After four games, Temple football is just about what everybody said they were a couple of months ago.

Two and two with the final eight games being the determining factor of the season. If the Owls do well, they could play 10 more games.

Disheartening, yes, because with the way the Owls and E.J. Warner finished a year ago (roughly 500 yards passing in the last couple of games against bowl teams), there was hope for a better start.

If Warner hit the ground running, he would not have gotten shut out in the first three quarters against Rutgers and he would have been able to put more than a score on the board against Miami. He would have put up a 40 burger on Akron.

None of that happened.

Instead of hitting the ground running, he’s just hit the ground. Somebody needs to pick him up or Quincy Patterson should be warming up on the sidelines. Championship college football teams have quarterbacks who can run as well as they pass. Temple can get away with being one-dimensional only if the immobile quarterback throws 300+ with about 3-5 TD passes every game.

That hasn’t happened for Temple. Time for a sense of urgency with this program.

Maybe it’s too early to declare sophomore slump but there hasn’t been a natural progression from games 11 and 12 of last year to 1-4 of this one.

That needs to change starting Thursday night.

Nobody expected to beat Miami but a win over a RU team that the Owls lost to 16-14 a year ago would have been tangible proof that this was a better team than the one Temple fielded a year ago.

Now it’s an open question.

Warner gets a Mulligan for the Miami game because this is a team that is capable of winning the national championship. I was invited to go on a Miami fan call-in show Friday night and told them the Canes would probably win 35-21. I really believe that would have been the score if Temple played to its potential. It did not. There is no disgrace for losing to Miami 41-7 yet there is a nagging annoyance that Temple did not play that team significantly better than Bethune-Cookman did. Really annoyed that good guy Jordan Smith was open by 10 yards in the end zone and Warner threw it right to the numbers of the only bad guy the same number of yards away. That said, I would not be surprised if Miami was in the Final Four and won the whole damn thing.

Beating Miami, though, was never the goal of this season.

Winning the AAC championship at the maximum or at least making a bowl game was.

Nothing the Owls have done through four games indicates the former and even Temple homer radio seems to agree. I left the game so disgusted about the Owls being uncompetitive that I sat back in my car to warm up. Holding the steering wheel while reaching for the heater I turned on the radio and heard Temple play-by-play guy Kevin Copp tell analyst Paul Palmer this: “The idea is to get to six wins however you need to do it.”

Huh?

Now the goal is six freaking wins for a program that used to win eight on a regular basis for the decade between 2009-2019? Yippee. “We’re No. 80!” From playing in consecutive AAC championships, beating Penn State, Maryland (three times, 38-7, 35-14 and 20-17), and Vandy (37-7) to fighting for that No. 80 spot of 130 teams.

No thanks.

That’s not what Stan Drayton has said since the end of last year.

He said the goal is to win the AAC championship. If you can’t beat a Tulsa team that lost to Washington, 43-10, you don’t deserve to win an AAC championship. Guys need to play to the stats they put on the sheet last year, especially at the most important positions on the team.

By 11 p.m. Thursday night, we will find out if Drayton’s goal is within reach or the Owls will have to struggle, scratch, crawl and, yes, SETTLE to reach Copp’s minimalist goal.

Update on picks: Went 5-1 against the spread Saturday with the only loss being Memphis at Missouri. Correctly picked the Oregon blowout of Colorado, Marshall covering the five against VT, and Duke blowing out UConn in the key games.

Week: 5-1

Season: 8-4

Monday: College Football in Nutshell

Friday: Tulsa Recap