Temple Football's Success Shows How Quickly Perceptions Can Change

By Mike Gibson
Temple football, South Florida football,
Howard Smith-USA TODAY Sports

In what goes around comes around department, Temple football is coming around this weekend and what the Owls can do will be the focus of football activity at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium.

While there, a current member of the BOT at the University of South Florida, John Ramil, might want to stop by and offer an apology for what he wrote after the last time the two teams met, Oct. 6, 2012. Temple won that game, 37-28, and Ramil fired off an email to President Judy Genshaft where he said losing to Temple was “disgusting and unacceptable.” He was BOT chairman then; he’s no longer in that position now, but still resides on the board.

If the tone of the letter sounded similar to Temple fans, it was pretty much the reaction of the entire MAC football conference on every opposing message board after each first loss to Temple and that conference eventually got used to it. The Owls did well enough on the field, in the stands and with TV ratings to earn an invitation to the then Big East football conference. The holdovers from that conference are now the AAC, one of only two conferences with four teams in the top 25. Now, pretty much everyone — with the exception of No. 4 Notre Dame — is getting used to losing to Temple. A Temple win on Saturday night (7 p.m., CBS Sports Network) would make the Owls the first team in AAC history to clinch a division title, the AAC East. This is the first year the AAC went to a divisional championship format, with the East winner facing the West winner at the site of the team with the best conference record.

Ramil’s knee-jerk response after the 2012 game was a reminder of how things change in college sports and how respect for an opponent matters. The perceptions of the two programs are a little different than they were in 2012, and an apology to the Owls for disrespecting their program probably would be the appropriate response now.

While Temple would no doubt appreciate one, no one in the Owls’ traveling party is holding their breath.

Mike Gibson is a featured writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @papreps , “Like” him on Facebook or add him to your network on Google.

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