Let’s smile with the Temple Owls, who are good for pretty much the first time ever

Temple is really good at football. I don’t mean that Temple is really good at football for Temple, although it certainly is. I mean that Temple is just really good at football.

There are ways to explain this. Matt Rhule is clearly a hell of a coach. Returning 11 defensive starters, let alone good ones, will win you games. Linebacker Tyler Matakevich is a playmaking stud who can change games.

But explaining seems unfair. This is TEMPLE, a school where football success has been proven impossible, a program where every step forward has historically been met with a catapult backwards. Explaining Temple’s football success distracts us from the fact that we’re witnessing a miracle.

There are two things you must do to love this Temple team. You must be passionate about suffocating, murderous defense. And you must understand the complete, overwhelming historical suck of Temple football.

The sun of the college football world shines so rarely on Temple, the Owls have good reason for being nocturnal.

Temple has never been 7-0 before, but it has started a season with seven wins, zero losses and a tie. That was 1934, when Pop Warner was the coach and not a long-dead person many people assume is just a neat name for a peewee football league.

Temple is ranked in the AP poll. Prior to Week 8, Temple hadn’t been ranked in the polls since 1979. That year, the Owls finished No. 17 and made something called the Garden State Bowl, which hasn’t existed since 1981.

It’s time for us to talk about Temple’s overwhelmingly sad affiliation with the Big East conference. I’m sure Temple fans are tired of hearing about this, but I’m only bringing it up so everybody else can better appreciate how cool it is that Temple is good now. I’m sorry. It’s baffling!

Temple joined the Big East in 1991 and stayed for 14 years. It went winless in league play in six of those, and never had more than three wins.

It was even more embarrassing because the Big East was never the nation’s strongest league. But the conference did have Miami, which put out some of the strongest college football teams in the sport’s history. These two programs should not have been allowed on the same field, and yet they played regularly anyway. Miami won all 13 matchups between the ‘Canes and Owls from 1991-2005, and never by fewer than 23 points.

In 2004, the Big East finally pulled the plug. It is, so far as we can tell, the only time a power conference has booted a team from its league. The stated reasons were lack of facilities, subpar non-conference scheduling and dismal attendance -- under 20,000 fans per game. But the obvious overlying reason was complete non-competitiveness and disinterest from the school.

What followed is maybe the worst team in college football history. As an independent in 2005, Temple went 0-11, finishing last nationally in points scored per game with 9.7 AND points allowed per game with 45.3. (SMU nearly did this last year, but scraped together a win and ended up second-to-last in points allowed.) The Owls were shut out 65-0 by Wisconsin and lost 70-7 to a Bowling Green team that went 6-5 in the MAC. They never scored more than 17 points, and only allowed fewer than 34 once.

Temple could have given up. This is the type of stuff programs don’t come back from. As an independent team, the Owls had very little in the way of recruiting power. Their existing on-field program was garbage. They were playing in a completely lifeless Lincoln Financial Field, with crowds of less than 20,000 barely registering noise in the cavernous expanse of an NFL stadium.

Since everybody else is crapping on him, let’s credit Al Golden, who came in and turned Temple around. He took over after that disaster and improved the Owls to 8- and 9-win seasons in just five years. But the second he could, he bolted to Miami. And then came Steve Addazio ... who only lasted two years before heading for greener pastures, this time to Boston College.

Now the Owls have Rhule, who took over a 2-10 mess Addazio left and has them doing things Temple has never done before. In 2004, Temple was kicked out of the Big East. In 2015, Temple is 7-0. Temple has been playing football since 1894 and only won seven games 15 times. The Owls have only won eight games seven times.

Who knows what the future holds for Rhule and the Owls. S&P+ gives them a 44 percent chance of pulling the upset against Notre Dame, possibly sending them to their highest AP ranking ever. That would be amazing.

Even if they lose, S&P+ also favors the Owls in every remaining conference game of the year, meaning they’ve got a great shot of finishing conference play undefeated for the first time ever. That would be amazing.

Temple is already well entrenched as the leader in the AAC’s East division, so the Owls should go to the school’s first conference championship game ever even with one conference loss. That would be amazing.

If the Owls win that, they’ll go to a New Year’s bowl game, the team’s first since the dang 1934 Sugar Bowl. That would be amazing.

Maybe it all goes kerblooie. Maybe the team loses to Notre Dame, maybe the team drops some games late in the season, maybe the team gets washed in the AAC championship game against Houston or Memphis, both great teams in their own right. Maybe Rhule ditches after the season, considering a lot of gigs are open and he’s done the impossible at Temple.

But this has already been amazing. In this moment, Owls fans are smiling for, like, maybe the fifth time in program history. Let’s smile with them.