Temple gets back to winning ways with victory over Houston

ON WEDNESDAY, Fran Dunphy said his Temple team could lose to anybody.

For a while last night at the Liacouras Center, the Owls tried to prove him right.

Coming off back-to-back road losses at SMU and Tulsa, the top two teams in the American Athetlic Conference, Temple hosted a Houston team that had won twice since December. And only once in the AAC. That was by two points. Neither was on the road.

Yet for the fourth straight game, and seventh time in eight, the Cougars led at the half. With 12 minutes to go, it was tied. Then the Owls scored the next 11, and things were finally back to normal. The final was 66-54. It won't help Temple's RPI. But sometimes it's not so much about the who or the how as the bottom line. Especially when you hadn't won in almost 2 weeks.

At this point, the Owls (20-9, 11-5 AAC), who reached 20 wins for the seventh time in Dunphy's nine seasons, are in the NCAA Tournament. So they mostly need to not lose to anybody they're not supposed to lose to. Now they'll get a week off before going to East Carolina (12-16, 5-10) on Thursday. They beat ECU by 13 here on Valentine's Day. On March 7, they will close the regular season against Connecticut (16-11, 9-6). They won in New England in their AAC opener on New Year's Eve, in overtime.

"No question, this was very, very important," Dunphy said. "We need to win games. It's crunch time now. We need to win."

The Cougars (9-18, 1-14) have lost six straight under first-year coach Kelvin Sampson. Remember him?

Houston led, 34-29, at the break. The Cougars, who shoot 31 percent from the arc, had made five threes. They didn't make another until the final minute. And it took them 7 minutes to get their first field goal of the second half.

The Owls came out after intermission with a smaller lineup, with sixth man Josh Brown inserted as an extra perimeter player. It worked.

"We made a couple of adjustments," Dunphy said. "We didn't do a good job of closing out on their shooters. That was the key. It was just a feeling. [Brown's] a guy I have a lot of confidence in. He's certainly a sixth starter, in my mind."

It was Brown who made the winning last-second jumper in a big win early this month at Memphis. This time, he played the entire second half, and finished with five points and three assists, almost all of that in the second half, in 28 minutes. And a number of plays that don't make it onto the stat sheet.

Quenton DeCosey, who hadn't scored in double digits in five of his previous six games, had 12 of his 16 after the break. And nine rebounds, which tied a career high. Jaylen Bond had 15, including a couple of highlight dunks, and nine boards. Will Cummings, the only Owl to score in double figures in either of the last two games, had 14 to go with seven assists and three steals, one of which led to a Bond slam. But not before Cummings made not one but two spin moves to break free near midcourt. And Jesse Morgan had all 10 of his in the first half, when Temple was looking to get anything going. He played 9 minutes in the second half, when Dunphy said he didn't look as "alert" as he needed to be.

"If you're not on top of your game, we're going to put someone else in," he said. "We have some good subs.

"They were playing loose and free. We had to do something to make them a little more uncomfortable . . . When you're making shots [55.2 percent in the second half], it makes you look like you know what you're doing. Will and Jaylen have been sort of our standard-bearers. We have to balance it out. When we share the ball, we're OK."

When asked about getting to 20 wins, Dunphy said it just means he's had some pretty good players.

DeCosey put it another way.

"It means a lot," he insisted. "Last year [9-22] was rough."

That is the word that would have described not taking care of business in this spot.

"I've had a rough stretch of games coming in," said DeCosey, who shot 6-for-10. "My confidence is always high. But once a shot or two doesn't go down, my confidence goes down. I might force a couple of plays. I tried not to focus on that tonight. I tried to play patiently, find other guys."

He also was able to get to the rim.

"The opportunity presented itself," he said. "We just have to stay sharp, play hard and together as a team. The team has to stay confident."

So how was practice after that road trip?

"It was very intense," Bond acknowledged. "We worked hard. We had to get a win."

In part because you don't want to take a three-game losing streak into March, and in part because the alternative could have seriously damaged their resumé.

Maybe the selection committee wasn't paying attention to too many of the details.