Temple football coach Al Golden, largely credited for starting the long.. slow.. impossible process of returning the program to relevance, interviewed last Wednesday to fill the vacancy as the top man at UCLA football.

He led Temple to a 4-8 record this past season – 4-4 in the MAC conference – and has been cheered for it. Still, he has been roundly criticized by many Temple alumni for meeting about the UCLA job.

Most recently, Dave “Fizzy” Weinraub, a Temple football player between 1959 and 1961, wrote a letter to the editor to the Inquirer lamenting that even just a meeting about leaving could hurt Temple’s next recruiting class – to be signed beginning Feb. 6.

(Golden has replied that – corrected below) The possibility remains that he was just exploring his options and politely accepting the invitation from UCLA chancellor Gene Block, who was also at the University of Virginia while Golden was a defensive coordinator.

Whether the meeting could raise his profile in college football enough to help his work at Temple and not just lead to more distraction is yet to be seen.
(Corrected 12/26/07 4:24 p.m. EST: Al Golden has declined to comment on his interview, though some, including Inquirer writer Kevin Tatum, have mentioned the possibility that the meeting was based more on the Temple coach’s relationship with Block than a desire to leave his post.)