Temple's AAC task nearly incalculable

Fran Dunphy caught himself. Speaking after Temple's last home game about the top-end strength of the American Athletic Conference, the Owls coach said that hopefully the AAC would get five NCAA bids.

Six bids, Dunphy amended.

The top five are shoo-ins to make it as at-large selections if they don't win the AAC tournament. Obviously, 9-21 Temple has to win the thing to hear its name on Selection Sunday, to make it six.

Dunphy told his team to pack for four days. But what are the odds of Temple winning four straight, starting Wednesday night at 9:30 p.m. against Central Florida at the FedEx Forum in Memphis?

Winning against UCF, then running through top seed Cincinnati, and then host Memphis or Connecticut, with Louisville, the top nationally ranked team in the league, possibly as a final hurdle?

It's rare that a league features two such distinct divisions as the AAC this season. While five schools are nationally ranked (No. 5 Louisville, No. 13 Cincinnati, No. 19 Memphis, No. 21 UConn and No. 25 SMU) the Owls share servant quarters with South Florida, Central Florida, Rutgers and Houston.

When the five at the bottom faced the five at the top this season, their combined record was 4-46. (Two of those were by top-of-the-bottom Houston, one by Temple, a home win over SMU.) On the road, the mark was a pristine 0-25. Temple got closest with an overtime loss at Memphis.

In figuring odds, let's split the difference for a neutral court (ignoring such things as incentive and Memphis owning home court advantage) and suggest the have-nots could beat the haves 2 out of 25 games, an 8 percent chance. Doing it three times through the quarters, semis and finals? My calculator has that at 0.000512.

So Temple got itself in over its head joining this league? That's simply false. If the Owls were good enough to make the NCAAs, as they had been in recent years, this would be a fantastic league for them this season, with all sorts of opportunities for quality wins. Nobody is complaining at SMU about the competition being too rough. Larry Brown's squad lost two of those four games against the lessers, but also swept UConn and beat Cincinnati and Memphis, assuring the rejuvenated Mustangs a bid.

If Temple were still in the Atlantic 10, the Owls would still be struggling. La Salle was clearly the better team when they faced off at the Palestra, and the Explorers finished 7-9 in the A-10. You could have penciled the Owls in somewhere below that in their old league.

This season may turn out to be the high point of the AAC, with Louisville leaving for the ACC right afterward. (The AAC should be able to withstand the loss of Rutgers to the Big Ten.) But there's no reason the AAC won't continue to be strong.

If you judge a league by its top end, the AAC really is as good as anybody. In Cincinnati's Sean Kilpatrick, UConn's Shabazz Napier and Louisville's Russ Smith (all products of the Northeast), the AAC has three legitimate candidates for first-team all-American, something no other league can boast.

"For a first-year conference, it's been unbelievable, the quality of play," Cincinnati coach Mick Cronin said this week.

Brown getting SMU up to speed quickly obviously was the X-factor. Temple getting back up will be big for the league's future.

For this week, though, the Owls need their little winning streak against the directional Florida schools to continue, and their defense to be as good as it can be, which has never been very good this season.

Not the type to spin too much, Dunphy didn't try to claim that Temple's "D" had everything to do with South Florida shooting just 39.4 percent in their regular-season finale, which the Owls won on a Quenton DeCosey buzzer-beater for their only conference road win.

"I think they struggled shooting the basketball most of the season," Dunphy said of USF. "I think we did play better defensively."

The Owls had to come from 18 down to win against a team that has now lost eight straight. Opponents had shot over 50 percent in Temple's four previous games. The Owls certainly can win a game in Memphis. Stranger things have happened than Temple also stealing one against one of the big boys.

But winning four straight? Let's pull out the calculator again. If the opener is a 50-50 proposition . . . and then there's that .000512 opportunity to win three more - put it together and it equates to .00001024.

Round it down to 100,000-1 - now that would be some March Madness for the Owls.