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We Had an Ultra-Rare Temple and Penn State Occurrence on Saturday Afternoon
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They say that you should work smarter, and not harder, so after the Temple Owls dispatched UTSA on Saturday, followed by the Penn State choke job in LA, we asked Grok to find out how many times in the last ten years Temple has won on the same day that Penn State lost:
That’s it. Just eight times in ten years, which includes the 2015 victory over PSU at Lincoln Financial Field. That seemed like a good starting point, because we ran the prompt a few times and the A.I. was struggling to pull the data from decades of football games.
In fact – of the eight instances the A.I. pulled, four of them took place during that heralded Matt Rhule season, when College Gameday found its way to Philadelphia.
So yeah, very rare occurrence on Saturday. Uber rare, like a total solar eclipse. Penn State actually fell out of the rankings entirely, along with Texas, which is insane. Both of those teams were title favorites at the beginning of the year and they might not even make the playoff. It’s a big win for the sportsbooks, which took a large handle and ticket percentage on the Nittany Lions to win the Big 10 and make the CFP.
The last time Penn State was unranked in the AP Top 25 poll prior to this week was in Week 2 of the 2022 season. They were coming off the 7-5 season in 2021, then started with wins over Purdue and Ohio before beating Auburn 41-12 on the road. Big Nick Singleton performance down there. They jumped back into the rankings and had been there ever since.
If the university were to fire him without cause, Penn State owes Franklin his entire base salary ($500,000) plus his supplemental pay ($6.5 million) and his life insurance loan ($1 million) — $8 million total — multiplied by the number of years remaining. As he’s still in coaching year 2025, the fourth of 10, he would be owed seven years worth of salary.
In other words, Penn State would owe James Franklin $56 million if it fired him after the UCLA loss. If it waited until Jan. 1, 2026, it would be $48 million.
A lot of money. It’s hard to see them beating all three of Iowa, Ohio State, and Indiana, considering how these last two games went. Nebraska’s not a gimme either. So the future looks like what? 9-3 and the Music City Bowl? They might might have to pull the plug, no matter how much it costs.
Temple, meantime, is 3-2 and K.C. Keeler needs one more win for the Owls to hit their season over. They’ve got 5-0 Navy in town next, then at 1-4 Charlotte and at 4-1 Tulsa. Navy is really good and that game feels like an over:
*I do want to say that the Neuheisel love fest on Saturday was a bit much. That had to be annoying for PSU fans to watch. Enough already.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com