5-0 Temple Continues To Impress

By Matt Leon

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The good times just keep rolling for Temple.

Temple hammered Tulane at the Linc on Saturday, 49-10. With the win the Owls improve to 5-0 (2-0 in the American Athletic Conference) and now prepare to host the University of Central Florida on Saturday night.

The Owls actually trailed the Green Wave 10-7 early in the second quarter, but they grabbed control of the game from there and never looked back, scoring the game's final 42 points. The Owls outgained Tulane for the game, 345-110, and Temple held the Green Wave to just eight first downs.

"We're just getting more and more confident, a little bit more experienced every week." Temple head coach Matt Rhule tells KYW Newsradio. "Everything isn't always going perfectly in the game, but they seem to keep playing their way through it, keep expecting good things to happen and we've eventually been able to turn the tide in our favor in all the games."

Listen to the entire interview with Temple's Matt Rhule

Temple is turning heads. The Owls are on the verge of breaking into the Top 25 for the first time since 1979. Temple is 26th in this week's AP Poll and 27th in the Coaches Poll.

"I really don't pay a lot of attention to it," Rhule says. "At the end of the day, as I told our guys, we're five games in, we have seven games to go and I think we all really want to be ranked at the end of the year. We want to go to a bowl game, we want to have a chance to compete for the conference championship. So getting caught up in things like that right now, probably really doesn't help us. So we're just trying to stay focused, hoping that, if we do that, we will get all those accolades in the end."

The UCF team the Owls will face on Saturday is really struggling. The Knights are 0-6 and coming off 40-13 loss to UConn this past weekend.

"They've had a lot of players get hurt," Rhule says. "Just a tremendous rash of injuries, but they're starting to come back. Their quarterback, Justin Holman, is back now. We know that they're a team that we played the last two years and haven't been able to beat. Whether it was that great catch that they made two years ago (39-36 UCF win at the Linc) or they really just got after us last season at their place (34-14 UCF victory). So we have a lot of respect for them and know we'll have to play really well to have a chance to win."

Temple and UCF will kickoff at 7:30pm on Saturday.

You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattleonkyw.