Honestly, the way the Temple football team crawled across the finish line this season, I wasn't expecting a bid to one of the myriad of minor bowl games that pop up like corner Christmas Tree vendors this time of year.
Yes, the Owls passed the bottom-line 6-win plateau for bowl eligibility after 8 games and were siting pretty at 8-2 after 10 games.
But with several starters on the shelf -- including running back Bernard Pierce, a flat-out stud on the rare days when he is healthy -- the Owls lost two key league games, to Ohio and Miami (Ohio), to close out the regular season.
I wondered if 8-4 is good enough. And being that Temple has only been competitive the last few years, I'm a newbie to the whole process.
I turned to the Internet, which is loaded with about a trillion sites of bowl projections. The first one I checked had Temple out in the cold.
Since I wasn't expecting warmth, I was fine with it.
The others, though, had the Owls going somewhere -- Sun Bowl, New Mexico Bowl, Humanitarian Bowl -- against opponents ranging from Utah to Miami (Fla.).
The projections were so consistent that I stopped worrying about the notion that Temple, at 8-4, would not be considered as one of the top 70 teams (there are 35 bowl games, hence the math) in the nation.
I started to warm myself by the fire of the opinions of what are probably bloggers taking breaks from popping their zits.
Although I had my doubts, given the injuries and lack of depth to fill the voids, that they would avoid embarrassment, I still believed that that going to a bowl game in successive years for the first time in school history was a good thing overall.
Plus, as I broke it down, I could see where those lurking in the online shadows making the projections were coming from.
Temple had beaten UConn, which is going to a BSC bowl. They beat another bowl team in Army. With a healthy Pierce, and a quarterback with a pulse, they may have even beaten Penn State in Happy Valley. And, as it turns out, there were no "bad losses." No one who beat the Owls in 2010 had a losing record and, as it turns out, all were perceived as good enough to receive bowl bids.
Additonally, Temple beat a Villanova team that is still in the postseason in the NCAA sub-division.
Not a bad resume.
Maybe I was being to hard on the team for kind of coming up small at season's end. Maybe they deserved a bowl appearance after all.
I was reinvigorated.
Temple even planned a selection party Sunday, so I figured the school's powers that be already knew -- albeit unofficially -- that a bid was coming.
I went to Atlantic City for the weekend without giving it a second thought.
When I finally got home Sunday, the bowl list was not even the first I sought out when I booted up the computer.
When I did check it out, it was going to be more a matter of where and when than if they were going to a bowl game.
But, for the first time ever, an 8-win team was left out in the cold in favor of a plethora of 7- and even 6-win teams.
That team getting the cold shoulder?
Not Notre Dame. Not Miami (Fla.).
Temple.
Turns out the only bowl that even considered the Owls was one the prognosticators didn't even mention, the New Orleans Bowl, and that bid went to the Ohio that Temple lost to during the swoon and the end of the season.
That makes sense, but the process is enough to make one's head spin.