East Carolina blows past Temple, 45-14
PHILADELPHIA — Temple wasn’t supposed to beat top-25 teams like Oklahoma and Georgia Tech due to a talent disparity. The Owls’ last-minute loss to an undefeated Navy team three weeks ago was the one that got away.
Saturday’s 45-14 loss to East Carolina before a crowd of just 13,168 fans at Lincoln Financial Field was something else altogether.
It was the first time Temple got pushed around this season in a game it had the talent to win.
“One-hundred percent,” Owls quarterback Evan Simon said after the game.
Five days ago, Temple head coach K.C. Keeler said his team talked openly about needing and wanting this game to get the Owls’ sixth win and gaining bowl eligibility for the first time since 2019.
Instead, his team responded with its most ill-prepared and poorly-executed effort of the season.
The Pirates (5-3, 3-1 American Conference) rolled up a staggering 614 yards of total offense, including 358 on the ground. An already-thin Temple secondary began the game without starting cornerback Jaylen Castleberry – who did not practice this week – and then lost another starter, Ben Osueke, during the game. Safeties Avery Powell and Dontae Pollard also went down in the loss.
With or without them across the line of scrimmage, quarterback Katin Houser and ECU’s no-huddle offense ran Temple off the field, even on a day when the Pirates committed two first-quarter turnovers. Running backs London Montgomery (14 carries, 84 yards), TJ Engleman (8 carries, 77 yards) and Marlon Gunn Jr. (10 carries, 64 yards) combined for 225 yards and two of the Pirates’ four rushing touchdowns, while wide receiver Yannick Smith led 10 ECU pass catchers with five catches for 100 yards and two touchdowns, with 67 of his receiving yards coming after the catch.
And ECU’s defense, one ranked 16th nationally in points allowed, held Temple to just 233 total yards, including 82 on the ground. The Owls were just 3-for-12 on third down, and Simon looked uncomfortable all day.
During his weekly Monday media availability, Keeler wondered if having 16 days off between games would help or hurt the Pirates.
After his team lost by 31 to them Saturday, Keeler determined the time off helped.
“I think they’re very well coached,” Keeler said in a nod to ECU head coach Blake Harrell, the team’s former defensive coordinator who won his first game as the Pirates’ interim head coach over Temple last season in the same week he got the job. “And I think during those 16 days, they obviously got fresh, but also they did a great job studying us. And, again, we had some opportunities.”
Keeler then referenced a seam-route throw that Simon put just a little too far ahead of JoJo Bermudez. Thrown better, it probably would have gone for a touchdown. Later in the game, Simon rolled to his left and had Bermudez breaking down the sideline but missed him.
Even so, those 14 missed points still would not have been enough.
Things got a little embarrassing for Temple in one third-quarter series that aptly summed up the day.
With a chance to get the ball back and down 14, Temple was flagged for an illegal substation with 12 men on the field on the punt. On the next play on fourth-and-1, everyone in the Linc could have seen a fake punt was coming – except Temple’s punt return unit.
The snap went right to ECU’s Rion Rosenborough, and the 6-foot-2, 295-pound defensive lineman rumbled 21 yards past a somehow startled Temple return unit to get more than enough yards for the first down. Four plays later, ECU converted another fourth-down attempt, this one a fourth-and-3 from the Temple 39 that saw Houser get 20 yards on a toss to Yannick Smith.
ECU could have scored on the next play on a badly busted Temple coverage, but Houser overthrew Anthony Smith. Unfazed, Montgomery picked things up with a 19-yard touchdown run on the next play, pushing safety Javier Morton out of the way at the end of the run to get to the pylon, giving ECU a commanding 35-14 lead with 8:42 left in the third quarter.
If the game had a turning point that put the game away, the successful fake punt seemed to demoralize Temple.
Prior to the fourth-and-1 play, Keeler said the team went into a defensive formation called “circus,” fittingly enough.
“We’re telling our guys, there’s something funky going on out there,” Keeler said of his approach. “They may fake the punt. So it wasn’t like we were surprised. We just … you know … they just ran right at us. But we told our guys when we called circus (that the fake punt might be coming.) I think my thought process was I wanted to get the ball into JoJo’s hands somehow on a punt return. And so calling ‘circus,’ letting them know, like, ‘Hey, we are anticipating they may fake this,’ that’s where your eyes need to be first. I thought that was going to do the trick, and it didn’t do the trick.”
Backup Gevani McCoy relieved Simon at quarterback at the 12:06 mark of the fourth quarter. ECU’s defense rattled Simon into arguably his worst day of the season. He completed 11 of his 20 passes just 80 yards and threw his first interception of the season. That interception, thrown behind Bermudez, was picked off by ECU safety Ja’Marrley Riddle. Anthony Smith scored on a 45-yard jet sweep touchdown run – on his first carry of the season – on the next play.
Simon’s 80 passing yards represent his lowest total since Oklahoma held him to 75 back in week 3. Keeler rightly pointed out that Simon threw at least two more passes that also could have been intercepted.
Simon was asked if ECU did anything to rattle his confidence, considering he put a handful of throws into triple coverage.
“Props to them,” Simon said of ECU’s defense. “Reflecting, I haven’t done that a whole lot this year. Gonna take a deep look in that mirror and find out the reason why. Why would I force stuff like that? So we’re gonna dive deep. We’ll be all right.”
That will be determined by how Temple responds next week in its noon road game at Army. The Black Knights, who improved to 4-4 Saturday with a 20-17 win at Air Force, are the next opponent standing between the Owls and bowl eligibility.
After spotting ECU a 14-0 lead before the game was six minutes old, Temple fought back to tie the game at 14-14 with the help of a Jay Ducker 4-yard touchdown run and a pretty, 29-yard touchdown run by true freshman running back Keveun Mason.
From there, of course, everything came undone.
“It’s written all over the film,” Simon said when asked what changed after Temple tied the game. “It’s a little bit of what ECU did today, but it’s a lot more so of what we did. We get on the sideline after three-and-out, you turn on the iPad. When in the world have we done something like that? So it’s things like that that we’re going to need to fix to get our six.”
Listen to Saturday’s postgame interviews here.
