That old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” certainly doesn’t apply to Temple football these days.

Based on one game, Temple football is broke. The evidence certainly was there for all to see in a 31-29 loss to Navy on Saturday night.

We will find out soon if the season is broken tomorrow, though. There’s no team worse in the AAC than USF and, if the Owls can’t beat the Bulls, there’s serious doubt that they can beat anyone else. That game will be played in front of family and friends (about 500) at Lincoln Financial Field and on TV (ESPN+) with the rest of the Owl fans watching from home.

Consider this: USF is coming off a 44-24 home loss to an ECU team that itself was coming off a 20-point loss to Georgia State. Not Georgia or even Georgia Tech, but Georgia State. Even coming off that loss, ECU was able to post its first win over USF since 2014, the year it was ranked No. 19 nationally (and lost to Temple).

Temple certainly went into the season thinking it was better than both ECU and USF but the Navy performance raised some doubts. The Navy game was the second in a row that the Owls underperformed from the standpoint of national perspective. In the bowl game against North Carolina, they entered as a 6.5-point underdog and lost, 55-13. Against Navy, they were anything from a 3-7-point favorite (depending on the day of the week) and lost, 31-29.

National confidence is still there in the Owls as they entered this one as a 10.5-point favorite but, no matter how much talk there is inside the Edberg Olson Complex about pad level, fans know what they saw with their two eyes:

One, the defense couldn’t stop the run;

Two, they couldn’t make the most obvious of two-point conversion calls in the red zone (a lob to a 6-6 wide receiver against a 5-10 corner).

Three, they saw on the film that Navy couldn’t stop a fullback all season but Temple refused to improvise and adjust enough to use one in order to win an important game because, you know, that’s not the way we did things at NIU.

Any one of those adjustments would have probably made Temple 1-0 at this point. Making none of them bordered on coaching malfeasance.

That’s the definition of broken.

Maybe the first part, being overwhelmed physically in the run game, had a lot to do with the second because the scheme to stop that run game was also designed by the same coaching staff that decided on a horrible two-point conversion call.

Whatever, the responsibility for the defeat lies at a well-paid coaching staff that didn’t do its job well enough. Other well-paid coaching staffs, at BYU and Air Force, were able to take similar talent and perform at a higher level against Navy than Temple was.

After the game, that same coaching staff talked more about pad level on the field than the coaching ability off of it.

Right now, as I see it, that’s the broken part. Pad level, schmad level. The braintrust will need to be fixed first. We will find out if they can adjust the head level soon enough.

Late Saturday: Game Analysis

Editor’s Note: If Fizzy, as loyal a long-time fan and season-ticket-holder as he is, says he won’t sit in the cold for the final two games (which he did in the last story), then you know our attendance is not going to approach the 30K average it has through the first five. His recap of USF starts here. 

By Dave (Fizzy) Weinraub

                                       How to Shoot Yourself in Both Feet Without a Gun

Offense

1. The offense continually stops itself with penalties.
2. The play calling in the red zone and at the goal line is atrocious.  The first two play calls with first and goal are always up-the-gut.  (Dairy Queen is introducing a new product, the Temple all-vanilla softy.)
3. Twice when Russo got sacked, linemen inconceivably double-teamed, while the linebacker rushed freely.
4. Continually on third and long, no roll-outs – no imagination.
5. The offense scored 10 points.
6. So far, Anthony Russo has had only one really good game. (It was the one with 7 drops.)  In fact, he’s regressed a little since last season.
7. Isaiah Wright has also gone downhill since last season.

Conclusion:  The game should have been put away in the first half.  Temple needs a new offensive coordinator.

Photo of crowd DURING the game (not at halftime or in warmups) shot from Buccaneers” super box where Bruce Arians hosted his former Owl players

Defense

1. If the SF receiver doesn’t drop the wide-open deep pass in the fourth quarter, the games’ a nail biter.  There were also two other SF barely overthrown deep passes to open receivers.
2. Sometimes it’s tough to avoid a targeting call, especially when the receiver or ball carrier suddenly ducks.  However, our outstanding linebacker (Chapelle Russell) had at least three steps before hitting the SF QB in the head with his helmet in the first quarter.  Inexcusable!
3. A really dumb roughing the kicker penalty negated a terrific stop of SF when the games was tied.

Conclusion:  If it wasn’t for the outstanding performance by our defensive rushers and all their sacks, as well as the defensive touchdown, we’d have probably lost this game. This is the sloppiest 6 – 3 team I’ve ever seen.  Oh yeah, the win was nice.  We are now eligible to go to the White House Sub Shop Bowl in Atlantic City.

There are three important things in football – coaching, coaching, and coaching.

Tuesday: The Improving Scenarios

Former Owl greats Kevin Jones (left) and Joe Greenwood sent these USF fans home with a smile on their faces.

Over the years, being a fan is the derivitive of the word fanatic.

Sometimes, it’s a good thing, sometimes a bad one.

My love of Temple and my hatred of the “bad guys” (anybody playing Temple) sometimes got the best of me but, over the last decade, I’ve matured and become more welcoming to the fans who wear other colors than Cherry and White.

I have a lot of people to thank for that, specifically some terrific hosts of tailgates–like Steve Conjar and Sheldon Morris–who I’ve been able to learn from and adopt their attitudes.

Mostly, watching them becoming good Ambassadors for Temple football, I’ve come to conclusion is a win-win for the program. When one group of fans from another school travels home, they can say what a terrific experience they had in Philadelphia with the Temple fans.

The fans you meet in person are often less aggravating than the ones who make antagonist comments about the Owls on the internet.

Take last Saturday, for instance.

The Sheldon Morris Group–which includes some of the great Bruce Arians’ players like Joe Greenwood, Paul Palmer and Mike Hinnant (to name a few)–welcomed a few South Florida fans into their post-game tailgate.

“It’s how we do,” was the way Joe Greenwood described it.

Despite the loss, those guys had a great time and will take the story back home to Tampa.

Maybe next year, the South Florida fans will recipocate.

Err, just for this guy I’d like to see Temple ring up 80 on UConn, though.

I’ve had a few terrific experiences on the road, including one at UConn in 2012. Myself and the late great Phil Makowski were walking around in the parking lot at Rentschler Field and a couple asked us about Temple and we got into an interesting hour conversation about Eastern football, other universities and towns. They introduced us to two more UConn fans and so on and so forth. The Husky fans could not have been nicer.

The next year, we returned the favor at the Temple tailgates.

I’ve found the nicest fans are the Navy fans, but I’ve never been to a game at Army. Notre Dame fans were terrific both in South Bend and at Lincoln Financial Field. A steady stream of green-cladded Irish walked up my aisle as I sat dejected after a 24-20 loss in 2015 and shook my hand and said things like, “Keep your head up, you have a great team.”

Even though, we all root for different teams, the thing that binds us is our love of college football and our schools.

Empathy is wonderful but it’s learned and not inherited. UConn is going through a tough time now–as we went through once–and it’s important to win and party with class and Temple, largely, has done that thanks to a special group of people.

Hopefully, the goodwill reflects as positively on the university as the play of the kids wearing Cherry and White does.

Sunday: Game Analysis

Amazingly, there is not a single color photo of this on the internet.

Matchups are supposed to mean more to the Temple basketball Owls, who open tonight (7 p.m., CBS Sports Network) against preseason No. 1 North Carolina than the Temple football Owls, who will be that network’s prime time show tomorrow night.

Don’t pretend to know what the basketball matchups are, but I will venture to say that the football matchups favor the Owls against host South Florida on Saturday night. The Owls, like USF, are a running team who pass well off play action. Unlike USF, though, the Owls have a dominating defense capable of shutting down the best running backs in the nation.

Tampa weather. Gosh, I hope the Philly snowbirds show up like they did at the 2008 World Series.

USF sophomore Marlon Mack is certainly that, but ask yourself honestly: Is he better than Notre Dame’s C.J. Prosise? No. The Owls held Prosise (pronounced PRO SIZE) to just 46 yards on 12 carries. Does USF have a quarterback with 1/10^th the talent of DeShone Kizer? Err, that would also be a negative.

South Florida is good, but it would seem in many areas its strengths are more than negated on the other side of the ball by Temple’s strengths. If Temple can stop Prosise, it can certainly stop Mack and force the Bulls to throw the ball, where they will have to face a defensive pass rush that sacked Penn State quarterback Christian Hackenberg 10 times. Temple has the only player in America with two pick 6s in Sean Chandler and, in Tavon Young, it arguably has a better corner manning the other side.

The fine line the Owls will have to walk on Saturday is a psychological one. They know that this game is for a championship, albeit an AAC East one, and they have never entered a game with that kind of mindset. On the other hand, they have played in what the newspapers called “the biggest game in Temple football history” (Notre Dame) and acquitted themselves well. They lifted the 800-pound, 74-year-old Gorilla called Penn State off their backs and THEN won a more meaningful game the next week at Cincinnati, jumping out to a 34-12 fourth-quarter lead.

They did all of that knowing that the hashtags #LeaveNoDoubt and #What’sNext have a special meaning only they understand fully. It’s a fine line they will be walking on Saturday night, but they’ve walked similar lines like Karl Wallenda and still managed to get to the other side.

There is no reason to believe they are going play like anyone other than the champions they have been all season.

The Bad Guys Are Confident, Too:

In what goes around comes around department, Temple football is coming around this weekend and what the Owls can do will be the focus of football activity at Raymond James Stadium on Saturday night.

While there, a current member of the BOT at the University of South Florida, John Ramil, might want to stop by and offer an apology for what he wrote after the last time the two teams met, Oct. 6, 2012. Temple won that game, 37-28, and Ramil fired off an email to President Judy Genshaft where he said losing to Temple was “disgusting and unacceptable.” He was BOT chairman then; he no longer is that now, but still resides on the board.

USF boss: Losing to Temple “disgusting and unacceptable.”

If the tone of the letter sounded similar to Temple fans, it was pretty much the reaction of the entire MAC football conference on every opposing message board after each first loss to Temple and that conference eventually got used to it. The Owls did well enough on the field, in the stands and with TV ratings to earn an invitation to the then Big East football conference. The holdovers from that conference are now the AAC, one of only two conferences with four teams in the Top 25. Now, pretty much everyone—with the exception of No. 4 Notre Dame—is getting used to losing to Temple.

A Temple win on Saturday night (7 p.m., CBS Sports Network) would make the Owls the first team in AAC history to clinch a division title, the AAC East. This is the first year the AAC went to a divisional championship format, with the East winner facing the West winner at the site of the team with the best conference record.

Ramil’s knee-jerk response after the 2012 game was a reminder of how things change in college sports and how respect for an opponent matters. The perceptions of the two programs are a little different than they were in 2012, and an apology to the Owls for disrespecting their program probably would be the appropriate response now.

While Temple would no doubt appreciate one, no one in the Owls’ traveling party is holding their breath.

Tomorrow: ‘][‘-Minus One Day