Instant analysis: USF 34, Temple 14
Will Kwenkeu used the same phrase four different times in describing what went wrong for Temple in its 34-14 loss to USF Saturday night at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa.
“We got our ass kicked,” the Owls’ sixth-year linebacker said. “It wasn’t anything else.”
Kwenkeu tried to choose his words thoughtfully in the postgame Zoom session with reporters, but he kept landing on the same sentiment each time.
It’s hard to argue with him.
After taking a 52-3 drubbing back on Oct. 8 to a then-No. 5 Cincinnati team that’s now ranked second in the country, Temple had a bye week and 14 days to prepare for a 1-5 USF team that had not won an American Athletic Conference game since Oct. 26, 2019, which was also the last time the Bulls had beaten an FBS opponent.
In other words, Saturday was very much a get-right game for a Temple team that, at 3-3, could still say it was playing for bowl eligibility.
Instead, the Owls responded with a dud. They got very little right and were otherwise embarrassed, especially at the line of scrimmage. Temple’s defense allowed 526 yards of total offense and a staggering 421 on the ground to a USF team that was averaging a shade more than 181 yards per game in that category. It marked just the third time in the program’s history that the Bulls surpassed the 400-yard rushing mark in a single game.
And against a USF team that owned the league’s worst rushing defense, Temple mustered just 34 yards on 13 attempts. Moreover, on a night when the Bulls simply steamrolled the Owls by running the ball 73 times and won the time-of-possession battle by a startling margin of 44:35 to 15:25, Temple ran just 34 plays to USF’s 94.
USF junior running back Jaren Mangham gashed Temple to the tune of 156 yards and two touchdowns, a pair of 1-yard scoring runs that opened and closed the scoring for the Bulls in the second and fourth quarters.
“From what we observed, it’s just details, the fundamentals and making sure we stayed true to that end and executed at a high level,” Kwenkeu said when asked why Temple’s defense simply could not gain control of the game. “They didn’t do any trick plays. It wasn’t any of that. It’s simply tackling. … We didn’t do that, and they just kept running the ball.”
After falling behind by 14-0, Temple eventually got two touchdowns on a perfectly-thrown, 70-yard touchdown pass from quarterback D’Wan Mathis to wideout Randle Jones that made it a 14-7 game in the second quarter and a 1-yard run by Edward Saydee that got the Owls within 17-14 at the 11:16 mark of the third quarter.
Temple held USF backup quarterback Katravis Marsh, who came in to relieve injured starter Timmy McClain, to an incompletion on the ensuing series on third-and-13 from the Owls’ 35-yard line, but Bulls placekicker Spencer Shrader calmly drilled a 52-yard field goal that bumped USF’s lead to 20-14 with 8:17 left in the third quarter.
Then on the Owls’ ensuing possession, they got three yards from Ra’Von Bonner on first down, a missed connection between Mathis and Jones on second down, and a 6-yard pass from Mathis to tight end Jordan Smith on third down that left Temple a yard short of a first down and facing a fourth-and-1 from its 34.
Instead of taking a chance and going for it on fourth down, Temple head coach Rod Carey elected to send punter Adam Barry onto the field. USF responded with a nine-play, 67-yard drive that culminated with a Kelley Joiner (14 carries, 126 yards) 2-yard touchdown run that made it a 27-14 ballgame with 2:41 left in the third.
Did Carey think of keeping his offense on the field on fourth down?
“I thought about it,” Carey said. “But at that point, I felt like we could get a stop, and I was obviously wrong, and then they put the game out of reach at that point with the score and the time that came off the clock.”
When asked what gave him the impression that his team could make a stop on a night when it wasn’t getting stops, Carey responded abruptly by saying, “Because we’re making adjustments all the time, that’s why.”
Carey and defensive coordinator Jeff Knowles did adjust by switching from a three-man defensive front to a four-man front in the fourth quarter, but it didn’t work. Not much of anything worked Saturday night, and now Temple must win three of its next five games to be bowl-eligible.
TURNING POINT
After Temple had allowed USF to move the ball downfield with relative ease down to the Owls’ 10-yard line, the Bulls’ drive stalled out, so USF head coach Jeff Scott brought Shrader out for a field goal. The snap, however, went awry, Keyshawn Paul picked it up at the Owls’ 34-yard line and ran it 61 yards down to the USF 5, setting up Temple for what would have been a big early momentum shift.
But three plays later, redshirt freshman Victor Stoffel, making his first career start at right tackle in place of an injured Michael Niese, committed a very obvious holding penalty that negated what would have been a 2-yard jet sweep push pass touchdown from Mathis to Jose Barbon.
On the next play, Mathis threw an interception that landed in the hands of Mekhi LaPointe in the end zone for a touchback.
USF responded with a 19-play, 80-yard scoring drive capped by Mangham’s relatively easy 1-yard touchdown run. Shrader’s PAT gave the Bulls a 7-0 lead at the 14:19 mark of the second quarter, and USF pushed the lead to 14-0 with 4:47 left in the half on a 4-yard touchdown pass from McClain to Demarcus Gregory.
It would certainly be fair to say the sequence wasn’t necessarily a turning point and instead something that just delayed the inevitable on a night when Temple’s defense was startlingly bad.
But it did set the tone for the rest of the night. The Owls had a chance to make a play that could have changed the course of the game, they didn’t, and the Bulls made them pay by running the ball right at them and controlling the clock.
NO OFFENSE, BUT ...
Yes, Temple’s offense ran just 34 total plays on offense on a night when its defense was manhandled and worn down. But again, the Owls gained just 34 yards and averaged a paltry 2.6 yards per carry against the conference’s worst rushing defense.
Mathis completed 12 of his 21 passes for 183 yards, and 70 of those yards came on the beautifully-thrown touchdown pass to Jones. He would have had two touchdown passes had it not been for the Stoffel penalty that negated the toss to Barbon. But his interception in the end zone on the next play, a throw intended for Jones, after Paul put them in a great position to score cost Temple points.
“I was trying to get him back shoulder,” Mathis said of the interception, “but I left it a little bit inside, and they made a play.”
Yes, it’s hard for an offense to get into any sort of rhythm when it runs just 34 plays, but Mathis wasn’t in the mood to make excuses.
“It’s definitely tough, but at the end of the day, we’ve got to figure out a way to do the best we can with 34 plays,” he said. “We obviously didn’t do that, and we’ve just got to regroup this week and not let two (losses) turn into three.”
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN MOVING FORWARD?
Until proven otherwise, Temple is a struggling football team without an identity.
Yes, the Owls have dealt with some injuries. On defense, they’ve been without safety DaeSean Winston since the season opening blowout loss at Rutgers, and fellow safety and sixth-year defensive captain Amir Tyler did not play Saturday night and is out with what’s been described as an upper-body injury. And Carey said he didn’t have any injury updates on Paul, who left the game with what appeared to be an injury to his right leg, and offensive guard Joseph Hooper.
Mathis, of course, missed the Akron and Boston College games after getting injured at Rutgers, and Jones had missed the last three games before returning Saturday night.
But the numbers are what they are, and Temple was simply owned in the trenches on both sides of the ball Saturday night by a 1-5 USF team that hadn’t won a conference game in almost two seasons.
Next up for the Owls is a home game next Saturday against a 4-3 UCF team coming off a 24-7 win over Memphis. The Knights ran for 215 yards and averaged 5.2 yards per carry in beating the Tigers.
To regroup and make sure two losses don’t turn into three, as Mathis said, a lot has to change for the team and the program.
So how do they get this thing turned around and keep it from going off the rails?
“We come in as a group, we pull the film, evaluate ourselves, and then we come together as a team,” Mathis said. “See, right here, this is where the world and social media and everybody else starts to try to divide us and tell us that we’re not good enough. This player isn’t good enough, this player isn’t good enough. This is where we’ve got to have each other’s back, to come together and stick together, because nobody knows what we go through except us every day.
“And until we get back to Philly and get back together and come together, if we don’t, then the same thing is going to happen. But if we do get together and we fight and we fight our asses off for the rest of the year, we’re going to have a great chance. We’ve still got a good team. We just lost two games, and then this game, we didn’t do what we expected to do. But … we’re going to bounce back and have a great season. I promise you that.”