Sometime late Saturday I received this text from a long-time Temple fan:

“Hey, did you see Boston College quarterback Phil Jurkovec went down with a wrist injury?”

Yeah, I did.

My initial reaction was that I wanted him to play so opposing fans and naysayers of Temple won’t say “yeah, but Jurkovec didn’t play” in the still unlikely event the Owls would win.

“I don’t want to win like that,” I typed back.

That was my initial reaction but after sleeping on the question I really don’t care if he plays or not.

I HOPE Temple plays to its potential, maybe gets a few breaks and pulls out the win. If one of those breaks is Jurkovec’s bum wrist, so be it. Temple will have to play with its backup QB, too, so I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the bad guys.

That’s how sorely Temple needs some breaks especially after getting a series of bad ones the last couple of years, especially in that all-important first home game.

Plenty of other teams are getting breaks and maybe it’s about time Temple gets some.

Really, the first couple of weeks in college football has restored a lot of the faith in the game that I had lost with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

First, UC-Davis won at Tulsa.

Then, South Dakota State won at Colorado State.

Then, East Tennessee State destroyed Vanderbilt and Montana won at Washington.

And, finally, Jacksonville State took advantage of a Hail Mary and won at Florida State.

The latter three wins, where FCS teams beat high-profile Power 5 teams, were particularly encouraging. None of those teams even recruit on the level of Temple, let alone the teams they were able to beat.

Hey, @JasonWingard! Thanks for coming out last week. Your words were heard and we delivered the W‼️#GoOwls🦉#TempleTUFF♦️♦️♦️ pic.twitter.com/3ZTatd7L9A

— Temple Football Recruiting (@TUFFRecruiting) September 12, 2021

If those teams can make their own breaks over teams whose recruiting rankings are significantly higher, then so can Temple. Hell, Akron was far more competitive in its games last year than UMass was and destroyed a Bowling Green team, 31-3, that UMass would have probably lost to a season ago.

A year ago, a former classmate of mine suggested it was pure folly for Temple to ever entertain the notion that it can beat Boston College because, he said, “they recruit on a whole different level than Temple.”

I pointed out to him that the Boston College team that got destroyed by Cincinnati, 37-8, in 2019 couldn’t compete with a Cincy team that barely beat Temple (15-13).

“Yeah, well that was before they had Jurkovec,” he said.

Well, I really don’t care if they have Jurkovec or not as long as the pixie dust sprinkled on Montana, SDSU, ETSU, Jacksonville State nd UC-Davis finds its way to Lincoln Financial Field. There seems to be a lot of that dust around this season for some reason and Temple could use it dropping down from a cloud in South Philly between noon-3 on Saturday.

If so, Temple wins, with or without Jurkovec.

Friday: BC Preview