Temple Preview

Basketball season gets back onto the rails started Monday night, as Bowling Green heads to Philly to play the Temple Owls in McGonigle Hall, which is significant primarily because it is not their main home floor. They are making it into a throw-back night, and will wear their uniforms from the 1980s, which is kind of cool.

McGonigle Hall is a venerable venue, as we can see here (set up for volleyball.  Use your imagination).

It kinda reminds me of, well, OUR arena, the one we play in all the time.

Philly has a huge tradition of college basketball, and playing here is an excellent opportunity to live part of that history.

When I heard it was a throwback game, I thought they might play with those really narrow lanes and oval wooden backboards, but I'm guessing not.

Temple is the best team we are playing this season.  They are 9-2 to date, and have played the eighth toughest schedule in D1 basketball.  Their losses are to Georgetown and St. Johns (at the Palestra), and their wins include a huge win against Villanova, along with Siena, Virginia Tech and Seton Hall.

As part of their deal to play MAC football, they schedule a number of MAC teams, and have beaten Ball State, WMU, and Miami already.  And, they have already qualified for a bye in the MAC tournament.

I kid.

Offensively, if you look at their whole season, they are at about 1 point per possession, which is pretty average.  However, they did get over 1.1 points per possession against all three of the MAC teams they have played.  They only shoot in the low 40s, and they don't try a ton of 3s, so that low % is coming on a shot mix that is a little richer in 2FGs.  They are a good but not great rebounding team.

Remember, however, that those stats are aggregate stats that were generated against a really rough schedule.

Keeping remembering it when you look at their defensive stats.  This is simply a dominating defensive team.  Opponents are shooting 37% against them.  Opponents are making only 23.9% of their 3FGs against Temple, the second best % in the country.  The allow only 55 points per game (3rd in country, albeit against a very slow tempo).  Even tempo-adjusted, they have one of the top 20 defenses in the country.

Getting good shots against these guys is really hard.

In that sense, they present a really tough matchup for us.  We have a hard time getting good shots normally, and we are going to have to figure out a way to compete with this team.

Guard Ryan Brooks is their leading scorer at 15 PPG, with Juan Fernandez scoring 13.5 (he is from Argentina).  They are both 6'4" and with that size could present some matchup issues for our guards.

In the middle, they have 6'9" LaVoy Allen, who is averaging  double-double.  There are not too many bad players who AVERAGE a double-double.  He is in the top 30 in the NCAA in rebounds and offensive rebounds.

After those three guys, their next highest scorer averages 4 points a game, so they are reliant on those three guys to score.

They have eight players averaging 10 minutes a game, so that's a pretty decent rotation.

All in all, as I said, this is the best team we have played or will play this year, and they are much better than the team that came into Anderson last year.  BG will need to play its best game of the year to compete.  While it looks unlikely on paper, upsets like this happen every week in college basketball.