That didn’t take long.

Temple is bringing an end to in-person instruction after experiencing a quick spike in COVID-19 cases as students returned to campus less than two weeks ago:

Steve says that residential students “have the option of staying on campus or leaving with a full refund for room/board.”

For our purposes, we’re wondering how this affects the football season.

The Owls were set to begin on September 26th at Navy after losing their non-conference games against Rutgers, Idaho, and Miami. The American Athletic Conference put forth an 8+4 schedule, allowing its teams the flexibility to schedule four out of conference games in addition to playing eight conference opponents. Obviously they’d need the players to remain on campus and take their classes digitally, then head over to the fields for practice. Maybe this actually helps because they won’t be mingling with the rest of the students and could theoretically be more pseudo-hermetically sealed in the dorms or their apartments. I don’t know.

One of the quirky things about the football schedule is that after the season opener, Temple doesn’t play again until October 17th, which would be their first home game. From there it’s six straight games to end the year, three of which will be played at the Linc. There’s room to add non-conference opponents on October 3rd or October 10th, but you wonder if they might just forget about it with the recent spike in COVID cases on campus.