Taking time off from all the bowl mania to re-examine one word uttered by Temple football coach Geoff Collins in his last press conference that we wanted to get to before too much time passed.

Ridiculous.

It stood right out there like a high-hanging curve ball for Barry Bonds to hit out of the park.

“We’re going to have a ridiculous team next year,” Collins said on the day the Owls beat Tulsa. That was his last press conference because he hit the recruiting trail the day after Tulsa and was not back for the bowl press conference.

“We’re going to have a ridiculous team next year,” Geoff Collins.

On the TV grid, MTV has a show called “Ridiculousness.” I page down it on the way to watching the Sixers or another sporting event and have never stopped, but the guide describes it  as “various viral videos from the Internet, usually involving failed stunts.”

Since the Minister of Mayhem (and swag) probably wasn’t referring to the Merriam-Webster definition of the word, we went to the online urban dictionary to get the meaning of it to the kids today.

The urban dictionary of the word ridiculous says “something unbelievable in any shape or form, or something worthy of memory.”

The last part of that sentence is probably what Collins was thinking about.

Something worthy of memory …

Geez, I hope so but this team loses two of its three best receivers, its best offensive lineman, the best fullback in the country, its two best edge rushers and pretty much the entire starting defensive secondary.

All of the things that should have made this season more satisfying to Temple fans than it turned out to be seem to be part of the reason why the Owls won’t return to championship form next year. All of those losses were guys who were key contributors to an AAC championship team and their talents should have been accentuated enough to get to at least eight wins this season.

Instead, the coaches tried to force a square peg into a round hole too many times this season, at least offensively, trying to turn fullback-oriented and play-action talent into a something foreign to them.

It’s all about the Jimmy’s and Joe’s, not the X’s and O’s, and the Owls lose too many Jimmy’s and Joe’s to be as “ridiculous” as Collins is projecting them to be. A word of caution is that when the experts picked UCF and USF ahead of the Owls, Collins said “I love it.” The interpretation at the time was that he loved it because he would have loved nothing better than the Owls to prove them wrong by vaulting over them, not that it had lessened the pressure of defending his team’s AAC title. Now, his word is ridiculous and we’ve got to interpret that was ridiculously good, not ridiculously bad.

For his sake, and ours, let’s hope he’s right but here we sit a year to almost the day from finding out, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Friday: An Early  Look At FIU