It's payback time.
Or is it?
The Penn State men's basketball team will face a familiar foe when they travel to Philadelphia Saturday to take on Temple at 4:30 p.m. The Owls ended the Nittany Lions Cinderella Sweet 16 run last season with an 84-72 victory in the South Regional Semifinal.
While the Owls will be easily recognizable to the Lions (1-3), Temple will not remember many faces with the Lions returning just one starter and three players that played more than ten minutes in last season's game.
Though revenge would be sweet for the Lions, they know they need to be less concerned with payback than competing hard in a match-up that in recent years has been hotly contested.
"Everybody's thinking about what happened in the Sweet 16," junior point guard Brandon Watkins said. "Everybody doesn't see that we beat them earlier that year when they came here. I think every time we play Temple it's a dogfight. It's a good game."
The Owls haven't seen much game action recently. Last night's game against Charlotte was their first since losing to No. 5 Maryland and No. 6 Florida in the Coaches vs. Cancer IKON Classic. The Owls fell out of the Top 25 after beginning the season ranked No. 16.
The Owls return a number of players that gave the Lions problems in the tournament last season. Most notable among them is senior guard Lynn Greer, who scored 21 points last season thanks to a stellar 10-for-10 performance from the free throw line. He was averaging 21.0 points per game this season going into last night's game.
"We're going to watch a lot of film on him," sophomore guard Sharif Chambliss said. "He's a real good offensive player. He's uses his speed and his quickness and his changing of pace real well. We just know we have to stay in front, keep the ball in front on the dribble drive."
The Lions will also face major mismatches again down low. The Owls sport two very thick bodies in the frontcourt that go by the names of Kevin Lyde and Ron Rollerson. Lyde, a senior forward listed at 6-foot-10 260, leads the team with 10.0 rebounds per game, along with 12.5 points per game. Rollerson, a 6-10 center who is listed at 290 pounds but may in fact be much bigger, is second on the team with 7.5 rebounds per game.
After being dominated by Clemson on the glass Wednesday night, the undersized Lions will have to try different techniques to hang with the bulky Owl frontline, and later with the strong front lines in the Big Ten.
"With boxing out, sometimes you can't even turn and put your back into him," senior forward Tyler Smith said after the Clemson game. "Some times you have to just face your guy and just push him out of the way. We didn't do that. We've done that some times in practice. We really stressed block out drills."
They will get some help with freshman forward Jan Jagla back in the lineup after sitting out the first four games for playing with professional players when he was in Europe.
Reeling off the squandering of a 10-point halftime lead against Clemson Wednesday night, the young Lions are desperately looking for something to turn their season around before it's too late. There would seem to be some temptation to look at this season as a rebuilding year and look toward next year with a more mature team. However, Penn State men's basketball coach Jerry Dunn is keeping his team focused on the task at hand.
"We've got an awful lot of games to play, and we can't get caught up into the numbers," he said. "We have to take one game at a time and try to improve each night out and try to make some things happen out there and have them go our way."
