Pro tip; If you are a blogger or a vlogger and your team got blown out at home by Middle Tennessee, don’t make pronouncements regarding any future opponent the next year.

You won’t see any sentence in this space disrespecting any 2023 Temple opponent even though the schedule is the third-easiest in college football.

The mantra at Temple should be to respect everyone and fear no one.

That, however, doesn’t seem to apply to a certain foe this year for Temple: Miami.

For many years, Temple’s “cockiest” foe was Penn State and the Nittany Lions had plenty of reasons for it. Until Temple’s 27-10 win in 2015, the Lions had not lost to the Owls in the prior 74 years (although they played to a 7-7 tie in 1950). When AAC defending champion Temple went on the road and lost by a touchdown to Big 10 champion Penn State the next season, a lot of that cockiness was knocked out of the Lions’ fans, who probably had a newfound respect for Temple. Had the Owls come up with eight more points that day, it would have been the first time a G5 champion ever beat a P5 champion on the road. So close yet so far.

The respect doesn’t extend as far south as Miami, which has a number of fan Youtube channels. The No.1 from a subscriber perspective channel is “Coach Coop” and he dismissed Temple out of hand with his preseason rundown of the Miami schedule last week.

“Next up we face off against the Temple Owls who went 3-9 last season and have won a combined seven games over the last three years,” Coop said. “Not a good football team but it’s going to be that MTSU argument all over again. We’re going to hear that all season and every season from now on as long as Mario Cristobal is the head coach until we prove otherwise consistently. It is what it is. This should be an easy win. Crazier things have happened to us but I’m just saying it should be an easy win. Temple is not a good football team. Let’s keep going.”

That was it.

No mention of the fact that quarterback E.J. Warner was the rookie of the year in the best G5 league in the country. No mention how improved the Owls were over the second half of the season. No mention that they took a Navy team that beat UCF (objectively a better team than Miami) to overtime when Warner just started to get good or the fact that Warner put up 500+ yard passing games against better teams than Miami (Houston and ECU) in the last part of the season.

You can’t expect Coop to know that.

Or even care.

Like those games against Penn State, Temple is going to have to earn Miami’s respect.

Just for giggles, we went into Coop’s wayback machine and found this gem discussing the upcoming game against MTSU in the 2022 season exactly 11 months ago:

“I’m just going to be honest with this. This should be an easy DUB for the Canes. I don’t even need to say anything else about that football team.”

Coop had to eat those words. We’re not saying that Miami is going to be an “easy DUB” in this space, we are just saying that if Warner looks like the guy he did against ECU and Houston, the Owls have more than a puncher’s chance.

And that’s all they can ask for at this point.

Friday: Another Temple gem unearthed