After an anticlimactic Sunday which saw Washington State fans alternate between tweeting at the ESPN College GameDay handle and constantly refreshing the College GameDay Twitter page, ESPN offered a temporary reprieve Sunday night when it spread the word that no site decision would be made on College GameDay until Monday.
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Temple’s defensive line anchor, Matt Ioannidis, said the Owls already “kind of knew” ESPN was coming to Temple, so when the announcement came Monday it wasn’t a shock. I mean that Temple is just really good at football. This year, behind a staunch defense that ranks No. 6 in Football Outsiders’ S&P+, Temple is 7-0 and is part of the AP top 25 for the first time since 1979.
Ioannidis said the Owls aren’t letting the national attention get to them and they’re sticking to what the coaching staff is preaching to them. We’re trying to go out there and show everybody what we can do. “They have earned everything that they have gotten this year as a football team”. It is also the first time that Notre Dame is traveling to Philadelphia to play Temple and the first time the Owls have been featured on GameDay.
Week after week, this team has shocked college football by remaining undefeated well beyond the amount of games anyone expected.
Although it’s great to see guys have a breakout senior season, you often have to wonder why that is. “We got a job that we got to do and we’re going to come out here and take care of business”. “So I think any time you play a true freshman, you have high hopes that in a couple years, he’s going to be a potentially game-breaking player for you, or you wouldn’t play him as a true freshman”. It is, so far as we can tell, the only time a power conference has booted a team from its league. “We don’t pretend we’re not playing Notre Dame”, Rhule said. We don’t pretend we’re not playing Notre Dame. “A lot of our kids played in that game, and we played a few of their best players”. Notre Dame has played before 652 sellouts in 931 total games (.700) since 1930.
This year, Rhule wants his team to embrace the moment and focus on what’s next.
An answer to that question will come this weekend, but it will not come without the Owls’ best effort. If that sounded familiar to Philadelphia fans, it was something similar to what his more famous father, Billy Packer, said about another magical run by another then unbeaten Philadelphia college team over a decade ago when he said St. Joseph’s did not deserve its NCAA No. 1 seed in basketball.
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“You can’t imagine the enormity of what Temple alums feel”, Chodoff said. He has faith in me and believed in me, and I just started working my butt off ever since he said that to me.
