Idaho is a completely different team indoors than outdoors.

The old Wizard of Oz line was that there was “no place like home.”
For Idaho’s football team, that’s especially true because, for the Vandals, there is no place like dome.

The last time Temple played in a small indoor arena (Carrier Dome doesn’t count).

The Vandals look like a Division II team outside of the Kibbie Dome. Inside the building, they play like a pretty good FBS team most of the time.
Whether it’s the familiarity with an unusual setting or the altitude, that’s something Temple’s football team will have to be aware of for tomorrow’s 5 p.m. (Philadelphia time) start (97.5 FM,  DirecTV via Altitude TV on DirecTV 681 and Dish Network 410-HDTV). The game is also available on the internet via a link to VandalsXtra here.
An Idaho team that loses, 42-0, on the road to Washington State, put 35 points up on Northern Illinois in a 45-35 loss earlier this season.

This chart  below shows that Idaho performs SIGNIFICANTLY better in home games than on the road:

Dome Sweet Home

Meanwhile, the Owls have problems of their own, especially with defense and the kicking game. Temple defensive coordinator Phil Snow had Eastern Michigan ranked 120 out of 125 defenses in FBS football last year, giving up  478.9 yards per game in 12 games last season. His Temple defense is ranked No. 119 currently, giving up 529 yards a game.

This is the same personnel Chuck Heater had when he shut out UConn in the second half a season ago; yes, the same UConn team that beat Louisville so talent does not appear to be an issue here. Hopefully, the changes made on defense with Nate D. Smith moving to one end and Matt Ioannidis moving to one tackle will help put pressure on the quarterback and take pressure off the defensive backs.

At least that’s the theory.

Snow has not recorded a shutout against an FBS opponent since 1996 — five years before he met a 25-year-old grad assistant at UCLA named Matt Rhule. Given the fact that the Vandals scored 35 points on a pretty good Northern Illinois’ team, he’s probably not likely to get one here. The feeling is the Owls will have to win a shootout, high-20s, high-30s, type game.

Temple opened as a 10-point favorite and the line dropped to 7 1/2 in just three days. There is not a lot of national confidence out there in Temple despite the strong words this week coming from the Edberg-Olsen Complex.

For Temple, this is where the talk about winning has to stop and the winning itself has to start.

Tomorrow: Late Saturday night game analysis

John Mitchell was “late” to this Matt Rhule teleconference.

When it comes to Temple football losses, the old adage about a tree falling in the forest seems to apply.
You know the one:  If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Well, if Temple football loses to Fordham and no one is around to report it properly, does it sting as much?
When it comes to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s John Mitchell’s reporting about Temple after that game, no news certainly is good news.

To me and you it does, but not to the general “Joe Philadelphia” public and that’s one of the small consolations we can take from what happened 10 days ago.
The loss coincides with a “perfect media storm” for Temple. The first part of the storm is a writer, John Mitchell, who obviously doesn’t give a crap about the beat he’s covering; listen to him apologizing to Matt Rhule above for “being late”  12 minutes into a teleconference and having Matt repeat all of the position changes he gave earlier. I mean, how can you be late for a teleconference? It’s not like you have to fight traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway.
The other part of the “Perfect Storm” was it coincided with Andy Reid’s Return. I listen to Philadelphia sports radio in between the commercials on 100.3 and Lady B, and Temple’s loss to Fordham wasn’t mentioned once on 97.5 The Fanatic on 94.1 WIP.
Thank Heaven for small blessings.
I guarantee you if that loss came on an Eagles’ bye week Mike Missanelli would have mentioned it and dug the knife further into the back of every die-hard Temple fan. Now it’s just about forgotten. Time to put it further in the rear-view mirror by winning at Idaho.
In reality, all Temple got in the local media was a bland game story and sidebar from Mitchell–what I call  the Kevin Tatum Treatment–going through the motions and skating by all week by not filing another Temple story. Tatum was famous for staying in the press box and waiting until the typed post-game coaching quotes came from the Sports Information Department and using typed quotes in his one story on the game. One story, one coaching quote, plus a lot of play-by-play. Pulitzer stuff it wasn’t.
Looks like Mitchell went to the Kevin Tatum School of Journalism.
Good.The less Temple stories after that fiasco, the better.

Click over the fans to get five upsets this weekend.

The Inky’s Mike Jensen wrote one column later in the week, saying it’s too early to “Rule on Temple’s Matt Rhule” and that was it. Sort of my 15 minutes of fame in that he mentioned me in the lede without using my name, saying we both had better candidates for the Temple job than Matt Rhule, naming Colorado’s Mike MacIntrye and Bowling Green’s Dave Clawson. That falls under the “duh” department. Pretty routine stuff, although he forgot to mention Ball State’s Pete Lembo might have been available.
That’s it, though.
Whew.
Dodged a huge media bullet there.
Now that Matt Rhule is here, all we can do is back him and hope he does a better job of getting the ball in the hands of Temple’s explosive playmakers (i.e., Chris Coyer and Zaire Williams) and that Jalen Fitzpatrick can snap out of a three-game funk and add some dynamite.
Maybe Rhule spent the 10 days asking defensive coordinator Phil Snow why the DBs play 15 yards off the ball, instead of challenging the receiver for it.
We can only hope that time will heal this Fordham wound.
Meanwhile, we can be thankful to one lazy beat reporter and one former Temple football dad (Andy Reid) that almost nobody else in Philadelphia knows about it.

Tomorrow: More Good News