Temple routs USF, 75-47, clinches No. 4 seed in AAC Tournament
Three days after suffering its most lopsided loss of the season, Temple rebounded at home Sunday afternoon with a 75-47 win over USF on Senior Day that clinched the Owls a first-round bye in this week’s American Athletic Conference.
Temple, which finished the regular season with a 17-11 overall record and a 10-7 mark in conference play, locked down the No. 4 seed in the AAC tournament and will play fifth-seeded Tulane Friday at 3 p.m. at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas.
After losing at No. 14 Houston by 38 points Thursday night, Temple took out its frustrations on one of the American’s worst teams in USF (8-22, 3-15), albeit one that beat the Owls 52-49 back on Feb. 7 in Tampa. Damian Dunn’s game-high 27 points and career-high nine rebounds led the way for Temple, which had the luxury of getting walk-ons Colin Daly and Ryan Sayers into the game with a few minutes still left on the clock. Daly, one of five seniors honored before the game, ended up with a career-best seven points and drained both of his three-pointers.
Turning point
After taking an 11-point lead into halftime, Temple used a 13-0 run to take control of the game and open up a 61-35 lead. Dunn had seven of those 13 points during the run, and Jahlil White (nine points, seven rebounds, three assists in 25 minutes) hit a three during that stretch, as did Tai Strickland.
“I thought this was one of our best games of sharing the ball for 40 minutes,” third-year head coach Aaron McKie said in comparing Sunday’s rout to getting routed at Houston Thursday night. “The moment that the ball stuck for us (Thursday night), it just looked like we were fractured out there on the offensive side, and they have to understand that. That’s a fun way to play the game of basketball, when you can share it and you keep the ball moving and hopping, and it opened up driving lanes for us. We got quality looks from the three-point line.
“So that’s the way you want to play basketball. It’s taken us so long during the course of the year, but timing is everything.”
Dunn, who shot 8 of 13 from the floor and 9 of 10 from the free-throw line, agreed.
“I think we were able to share it more and more efficiently the whole 40 (minutes),” Dunn said. “That’s something we really talked about and keyed in on since the Houston game, and it’s something we talked about being better at. So that was just our game plan, to execute, just sharing (the ball) with each other. We made plays for each other.”
Polls be damned
Temple was predicted to finish eighth in the American Athletic Conference in a preseason poll of the league’s head coaches.
Now that the Owls finished the regular season with 17 wins and fourth in the league’s standings, Dunn was asked after the game about how it felt to surpass those expectations.
“Coming into it, we really didn’t pay too much attention to it,” the redshirt-freshman guard said. “At the end of the day, everybody has to put in the work just like we do in the summer and the regular season. So we really didn’t look at it too differently, other than we’ve got to compete just like they do, and so on. At the end of the day, the games and wins speak for themselves. We’re just so keyed in and locked in on us and our future as a team.”
McKie offered a more animated response to that question.
“And whose opinion was that? Because it wasn’t ours in that locker room,” McKie said. “I don't pay any attention to what people … nothing against you guys (in the media). And I know you’ve got a job to do. But I've been defying the odds all my life, and it's the same mindset that I try to give my kids. This is the result of one person's opinion versus yours in spite of, and that's life. And that's what I try to teach him. We’re fighters. We’ve got to get out and we’ve got to fight every day. We're not worrying about those statistics.
“(Tulane head coach) Ron (Hunter) and I were laughing about it. Not laughing about it, but just saying, ‘Hey, man, I said great job. You’re doing a wonderful job,’ and he said the same thing to me. He was like, ‘Think about what they had us (Tulane was predicted to finish 10th in the same preseason media poll.) And we would be on those conference calls and will be on those conference calls, and they would be talking about the seedings and everything. And in our mind, we were saying, ‘We'll show ‘em. We’ll show them better than we can tell them.’ And I’m not saying that in an arrogant way. But that's the confidence that I like to give my players and my kids. Now, whether or not we do it is one thing. But to have that mindset, we feel like we can go out and play against anybody.”
When a reporter reminded McKie that it was a coaches’ poll and not a media poll, McKie smiled and said, “Whoever. It don’t matter. It could be my wife and her girlfriends. It don’t matter. We’ve got our own thoughts on where we think we can be at. We do the analytics. We watch teams, and we see who’s going and who’s coming, and we still think we can match up. And we saw things differently.
“So I'm big on giving my guys confidence and just making sure I hold them accountable to that, to our goals that we have for the year. We keep that amongst us. But we have our goals and quite honestly, I thought we fell a hair short of our goal. But we're here now. We're closing the chapter on this regular season, and then we have a new season right in front of us.”
Forrester returns to the floor
Forward Jake Forrester, one of five Temple players honored before the game on Senior Day, took the floor Sunday for the first time since the Owls’ Jan. 12 road game at Tulsa. Forrester had previously announced on social media last month that he was taking some time away from basketball to prioritize his mental health and missed the next 12 games after Temple beat Tulsa back in January.
Forrester checked in at the 16:30 mark of the first half and finished with five points and two rebounds in 14 minutes. He completed a three-point play almost three minutes into the second half to Temple ahead by 12 at 42-30.
It’s possible the 6-foot-9, 225-pound forward could play more in this week’s conference tournament
“Well, we got to get Jake caught back up,” McKie said. “We’ve got to get him back in game form, conditioning. So this was a step. So next practice would be another step, and then we just will go from there. He understands everything we're doing schematically on the defensive side, and on the offensive side. So he understands all of those things. It's just, you can't replicate the game. You can get on a treadmill all you want. You can run 10 miles all you want, but it's nothing like the game where you’re running north and south, and you’re lateral, you know, east and west, all those different things, and you're getting hit. So we’ve just got to get him back in game shape.”
“We love to see him out there having fun,” Dunn said of Forrester, who is averaging 5.7 points and 4.0 rebounds in 13 games this season. “I think that was the biggest thing for us, his first day back out there with us on senior night. And a guy like that, as much time as he's missed with the situation and everything, we just love to see him out there and see him smiling on senior night and his last time playing at (the) Liacouras (Center.) So we were able to be there for him as his brothers and as a team, and we celebrated them and the rest of the seniors in the locker room, so it was definitely fun for us.”
Putbacks
Sam Hines Jr. led USF with 12 points as the only Bulls player to score in double figures. … Aaron McKie gave freshman center Emmanuel Okpomo his second consecutive start, and the Wake Forest transfer contributed four points in a little more than 10 minutes. Freshman forward Zach Hicks was the only other Temple player to reach double-figure scoring. The Camden Catholic High School product shot 4 of 9 from the floor, all from beyond the arc, in adding 12 points to go with seven rebounds. … Temple’s bench outscored USF’s by 31-9, and the Owls outrebounded the Bulls, 46-33.