Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Owls step into the waters as college hoops season gets in full swing

COLLEGE basketball's opening weekend featured games in such exotic places as an aircraft carrier outside San Diego, a giant airplane hangar in Germany, and Brooklyn, N.Y. Kent, Ohio, really does not qualify as exotic, but after 123 games on Friday, 51 Saturday, 42 Sunday and 60 Monday, Temple will finally start its season at Kent State on Tuesday, as part of the ESPN hoops marathon, 11 games in 24 hours.

Fran Dunphy watches his team during a practice session. (David Swanson/Staff Photographer)
Fran Dunphy watches his team during a practice session. (David Swanson/Staff Photographer)Read more

COLLEGE basketball's opening weekend featured games in such exotic places as an aircraft carrier outside San Diego, a giant airplane hangar in Germany, and Brooklyn, N.Y. Kent, Ohio, really does not qualify as exotic, but after 123 games on Friday, 51 Saturday, 42 Sunday and 60 Monday, Temple will finally start its season at Kent State on Tuesday, as part of the ESPN hoops marathon, 11 games in 24 hours.

If you got up real early, maybe you saw Stony Brook at Rider (6 a.m.) before reading this story. Who won?

And make sure you check out the box score from the midnight opener - West Virginia at Gonzaga. WVU coach Bob Huggins was so angry after his team got crushed, 77-54, by Gonzaga in an NCAA game last March in Pittsburgh that he told his staff to schedule the opener with Gonzaga.

Huggins, whose Cincinnati, Kansas State and WVU teams have made 19 of the last 20 NCAA Tournaments, called his 2011-12 group "the worst defensive team I've ever had in 30 years."

"Hugs" is his sport's ultimate risk-taker if, as he says, the talent outweighs the problem. The ultimate test case will be Aaric Murray, the very definition of a talented problem. How did the La Salle transfer do in his first game for West Virginia?

Now that you are awake, Harvard-Massachusetts is right before Temple-Kent (noon). Butler-Xavier follows the Owls in the 24 hours of hoops.

ESPN's feature games come Tuesday night, a doubleheader in Atlanta, the site of the 2013 Final Four. It's Michigan State-Kansas, followed by Duke-Kentucky.

Is any coach more ambitious than the Spartans' Tom Izzo? Michigan State was at Ramstein Air Base to play (and lose to) Connecticut in that hangar game on Friday. Now, the Spartans are in Atlanta. There are road trips and then there are Michigan State road trips.

You can't draw any conclusions from these early games, but you can get a snapshot. Watching teams evolve over the 4-month regular season is an annual exercise that often yields clues about what teams are peaking at the right time. That really was not an issue last season. Kentucky was the best team in November, April and every month in between.

Anybody expecting the Wildcats to be as good again this season really did not understand just how good the 2012 champs were last season. They were, in many ways, a perfect blend of skills that was beautifully coached and centered on Anthony Davis, a once-in-a-generation talent. Also remember they had upperclassmen who had played major roles in major games. This UK team does not have that.

Indiana is the preseason No. 1. No team is more offensively skilled than the Hoosiers.

I think second-ranked Louisville is the best team. No team played better defense last season than the Cardinals. Now, almost all of those players are back. And they actually have a few players who can make a jump shot. I always thought Rick Pitino would be the first coach to win a national championship at two schools. This looks like the season.

Temple has a few more questions than in recent seasons. Two seasons removed from the program rock represented by Lavoy Allen and one season removed from the final games of Ramone Moore, Juan Fernandez and Micheal Eric, Fran Dunphy's team will look a bit different.

Kent, which just beat Drexel in overtime on Friday, is first up. So we will all get an early read on the Owls, who have done just about everything in the Dunphy era - except have a deep NCAA run.

Temple was a double-OT loss against San Diego State in 2011 from making that run. Things were set up perfectly for the Owls last season, and then they played a game so poorly against South Florida, it was almost unrecognizable as Temple basketball.

The Owls can't win NCAA games in November. They can just set the table for a sixth consecutive appearance. Winning at Kent would be a nice start, but these Owls will have so many opportunities at quality wins (Duke, Syracuse, Kansas, VCU, Butler, Saint Louis, Big 5 games) that one game won't change anything.

Coaching is never an issue on North Broad, but there are questions surrounding some of the players. Will Khalif Wyatt be a mature scoring machine who has gotten beyond some knucklehead tendencies? Is Scootie Randall all the way back to the form of 2011 when he was blowing up before getting hurt? Who will guard the basket as Allen and then Eric did? Will the point-guard play, so steady with Fernandez, be of that caliber? How good will transfers Dalton Pepper and Jake O'Brien be? Are some of the freshmen ready to help now?

If you are reading this early in the day, check out the Owls. If you are reading this late in the day, let me know how Temple did. Actually, that won't be necessary. You know that I was watching.

E-mail: jerardd@phillynews.com