Temple's 28-24 loss to UConn a blown opportunity for the Owls

It was always going to be a transitional season for this Temple football team. A new head coach, a mostly-new staff and losing some talented players to the NFL ultimately leaves some bumps along the road.

But make no mistake about it: with a chance to get some momentum going in a quest to get bowl-eligible, Temple’s 28-24 setback to UConn Saturday afternoon before a homecoming crowd of 29,849 fans at Lincoln Financial Field was a bad loss to a bad football team, regardless of who’s new and who’s not.

The Owls, who lost to the Huskies (2-4) for the first time since 2013, fell to 3-4 overall and 1-3 in the American Athletic Conference. Just past the halfway mark of the season, Temple needs three more wins to be bowl-eligible, and the three most winnable games are all on the road: at Army next week, at Cincinnati Nov. 10 and at Tulsa in the regular-season finale Nov. 25.

That’s not to say the Owls couldn’t beat Navy at home Nov. 2 or upset UCF Nov. 18. Anything can happen, of course.

But either way, something is amiss, and first-year head coach Geoff Collins, his staff and his players have to put their finger on it in a hurry, especially after losing to a team whose head coach was doubting his defensive personnel after UConn surrendered 70 points a week ago.

“There’s obviously some hurt kids in there,” Collins said, referencing Temple’s locker room during his postgame press conference. “We want to make sure we put our arm around them. Those kids fought.”

Fighting doesn’t do anything for the win column, especially when you lose to a team with one of the worst defenses in the nation, one that was allowing 43.6 points per game and ranked dead last in the country in passing defense heading into Saturday.

Sure, Temple got its yards in the passing game. Redshirt-sophomore quarterback Logan Marchi threw for a career-high 356 yards and a touchdown, a 9-yard scoring toss to Isaiah Wright that helped get the Owls within 21-14 with a little less than eight minutes to go in the third quarter.

But with no running back gaining more than 33 yards on the ground, Marchi had to throw it 54 times to get those numbers, and this team simply isn’t designed to throw the ball that often if it wants to win. Marchi likely knows it, and offensive coordinator Dave Patenaude said as much after the game.

A lot went wrong in this loss, and a lot of it was the same stuff that’s haunted the Owls all season.

Marchi, despite his lofty numbers, threw a costly interception to UConn’s Tyler Coyle that he returned 34 yards for a touchdown that lifted the Huskies to a 28-14 lead with 6:37 left in the third quarter. This was less than two minutes after that Marchi-to-Wright connection and just after the Owls had forced the Huskies into a three-and-out.

On the very next play after the punt and change of possession, Marchi tossed an ill-advised pass across the field that he said got deflected. A look at the replay shows it may have been touched, but it wasn’t much of anything that seemed to affect the trajectory of the throw.

“We had an out-breaking route,” Marchi explained. “On the throw, the ball got tipped at the line, so it ended up floating a little more than we would have liked. And with the tip, it kind of fell short and the guy made a play.”

Consider this: Temple lost Saturday despite getting 28 first downs, the second-highest total by an Owls team in the last 20 seasons. But there were a lot of tentacles to this loss, far too much that made that first-down stat an afterthought.

The obvious one that sticks out like a sore thumb is the 12 penalties for 117 yards. Collins said that’s on him. More on that later.

And although Marchi’s pick-six cost the team dearly, so did a number of dropped passes. Wright dropped one in the end zone that would have tied the game a little more than four minutes into the fourth quarter.

When Wright was asked if it was a lack of attention that’s leading to the drops, the sophomore seemed to disagree with that notion.

“I can’t really answer that question,” Wright said, “because I think we have the attention. It’s just sometimes that might happen, and we’ve just got to keep playing. That’s all we can really do. Next question.”

OK. So the next question was about the pass Wright dropped in the end zone that would have put Temple in position to tie the game at 28-28. Instead, Aaron Boumerhi settled for a 21-yard chip shot that closed the gap to what ultimately became the final score, 28-24, with 11:14 to go.

“I couldn’t see it at first and then it came,” Wright said. “But it’s still a ball I should have caught, so that one was on me.”

Talk to a handful of players on the team, and they’ll tell you the coaching change that came with Matt Rhule leaving for Baylor and Collins coming in with a new staff shouldn’t be an excuse. Despite losing players like Phillip Walker, Dion Dawkins and Jahad Thomas to the NFL, there’s still too much talent on the roster for the offense to still be searching for an identity.

“Yes, we do feel that way,” Wright said, “but it’s on us for us to start fast, and that’s what we’ve been working on and that’s what we’re going to continue to work on.”

Speaking of starting fast, junior running back Ryquell Armstead talked about wanting to go with a faster tempo as a possible remedy to what could help cure an offense that’s still looking for an identity. The South Jersey native, who scored 14 touchdowns last season, has been battling an injury to a toe on his left foot, one he sustained at Notre Dame in the season opener.

After not practicing all week, Armstead scored his first touchdown of the season, a 10-yard run that came just five seconds into the fourth quarter and helped closed the gap to 28-21.

“Throughout the week, my toe just felt great, and I knew I was going to play in this game,” Armstead, who finished with 31 yards on nine carries, said. “It was just a matter of time.”

But what is the difference? Why has the offense struggled to find an identity?

“We’ve got to go back, we’ve got to look at the film,” Armstead said. “I’m not going to blame the coaches for anything. I’m not going to blame us for anything. I believe in my mind that we’ve got to go faster and we’ve got to stay fast, in terms of tempo. In the third quarter, I was clicking. There were a lot of D-linemen with their hands on their hips. We’ve just got to stay fast and keep going like that.”

David Hood, who got the start at tailback, had 29 yards on six carries. He made more of an impact in the passing game, where he caught eight balls for 91 yards. That’s six more than last year’s leading receiver, Ventell Bryant, who caught just two balls for 20 yards and still looks nothing like the player he was last season.

Temple’s receiving corps was supposed to be the strength of the team coming into the season, but it’s been inconsistent at best. Wright had six catches for 50 yards and the touchdown Saturday, but his drop hurt the team. Adonis Jennings caught five passes for 52 yards and Keith Kirkwood caught four balls for 46 yards, but he dropped a pass on fourth-and-7 from the UConn 24 that would have gone for first-down yardage.

Would he have come down in bounds? Hard to say, but it’s a pass that could have and should have been caught.

Patenaude said UConn came in with a “porous” defense. The drops seemed to have him irked after the game.

“I don’t know. You guys tell me. They dropped a lot of balls out there,” Patenaude said. “You’re never going to win a game if you have six or seven drops in one game. We had a couple missed targets, a bunch of drops. … The reason David got a bunch of those throws is Logan did a good job of checking the ball down.”

Temple decided to go for it twice on fourth down Saturday and came up empty both times. Six points on what could have been a couple of made field goals obviously would have helped.

The first failed fourth-down conversion came when Wright got stopped for no gain on fourth-and-1 from the UConn 12 late in the third quarter.

“We practiced that play for the last three weeks,” Patenaude said. “It’s looked good in practice. It’s a makeable short-yardage play. It was one of the plays that we had scripted all week, and I’d have to watch the tape to tell you exactly what happened.”

The second failed fourth-down try was the pass Kirkwood dropped. Collins, Patenaude said, ultimately made the decision to go for it there.

As for the penalties, Collins, as previously mentioned, blamed himself. The players accepted blame, too. Patenaude doesn’t think it comes from a lack of discipline, though.

“I don’t think that there’s a lack of discipline,” said Patenaude, who joined Collins staff after a stint as the offensive coordinator at Coastal Carolina. “There’s never going to be a lack of discipline in a Geoff Collins program. These are the things that happen when you have a younger group of guys that are out there. A lot of them are doing this for the first time.”

But not really.

On a 15-play, 88-yard scoring drive that tied the game at 7-7 and took almost six minutes off the clock, UConn benefitted from two facemask penalties that gave the Huskies 30 of those 88 yards. The culprits on the drive were cornerbacks Artrel Foster and Mike Jones. Both are redshirt seniors.

At least half of Temple's 12 penalties Saturday were committed by redshirt juniors or redshirt seniors, players who have spent at least four years playing college football.

Temple’s defense held UConn quarterback Bryant Shirreffs to pedestrian numbers yardage-wise at 18 of 28 for 105 yards, and Delvon Randall picked him off in the first quarter. But he did toss three touchdown passes, and his 49-yard run right up the gut late in the fourth quarter on a series that ultimately ended in a missed field goal helped the Huskies chew up more clock.

So where does Temple go from here after losing a game against a very beatable team?

The Owls have options. That’s the thing. Despite the transition of a coaching change, this isn’t a roster bereft of talent, and the players know it.

Armstead, despite feeling healthier than he has in previous weeks, just knows he’s sick of losing and doesn’t want to be a sub-.500 team.

“I guess it’s a good feeling to get the run game going,” Armstead said, “but I want to win games. I don’t know what you want me to say here. I want to win games. I couldn’t care less about scoring. I don’t care if Hood scores. I don’t care if Logan throws a touchdown pass. We lost by four points and that’s what hurt most.”

EXTRA POINTS: In addition to the dropped passes, a fumble by slot receiver Brodrick Yancy was another setback for a receiving corps that had a tough day Saturday. On the very first play of a series that started at the 7:37 mark of the second quarter, Yancy got hit by UConn's Jordan Swann, and Terry Marshe recovered for UConn and returned it 35 yards to the Temple 9-yard line. Two plays later, Hergy Mayala caught a 6-yard touchdown pass, and the PAT gave UConn a 14-7 lead. ... Redshirt sophomore linebacker Chapelle Russell, who’s still less than a year removed from a torn ACL that ended his season last November, led Temple with 12 total tackles and split a sack with defensive end Jacob Martin. Fellow linebacker Shaun Bradley, who also gained seven yards on two carries as a running back, collected seven tackles. Linebacker Sam Franklin had five tackles, including three for a loss, and a sack that was initially ruled to have produced a fumble, but the play was reversed when replays showed that UConn quarterback Bryant Shirreffs was down before he lost the ball. … Left tackle Leon Johnson left the game with an injury, and Geoff Collins said Johnson will have x-rays to determine the extent of what appeared to be a leg injury. Jaelin Robinson initially replaced Johnson at left tackle, but James McHale ultimately played most of the game there in Johnson's absence. ... Despite some of the mistakes he’s made, including taking a 24-yard sack against Houston, throwing a red-zone interception at East Carolina and throwing a pick-six Saturday, Logan Marchi hasn’t been in danger of being pulled from the game, offensive coordinator Dave Patenaude said. Is it a matter of Marchi simply being far better than backup Frank Nutile? “No, I wouldn’t say he’s head and shoulders,” Patenaude replied. “I think every week you go in and you say, who gives you the best opportunity to play? That’s two weeks in a row we threw for over 300 yards, so he’s obviously doing some good things. Like I said over and over again, we’ve got to do a good job of protecting. I thought he did a really good job of sliding on protections. He protected himself really well. He’s got to be able to throw on target. You’re going to miss a few targets. He tried to get one over a linebacker’s head on that pick six. Not a great deal there. But again, he also threw for (356) yards, so he did some good things.” … Patenaude said the team will pursue a redshirt for true freshman quarterback Todd Centeio, who has appeared briefly in two games this season.