Get ready to yell "incoming ....."

By Mike Gibson
One of my summer friends also serves in the Pennsylvania National Guard.
That requires her to be away a weekend a month and two weeks a year.
When she signed up, she didn't figure on the PNG being used to guard a country 8,000 miles away but that's how it turned out so she served a tour of duty there, too.
The air base in the Sunni Triangle was secure by day, not so much at night.
When it got dark, that's when the bad guys started to lob low-caliber mortar rounds into the base, primarily because they didn't have the stomach to take the turbans off and slug it out in the daytime.
"The sirens would go off and we'd yell INCOMING," she said. "We had about 25 seconds to go down to the shelter. It was pretty safe down there, but we didn't get much sleep."
I thought of what she said during the late stages of Louisville's 62-0 thumping of Temple on Saturday. I really didn't care about the score at the time or the grumbling some seats away that Louisville was rolling it up. My feeling is that if you put a team on the field that's bad enough to lose, 62-0, it's your fault, not the other guy's.
No, I wasn't thinking about any of that.
"Incoming," was all I could think about.
It's bad enough watching the carnage of a 62-0 defeat right in front of my eyes, yet all I could think about is the aftermath, incoming verbal mortar rounds from people who don't have the stomach for a fair fight.
A fair fight would be to give the current head coach, Al Golden, four years to bring his guys in and then start lobbing grenades should four Golden classes lay a 62-0 egg.
That would be the fair way to do it. Remember Golden is a guy who in just one month produced a recruiting class that was ranked by one independent source as the No. 1 class in the entire Mid-American Conference. It is no large leap of faith to think he can do even better with a full year under his belt.
Yet there are bad guys laying in wait, just hoping and praying that Golden fails.
They stumble over their furniture to get to the computer keyboard and lob their own ordinance behind the relative cover of anonymity at the first early sign of failure.
Some of these people use internet message boards to convey their opinion. Some of them are accredited members of the media who can't wait to tell you "I-told-you-so. Temple can't win. It doesn't matter if it's Ron Dickerson, Bobby Wallace, Al Golden or Vince Lombardi."
After a 62-0 loss, that would be all too easy. People like that fail to remember guys named Bruce Arians and Wayne Hardin proved that you can win at Temple not all that long ago.
Talk to me in four years.
Until then, I'm going to cover my ears, yell "incoming" and look for the safety of the nearest shelter.