Unchartered Waters: ESPN Gameday

Temple fans are going to have to fill Independence Hall with a crowd this size plus a few hundred clever banners.

Temple fans are going to have to fill Independence Hall with a crowd this size plus a few hundred clever banners.

After stringing along two fan bases for more than 24 hours, the production made by ESPN in making its Halloween Day call for a GameDay site should be nominated for an Academy Award. There was that much drama in the official announcement that game down at 12:41 p.m., Eastern Time, on Monday.

The crew made the correct call in picking Temple, and downtown Philadelphia, as the site and made a whole lot of Washington State fans on the West Coast saltier than someone who accidentally fell into The Great Salt Lake.

In reality, the call was a no-brainer. Temple is 7-0 for the first time in its history, ranked No. 21, and is facing a Top 10 team in visiting and No. 9 Notre Dame. The show will serve to pump the ratings for the prime time game on ABC, which is the parent network of ESPN. Washington State, which barely beat former Temple Big East rival Rutgers, is 5-2 with a loss to FCS member Portland State. Losing to a FCS team should automatically disqualify a so-called Power 5 team from a GameDay visit.

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Since there is construction on the main campus of Temple, the production crew felt the best backdrop would be Independence Hall, so that’s where the broadcast will originate from on Saturday morning. The site is rich in history since it is where both the Declaration and Independence and the Constitution were ratified and there is also some college football history connected with the game.

It will probably be the biggest game in modern Philadelphia college football history. Two ranked teams have not played in Philadelphia since No. 6 Penn played No. 2 Army to a 13-13 tie in the 1943 season.

No one knows who will win this modern day ranked matchup just yet, but without a doubt the first winner is College Football GameDay for making the obvious call. Now it’s up to Temple fans to reward that confidence by setting those alarm clocks early for Saturday and being there.

Gameday: Leave No Doubt

New York Jets' head coach Todd Bowles rocks the Temple gear on Friday night's show.

New York Jets’ head coach Todd Bowles rocks the Temple gear on Friday night’s show.

If you are tuning into ESPN College Football’s Gameday this morning looking for extensive talk about  Temple, don’t bother. The Owls will have to take care of business not only today against UMASS, but also in the four weeks after that just to get something other than the casual mention they got this morning.

Money talks, bullbleep walks is the saying and, when it comes to college football, the most important thermometer to measure the temperature of the sport is ESPN’s College Gameday Show. Simply put, if you are a fan of a Power Five team, they talk about your squad. If your team is in the Group of Five, they do not.

There is little wonder, then, when it comes time for the musical chairs to start again, a relatively small number of the current G5 teams are pressing their noses against the window like a shopper on Black Friday waiting for the doors to open.  To be sure, networks like ESPN have a vested interest in talking about only the big conferences because TV contracts have been signed far into the future. In college football, though, the issue runs a little deeper than that because there is a substantial fear that sometime within the next decade, the teams in the Power 5 will break away and make the rest of the schools in the NCAA as irrelevant in college football as today’s Ivy League is.

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That’s why, for schools like UConn, Boise State, Cincinnati, Houston and Temple – the top G5 candidates for P5 expansion — how football does this year and next is so important. In college football today, it’s all about TV markets and eyeballs, and at least three of those schools (Houston, Temple and Cincinnati) can deliver both a decent football program and a big-time market. For Boise State and UConn, it’s not so much about the markets as it is about the programs. Boise State might have the most consistent football program of the five, but the TV market is so small that it’s irrelevant. UConn has a terrible football program, but a great basketball one.

Cincinnati and Temple are comparatively strong in both sports and Temple can deliver the largest available TV market of any of the five top G5 schools, the nation’s fourth-rated one. There are P5 teams in the New York market (Rutgers), the Chicago market (Northwestern and Notre Dame) and the third-ranked market, Los Angeles (UCLA and USC), but none in the fourth. Temple would complete a chain that includes the fifth-ranked market, Dallas-Fort Worth, which has Waco suburb member Baylor. Houston is No. 10, while UConn (Hartford-New Haven) is No. 30 and Cincinnati 34.

Whatever happens, all of those schools are on the outside looking in because ESPN College Gameday is not talking about them now. The G5 is dying and the evidence is on TV every Saturday morning for all to see.

Temple has a chance to pump some life into it by going 7-0 into the Notre Dame game, but the Irish will have to keep their end of the bargain by beating Georgia Tech today. So those are at least two teams to root for, another would be Penn State to add further legitimacy to the opening-day win. If you are a G5 team like the Owls are, a lot of dominoes have to fall your way.

Depth Charts

Here is the depth chart for UMASS with no changes from last week and the depth chart for Temple follows below.

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