City of Basketball Love

Stephen Pianovich (@SPianovich)
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A glimpse at Temple’s schedule before the season showed the Owls would have plenty of opportunities for a statement win in the first month. They opened against then-No. 1 North Carolina and also had potential top-25 matchups in the Puerto Rico Tipoff, as well as a road test against reigning National runner-up Wisconsin.

But Temple fell short in all of those contests, and coupled with a home loss to St. Joseph’s, the Owls were under .500 a month into the season. For a team that just missed out on the NCAA Tournament field a season ago, it was looking like Temple wouldn’t have any Selection Sunday heartbreak in 2016, because the team wouldn’t be close to the field come mid-March.

Fast forward six weeks, and those same Owls are in much better shape. They have three top 25 wins in the last month, two of which came on the road, and the other was Sunday’s home upset of No. 8 SMU – the team’s seventh win over a top-10 opponent under Fran Dunphy.

Temple’s season had opportunity, disappointment and frustration in the early goings. However, after Sunday, the Owls have something else: revitalized hope.

For the first time this season, the Owls have won three games in a row. They’re 11-7 overall, the farthest north of .500 they’ve seen this season and at 5-2 in league play, they are in contention for a regular season title in the American Athletic Conference.

“We played so many really good teams early on, and we couldn’t find any type of rhythm,” Dunphy said after the 89-80 triumph over the previously unbeaten Mustangs. “Now we seemingly have one, but we’re going on the road two times this week. So we better have a rhythm and we better have an understanding of how hard this is going to be. It’s been a unique year, and hopefully a win like this helps us determine who we are going forward.”

The Owls have been trying to figure that out all season, and it’s been a little bit difficult to figure out with the deep rotations they’ve been using. Freshman Ernest Alflakpui and Trey Lowe have grown a lot in the last two months, and now find themselves in the starting lineup. Meanwhile, a series of role players has stepped up in different games for Temple – including Devin Coleman’s flawless shooting effort and 23 points against SMU.

Quenton DeCosey has anchored the team being a consistent scoring option, and Josh Brown seems to have a better understanding of what he needs to do in his first season running the point as the weeks go by.

“I think it does a lot for our resume, beating a top 10 team,” DeCosey said after Sundays win. “They’re the third ranked team we’ve beaten, so it does a lot for our resume. It shows people we can compete with anybody.”

DeCosey is right, as the Owls’ wins against Cincinnati (twice) as well as UConn and SMU, show they can beat anyone in the conference. But the team also has proved it’s capable of not showing up. The most glaring example of this came on Jan. 2 when the Owls got drubbed, 77-50, at home by Houston.

That loss came right after a Dec. 29 win at Cincinnati – then the team’s best win of the season. So after the SMU victory, Dunphy is hoping to avoid a similar letdown in the Owls’ next game, a Wednesday night road test at East Carolina.

“We’re going to talk about East Carolina (on Monday) at length,” Dunphy said. “We’re going to watch x-amount of film on the SMU game to see what we can do better – we got beat up on the boards pretty bad in the second half. …I told these guys in the locker room, let’s enjoy this for a little while, but we have to set our sights on East Carolina on Wednesday. They’re smart enough to know this is a good win and we did what we needed to do. But there’s no assurance moving forward.”

Dunphy is right about the lack of any guarantees, but recent history is at least on Temple’s side. The Owls went on a seven-game winning streak at this time last year, and did not lose a game from Jan. 17 to Feb. 19. That undefeated month came on the heels of a three-game losing streak, and DeCosey sees a loss this season as a similar juncture.

“I think the turning point I saw was after that tough loss against Memphis,” DeCosey said. “We came back and got two great wins and we built momentum coming into today’s game. We were ready from the start.”

If the Owls can keep that momentum going for a few more weeks, they’ll keep hearing their name louder in the NCAA Tournament conversation.