How has Temple kept its 2020-21 hoop schedule straight with the COVID-19 cancellations? | Mike Jensen

The game was in progress last Thursday at the Liacouras Center, Temple hosting Central Florida, so Owls director of basketball operations Raheem Mapp didn’t look at his phone. At halftime, he snuck a peek, saw a long text chain, updated himself quickly.

As soon as the game was over, Temple deputy athletic director Craig Angelos went straight to Mapp. They had the plane.

“Everybody’s at the point now where they don’t bat an eye,’' Angelos said.

The Owls had been scheduled to play East Carolina on Saturday until a positive COVID-19 test knocked out ECU. Who was available?

“Tulane had an opening,’' said Angelos, the sport administrator for basketball. “We rerouted our trip.”

Within a few hours of beating UCF, the Owls were in the air, heading for New Orleans instead of North Carolina, to play a game that hadn’t been on the schedule the day before. Mapp had sprung into action, calling the hotel the Owls had been scheduled to stay in last month before a positive test at Temple knocked that Tulane game out. Would the same bloc be available? It was. Other than scrambling for food, it went off like the game had been scheduled for a year.

Behind the scenes, craziness. On the chartered plane, assistant coaches watched film of a team they had not been preparing to play. A film session with the team followed when they got to the hotel. All of Friday to prepare meant this one came off without a hitch. Temple got a W on Saturday, got back on the plane, home that night.

“Our guys, much credit to them,’' Mapp said of Temple’s players. “We’ve been preaching, take it as it comes.”

That was last week. This week, nothing came off as scheduled yet it all worked out. Wednesday afternoon, Temple issued two press releases. The first: “Temple will host #8 Houston this Saturday at noon on CBS. The game was originally scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 10, but was moved by the American Athletic Conference as part of a pair of changes to the men’s basketball schedule.”

Those two sentences, ripping up schedules on the fly, adding a network television game on the run, reflected probably a hundred phone calls and a thousand texts.

The beauty of it, the game was really conjured up by the director of basketball operations at Houston as he texted with Mapp at Temple. DOBOs (Directors of Basketball Operations) make the hoop world go round. More so during a pandemic. Cincinnati had been scheduled to play Houston this coming Saturday on CBS. But rumors of a Cincinnati positive test hit the DOBO rumor wire Monday night.

“I had already contacted my DOBO counterpart [at Houston], just checking in,’' Mapp said. “He was like, ‘Just in case, would you be interested?’ "

Mapp ran the possibility of playing Houston Saturday past Owls coach Aaron McKie and up the chain of command. Temple had just won two in a row – “we want to keep rolling.”

Would CBS go for it, and reroute its production apparatus to get to Philly? That was up to the AAC office to arrange, amidst all the other changes happening all over the conference.

“The hub of all that is Brian Thornton,’' Angelos said, mentioning the AAC’s associate commissioner for men’s and women’s basketball, just hired from the NCAA in October. “His head must be spinning.”

CBS went for the switch. Enough action for one day? Nah, two hours later, Temple issued another press release … “men’s basketball game at USF scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 27 has been postponed due to additional positive COVID-19 cases and the ensuing contact tracing at USF.”

So the Owls gained one and lost one. That’s the way it’s been going all over college hoops. You want to say it’s crazy to be playing, it’s even crazier to actually make it happen. Temple is testing every day, so Mapp gets anxious every night, “between 7 and 10 o’clock,” hoping the medical staff doesn’t text bad news. This month, the men’s team has been all right.

“Now that we have students back on campus, that’s another hurdle,” Mapp said of trying to play catch-up on games after Temple didn’t start its season until Dec. 19, over three weeks late, because of its own COVID issues.

Mapp said that in addition to staying close to other AAC DOBOs, he stays in close contact with his counterparts at the other Philadelphia schools.

“You never know if you need something quick,” Mapp said.

But the first priority for Temple and all the other schools is to get the league games in. Scheduling a Big 5 game on a day that could have been used for league play doesn’t make sense. Time is already getting short to get games in.

“Keep your phone charged up,” Mapp said of his top priority, acknowledging that the crucial aspect of all this is constant communication, all levels.

“We have to almost over-communicate to make sure these things work,” Mapp said.

Word of cancellations “kind of creeps up on you,” Angelos said, as the conference’s medical advisory group stays in touch, and a possible positive test on some campus turns into a confirmed cancellation. “You start looking at the schedule.”

While Angelos was talking on the phone with a reporter Thursday afternoon, he got a text from Mapp. That game that was off the schedule for next week? Maybe there was a replacement.

“Even as we’re speaking, we’re talking about Tulsa now,’' Angelos said.

Tulsa, it turns out, has no game scheduled next week.

“It was just reaching out – would you want a game?” Mapp said, noting that Temple and Tulsa are currently scheduled to play once in February and once in March. “Who knows if we’re going to get to that. Let’s move it up.”

Sure enough, by Friday, the AAC was preparing another press release.