TAMPA, Fla. — Jesse Morgan couldn’t find the nearby Gulf of Mexico.
Quenton DeCosey was similarly lost somewhere on a beach in Clearwater.
And Will Cummings wasn’t lacking for effort — he never is — but he required plenty of charity.
With those three, Temple’s top perimeter threats, combining to shoot a horrid 11 for 35 from the field, someone needed to locate the basket. That someone turned out to be Josh Brown.
The sophomore guard sparked Temple to an ugly-but-effective 61-48 road win over USF, hitting three key shots from roughly a six-foot radius on the floor to give the Owls the cushion they needed in the second half.
“I thought Josh Brown was really big,” head coach Fran Dunphy said. “He made two huge threes in the second half and really stepped up and did some really good things.
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“I thought he really arrived tonight.”
The two threes came from the right elbow and top of the key. Another jumper with just over a minute to go came from nearly the exact same spot, straight away from the basket, except his foot was on the line. It was only eight points, but Brown (3 of 5) was the only Owl to make more shots than he missed Wednesday night.
Temple (16-7, 7-3 American) went into the half trailing USF (7-16, 1-8) by one thanks to the following shooting totals: 8 of 28 from the field, 1 of 10 from three.
It was Brown, with help from his backcourt running mate Cummings (19 points, 10 from the foul line), who bailed Temple out of what could have been a bad spot against a bad team that’s lost its last eight straight.
“We’ve got a lot of scorers,” Brown said, “but when people are off, other people have to step up.
“Every game and in practice, coach just tells me to stay shot-ready to get my shots up every day and just be ready to knock it down.”
Thankfully for the Owls, he and the rest of his teammates were also steal-ready. Temple forced USF into 13 turnovers, nine of them in the second half, and outscored the Bulls 14-1 in points off giveaways.
The rest of the night’s stats were pretty even. The rebounds were 41-41. The shooting percentages were within a point of each other. It was the defense that saved Temple from blemishing its bubbly NCAA tournament resume.
“It was interesting,” Dunphy started, “I said to [Brown], I thought his defense was really terrific in the second half. I thought he struggled a little bit in the first half, but in the second half, because he was shooting it well, sometimes these guys feed off the offense to do a good job on the other end, which they [otherwise] wouldn’t.”
After dropping three straight when Cummings went down with a muscle strain in his left leg, Temple has now won four in a row, holding three of those opponents to fewer than 50 points.
The Owls’ defense continues to be a welcome improvement from last year, but the shooting numbers have to improve if they hope to make any kind of run in March. Temple is taking an average of 20 threes per game — certainly not uncommon or unwise from the college line — but its shooting a miserable 31.6 percent. That number is going to drop further after a 6-for-22 effort from deep on Wednesday.
If Temple is going to go from its worst season in program history to its seventh NCAA tournament in nine years under Dunphy, it’s going to need a more efficient offense and continued contributions from guys like Brown.
“We had a bad season last year,” Brown said, “and I feel like I played a lot of those minutes and I felt I couldn’t give the team anything, offensively. Defensively, I tried my best but I was still a freshman.
“I just tried to work on my game over the summer so that when coach calls my numbers, or my teammates get me the ball, I can step up and hit the shot.”