Football's back ... and it's going to be fun

By Mike Gibson
A week ago, the "MAC football media" picked Temple to finish fifth in the Eastern Division of the Mid-American Conference.
Clueless hogwash.
I could just see it now.
A MAC beat writer who doesn't know Eric Reynolds from Al Reynolds or Joe Jones from Jack Jones circles Temple for fifth place because he remembered the Temple running game from last year and figured it wouldn't be much improved.
One guy even wrote, "With everybody back, Temple should be an improved squad" and then his bottom-line prediction was 4-8. Huh? Temple won four games last year.
Another guy who doesn't know Adrian Robinson from Jackie Robinson figures the Temple defense could not possibly get any better than last year's, which was incidentally No. 1 in MAC overall and No. 1 in the nation in red-zone defense.
No. 1 out of 119.
It wasn't long ago that Temple was 119 out of 119 in a number of categories.
The after-effects of 25 years of futility are not lost on the MAC beat writers, who seemingly cannot get THAT Temple out of their minds.
Al Golden and company have already reached that mindset.
"We can't change what's happened in the past," Golden said. "We're a whole different program."
Yesterday, Golden's group of 102 extremely talented players got to work at the Edberg-Olson Football Complex to debuse the MAC media's incredibly sloppy research when coming to a fifth-place berth for the Owls.
Sloppy research and, yes, a lot of anti-Temple bias based on outdated notions of the program.
It's a new year and a new program and it's going to be fun proving the so-called experts wrong.