UCF travels to Temple with regular season winding down
Overtime was needed in the first matchup between UCF men’s basketball and Temple on Jan. 28 when the visiting Owls won 77-70, extending the Knights’ losing streak at that point to four games.
UCF (16-12, 7-9 AAC) lost a fifth straight game before getting back on track with back-to-back victories. The winning ways, however, didn’t last long as the Knights lost three more in a row before notching a win this past Sunday at Tulsa.
Johnny Dawkins’ squad wasn’t the only one losing multiple games since UCF and Temple last met.
Immediately following their win in Orlando, the Owls (15-14, 9-7 AAC) dropped four straight games and have only won once in their past six.
Simply put, both teams are in need of a win entering Thursday’s matchup (7 p.m., ESPNU) in Philadelphia. The game has implications for AAC tournament seeding, too.
The Knights currently sit in seventh in the conference standings, two spots behind the Owls.
While some seeding in the AAC tournament is still to be determined, UCF already has been mathematically eliminated from finishing in the top five, the AAC confirmed to the Sentinel.
Temple could fall to 9-9 in league play with two losses and UCF could improve to 9-9 with two wins, which would include a win against the Owls on the road as well as against ECU at home Sunday.
The head-to-head between UCF and Temple would be 1-1, which means it would then go to the next tiebreaker. Temple’s Jan. 22 win over Houston would mean the Owls would earn the tiebreaker with the Knights because UCF lost twice to the Cougars, a spokesperson for the conference explained.
That means UCF won’t receive a first-round bye in the conference tournament — which takes place in Fort Worth, Texas, next week — but it can avoid meeting the AAC’s top seed, Houston, in the quarterfinals.
The Knights can accomplish that by ending the regular season in sixth or seventh place.
If UCF ends the regular season in the eighth or ninth spot and advances past the first round, the
Knights would have to face the Cougars, a team that swept them this season and outright won the AAC regular-season title.
Before thinking too much about next week’s conference tournament, however, beating the Owls is where the Knights can start a late-season turnaround.
There are three key statistics that generally indicate how a game ends for UCF.
First, the Knights are 13-1 when leading at halftime but 3-11 when trailing at the break. Defense and rebounds tend to impact the result more often than
not, too.
UCF is 11-0 this season when holding teams to fewer than 60 points but 2-9 when the opponent scores 70 or more.
When outrebounding the opposing team, UCF is 13-4 but that record is 3-8 when the Knights are beaten on the boards.
The Owls are hoping to rebound as well. Temple is 11-4 when grabbing more rebounds but 4-10 when not.