eagles are playing a Super Bowl rematch at Kansas City on Sunday, so former Sooners Jalen Hurts, Lane Johnson and Grant Calcaterra are not likely to be at the Temple game, which kicks off at noon ET.
The Sooners rarely play in the Northeast. They played Army at Yankee Stadium in 1961 and Boston College at Braves Field in 1949. And in 1942, in front of 3,000 fans at Temple Field, according to UPI, the Owls beat the Sooners 14-7.
Castiglione said he liked the idea of giving OU fans in the Northeast Corridor a chance to see the team close to home. In 2009, Oklahoma scheduled a home-and-home with Army, but after the teams played in Norman in 2018 (the Sooners escaped with a 28-21 win in overtime) the trip to West Point in 2020 was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The OU alumni clubs in nearby Washington, D.C., and New York City have planned a happy hour Friday and tailgating Saturday. Rainey Sewell, Oklahoma Class of 2013 and president of DC Sooners, said about 700 people have purchased tickets through the two clubs. Though she did point out it caught some of her fellow Sooners by surprise that Temple played in an NFL stadium.
Sewell was in Norman last week for the Michigan game and has plans to be at seven games this season. She’s thrilled she’ll only need to spend $36 on a round-trip train ride to see her team this weekend.
“It’s the one time they’ll probably ever be here, and it’s a great weekend,” Sewell said. “Philadelphia is an amazing city.”
Playing in the same conference as West Virginia for a few years brought the Sooners this direction regularly before their move to the SEC. Otherwise, a game at Pitt in 1984 is the closest they have been to Philadelphia for a nonconference game in decades.
Locking in two season-opening home games with Temple was also helpful for Oklahoma. Making available dates match in college football can be difficult, which is why games are often scheduled so far in advance.
Crafting the ideal schedule can also be expensive.
Back when Oklahoma signed up for this trip, the prices for guarantee games were on the rise. Guarantee games (or “buy games”) are one-off arrangements where the visiting team typically — though certainly not always — receives a big check and a sound beating.
Football Bowl Subdivision schools outside the power conferences have been routinely getting more than $1 million to more often than not serve as glorified warmups for their P5 (now P4) counterparts. Prices have soared past $1.5 million in recent years, with some P5 schools shelling out around $2 million for games. Alabama paid $1.925 million to Louisiana-Monroe for last week’s game, and several teams are paying upward of $1.8 million for games this season.
By comparison, two-for-ones are a good value play. Instead of Oklahoma spending upward of $4 million on three separate home games, it agreed to pay Temple $1 million for this deal, according to contract details reported by The Oklahoman.
“The financial components made all the sense in the world for us to consider that,” Castiglione said.
Dave Brown, the founder of a scheduling software company called Gridiron that helps college football teams make matchups, said the two-for-one might be endangered as the market for guarantee games shifts in favor of the buyers.
With the SEC moving to nine conference games next season, there will be fewer nonconference spots to fill for lower-level FBS teams looking to cash in. Plus, an influx of new FBS schools over the past few years — Missouri State and Delaware joining Conference USA upped the total to 136 — has decreased scarcity in the market.
“Nobody’s going to have the pressure to pay huge guarantees because in some years there’s 15 games available for sale that there aren’t buyers for,” Brown said.
It’s not unusual for Temple to do home-and-home series with power conference teams, but normally it’s with schools that have more regional ties. An international airport and an NFL stadium make for an easy trip for schools such as Miami, Georgia Tech and Duke that draw a lot of students from the Northeast.
Temple has a four-game back-and-forth with Rutgers, which is about 70 miles down Interstate 95 from the Linc, scheduled for later this decade.
It makes sense for Penn State to occasionally head east and play at Temple, though Rhule’s Owls beat the Nittany Lions in 2015 in Philadelphia, and they haven’t been back since. Penn State is scheduled to return next year — with Kraft as the Nittany Lions AD.
Maybe the most memorable game Temple has hosted at the Linc came later in 2015, when No. 9 Notre Dame faced the unbeaten Owls on Halloween. The Fighting Irish play in NFL stadiums on the East Coast all the time, trying to connect with their so-called “subway alumni.”
ESPN’s “College GameDay” came to Philadelphia for that ranked matchup.
The Irish won 24-20, but Temple went on to play in the American title game that season and the next, winning the league in 2016.
Those were heady times for a program that has historically had more downs than ups. As most athletic directors would, Kraft tried to turn success and enthusiasm for the program into investment.
“We were trying to get a stadium,” Padden said. “We were really trying to promote that possibility. And we’re working with firms, and had drawings and had plans. We’re sort of moving along to where we could bring it to people, but we were having a lot of folks that didn’t believe you could get a big-time school to play in a smaller stadium.”
The stadium plans never did get off the ground. Rhule left for Baylor after the 2016 season. The Owls stayed competitive for a couple more years under Geoff Collins, who bounced to Georgia Tech after 2018. And then in 2020, Kraft left for Boston College.
Johnson said Temple has no plans to leave the Linc, and Keeler has different ideas for marquee games to come.
“In the future, I have no interest in playing Oklahoma. I want to play Penn State. I want to play Pitt. I want to play Maryland and Rutgers. I want to play regional games here that’s going to fill Lincoln Financial,” Keeler said. “But for this weekend coming up, I have the opportunity to play a blue blood? It’s pretty exciting.”
(Photo: Brian Bahr / Getty Images)
