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Talking about UConn

After Saturday’s 15-13 loss at No. 19 Cincinnati, Temple is out of the American Athletic Conference East division race and no longer in contention for a league title.

But the Owls still have one last regular season game to play Saturday when they host UConn at Lincoln Financial Field for a 3:30 p.m. kickoff on senior day before awaiting their bowl destination.

First-year head coach Rod Carey and several of his players talked to reporters Tuesday during the team’s weekly media session in interviews you can listen to here, wrapping up conversation about the loss to the Bearcats and talking about how they can’t overlook a struggling UConn team that’s 2-9 overall and winless in league play.

Rod Carey

Chapelle Russell

Benny Walls

Jadan Blue

Temple is 4-2 against UConn since it joined The American, and this will be the Huskies’ last game in the conference. The football team will play as an independent next year while its basketball programs will move back over to the Big East.

The Owls have gone 6-0 in the last game of the regular season since 2013, and two of those six wins have come against UConn - in 2015 and last season, when the Owls won in a 57-7 rout at Rentschler Field.

But Carey guarded against looking past the Huskies, who lost 31-24 to ECU last week at home.

“To my eye, they’re much improved from what I spent the offseason looking at,” Carey said.

UConn is ranked dead last in the American in both scoring offense (19.1 points per game) and scoring defense (allowing 39.7 points per game), but Carey said Huskies right tackle Matt Peart “might be the best one I’ve seen on tape” among the teams Temple has played this season.

Saturday will be the final home game for several Temple seniors, including linebackers Shaun Bradley and Chapelle Russell, left guard Jovahn Fair and safety Benny Walls.

“I haven’t even thought about all that yet, honestly,” Walls said. “It’s going to be emotional, of course. It’s my last game here at the Linc and all that. Just got to play.”

Not-so-special teams

Saturday’s loss was another marked by special teams blunders. And in this case, those mistakes were a bit part of what cost Temple the game.

Cincinnati’s final score came when 6-foot-9 freshman Lorenzo Metz blocked Will Mobley’s extra point attempt early in the fourth quarter and returned it for two points. Those two points make it a two-possession game with 11:19 to go and gave the Bearcats a cushion after Temple got within 15-13 with 6:59 left after an Anthony Russo touchdown pass to Kenny Yeboah and Mobley’s ensuing extra point.

Earlier in the game, punter Adam Barry fielded a low snap from long snapper Ronald Gaines by taking a knee at Temple’s 6-yard line. Cincinnati went backwards after that but nonetheless used the great field position to get a 37-yard field goal from Sam Crosa just before halftime and take a 6-0 lead into intermission.

Mobley later missed a 32-yard field goal in the third quarter after coming into the game having made 11 of his first 12 attempts of the season.

So at the end of the day on special teams, Temple handed Cincinnati five points and missed out on three more.

The Owls have been, at best, inconsistent on special teams this season. They do lead the American in kickoff coverage and are tied for 10th nationally with three blocked kicks – two field goals and one PAT.

But two special teams blunders nearly cost Temple the Maryland game and forced the Owls’ defense to respond with goal-line stands, and a bad punt snap the following week at Buffalo gave way to a Bulls touchdown that sent them ahead in a game Temple lost, 38-22.

Last season, the Owls tallied five blocked kicks and six special teams touchdowns, and they also led the conference in punt and kickoff returns. This season, Temple is eighth in the American in kickoff returns with an 18.9 yards-per-return average and second-to-last in punt return average at just 5.2 yards per return. The return units, led largely by Isaiah Wright once again, have not produced a kickoff or punt return touchdown.

The Owls have actually not yielded a single yard on a punt return since the ECU game back on Thursday, Oct. 3.

Carey retained Ed Foley, who coached the Owls’ tight ends and special teams last season, when he took the Temple job last January. Foley coached special teams through spring ball but was eventually moved to an off-field role prior to preseason camp.

Foley eventually resigned in July and joined former Temple coach Matt Rhule’s staff at Baylor, where Foley is now listed as an associate AD for football services.

Carey told reporters back in July at the American Athletic Conference’s media day in Newport that he had moved Foley off the field so he could put Tyler Yelk in an on-field role, where he now coaches the team’s outside linebackers, to give the team another defensive coach and balance out a staff he felt was a bit offense heavy. Carey said he had hoped Foley would remain and that the veteran assistant “was still going to be very involved in special teams.”

Carey said he would “divvy it up” when it came to assigning coaching responsibilities for special teams. Brett Diersen is the staff’s associate special teams coordinator, and Dan Sabock is a defensive and special teams analyst. Diersen came to Temple from SMU but worked previously with Carey at Northern Illinois, and Sabock worked on Carey’s NIU staff the past two seasons.

On Tuesday, Carey was asked if looking back he would have one coach assigned to that role again instead of dividing the responsibilities.

“Yeah, I don’t think that the way I aligned the staff has anything to do with the execution that we’ve had on the field,” Carey said. “And so, if that is what you’re inferring, I wouldn’t agree with that at all, because I’ve done it this way for a long time, and this is more the norm than the odd.

“So we had a bad snap the other night (at Cincinnati.) We had a blocked kick that they returned, and those are execution issues that we need to coach better and to get better at and certainly can and didn’t do a good enough job coaching that in the game.”

What’s wrong with Wright?

Along the lines of special teams, senior Isaiah Wright has not come close to the production he flashed last season, when he was one of just three players nationally to return a kickoff and a punt for a touchdown. He led the nation with two punt return touchdowns, and his 13.1 yards-per-return average on punts led the American and ranked him seventh nationally in that category.

As previously mentioned, Temple has yielded 0 yards on punt returns since the ECU game, and Carey was asked Tuesday about how the staff can get Wright going in the return game.

“Yeah, that’s been a disappointment,” Carey said, “because we’ve certainly had some seams there. And then when we’ve hit it, haven’t had seams there. And that’s been certainly a disappointment this year. I don’t feel like we’ve given him as good an opportunity as we can. Some of that’s with rule changes, right? Everyone’s feeling their way through the new rule changes with wedge blocks and things like that, and I’m not going to use that as an excuse. We’ve all adjusted now. But certainly that’s been a disappointment, and that’s not something we’re stopping to work at. We continue to work at that each week.”

Although Wright has tied a career-best mark with 46 receptions this season and set a career high with five receiving touchdowns, the Hartford, Connecticut native has seen his production slip over the past five games, catching just nine passes for 64 yards and no touchdowns in that span. He didn’t register a single snap on offense at USF.

Wright was targeted seven times last Saturday at Cincinnati and caught three passes for 12 yards while dropping another. He had two drops on a day when Temple had seven total in a blowout loss at SMU back on Oct. 19.

Carey was asked if Wright, who declined to speak with reporters Tuesday, was injured or banged up and if that had anything to do with his recent lack of production or role in the offense.

“I don’t know that he’s any more banged up than other people,” Carey said. “Certainly no one’s 100 percent this time of year. So I wouldn’t say he’s 100 percent in any way, shape or form. But I think between probably the wear and tear of the season – because he has more catches and more yards than he’s ever had in a single season in his career here – and the wear and the tear and the competition (at the receiver position) and then some of the execution things, I think that’s probably where we’re at.

“I don’t like to overcomplicate things in any, way shape or form. You look at what’s on film, on practice film. How can we get better? How can we help him? You put it all together and I think this is where we’re at.”

While Wright’s production has dropped, Jadan Blue’s has flourished. The redshirt-sophomore now owns the program record for most receptions in a season with 80 and is now just 77 yards away from becoming the first player in program history to get 1,000 yards receiving in a season.

Over the last three weeks, Blue has caught 36 passes for 372 yards and a touchdown.

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