As far as Group of Five days go in this new configuration of college football, it was a pretty good day for a few schools.

Northern Illinois went into Notre Dame and upset the Irish, its second win over a Power 4 team in as many years.

Bowling Green, a 35.5-point underdog, hung with Penn State and lost by a touchdown, 34-27.

USF, a team Temple beat 54-28 two years ago, hung with Alabama for the second-straight year.

As good as those days were for those schools, that’s how bad Saturday was for Temple in a 38-11 loss at Navy.

The thing all of the above schools have in common with Temple is similar resources. BG, USF and NIU have pretty much the same challenges with the transfer portal and NIL money as Temple does.

The difference is that they don’t cry about it, they turn what meager bread they have into loaves and fishes by mastering the transfer portal the way Howie Roseman has mastered the NFL draft. Simply put, what Scot Loeffler has done at Bowling Green is to scour the Power 4 guys in the transfer portal who were on the cusp of starting at that level but stuck behind all conference players. Thomas Hammock has done the same at NIU. They can’t offer NIL money but can offer those guys starting spots. So could Temple if the CEO in charge was willing to take the same approach.

Stan Drayton?

He’s stuck back in a football mindset of the 1980s, when he was an assistant coach and Penn and Villanova. Back then, the way to fill areas of need was get a guy or two at the JUCO level. Now, faced with significant portal losses, JUCO was and is a crutch for old-school coaches like Drayton and DC Everett Withers.

That was last century. This is this one.

New school guys like Loeffler, Hammock and USF’s Alex Golesh think outside the box.

Bowling Green, NIU and USF have improvised and adjusted.

Temple’s 1980s mindset will at best cost Drayton his job and at worst cost the school its football program.

Temple has 10 games left and there doesn’t appear to be any hope for Drayton to keep his job so these 10 games will be the beginning of a farewell tour that was entirely of his own making.

Take his handling of the quarterback situation as Exhibit A. Only two weeks ago, Drayton was saying that his three quarterbacks were locked in a competition so close that he couldn’t name the starter and then on the Monday before the Oklahoma game said there was a definite “1-2-3” hierarchy but that was for him to know and the press to find out. Before that, he said it was a three-horse race that was pretty much a dead heat.

The best comment I saw on the Temple fan message boards came a couple of days ago when someone posted: “If this was a three-horse race, all three horses need to be put down.”

Now starter Forrest Brock has gotten the most rope of any human being since Thomas Knight, who was executed in 2014 after spending 40 years on death row.

You’ve got to wonder what it will take for Drayton to pull the plug on a guy who had three turnovers in his first game and four more in his second game.

Twenty turnovers?

Thirty?

Eighty-seven?

Have to wonder how Dwan Mathis is feeling after seeing one of his successors has seven turnovers after two games while he was pulled after only two. That was Drayton’s first year and he was full of vim and vigor. Now he appears to be a beaten man.

Competent coaches don’t wait that long to make a change but someone who is resigned to his eventual fate might.

A new anti-football President comes on board on Nov. 1.

For Temple fans, all that is left is to hope a coaching change in a couple of months isn’t the worst thing that could happen to their beloved program.

Monday: Some possible solutions

Friday: Coastal Carolina Preview