They've won only four conference games this season, but Fran Dunphy has his players packing for four days.
Well, save for Dalton Pepper.
Before Monday's practice, Temple's lone senior already had his bag ready to go and saw no reason to change up his routine.
"It doesn't really matter," he said. "I usually bring two pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks on every trip. I pack the same way on every trip."
Think of it this way: If he runs out of clothes, that'll be a good thing. It'll mean Temple's still alive.
The inaugural American Athletic Conference tournament tips off Wednesday night in Memphis at FedExForum. All 10 conference teams make the tournament, but only four, including Temple, will be in action on Day 1.
No. 7 Rutgers and No. 10 USF play at 7 p.m., while No. 8 Temple (9-21, 4-14) faces No. 9 UCF (12-17, 4-14) for the second time in nine days at 9:30 p.m.
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Last Tuesday on senior night, Pepper scored a game-high 26 points as Temple beat UCF, 86-78 in overtime, for the Owls' third win of 2014. That's the good news.
The bad news is that the Knights were without both their leading scorer, Isaiah Sykes, and their head coach, Donnie Jones. Sykes had a bum foot and Jones had the flu. Both will be fine come Wednesday, which is bad news for Temple.
When these teams first met in Orlando back in January, a 78-76 Owls loss, Sykes, who averages 16.4 points and 7.1 rebounds, lit up Temple for 23 and 15. On Tuesday, he was named second-team All-AAC.
"He just makes so many different plays," Dunphy said. "He scores it well, he's a good assist man. Just watching on film, he forces [the ball] at you. It just puts so much more pressure on the defense because of how he forces the action.
"He runs off makes, he runs off misses, he runs off rebounds he gets, he pushes it very well.
"He just forces his will on the game. It's up to us to limit the damage."
In that sense, Temple's tape from Tuesday is less valuable than the one from January. Dunphy said the team will review last Tuesday's game but spend more time watching both the first meeting and Sykes' 34-minute, 24-point, eight-rebound performance in UCF's 104-83 win over Houston last Friday.
In the event Temple wins its third game in a row Wednesday night -- something it hasn't done since a three-game stretch from Nov. 22-Dec. 4 -- it then has the pleasure of playing top-seeded and 13th-ranked Cincinnati.
And if they somehow make it through that, the Owls get the winner of UConn and Memphis. Louisville is the favorite to make it to the championship game from the other side of the bracket.
So, in order for this Temple team, which has set a new all-time program record for losses in a season, to make its seventh straight NCAA tournament, it has to beat UCF, and then likely three teams ranked in the Top 25.
The Owls are an eight-win team that has scared every other team in the conference with the exception of Louisville. They knocked off SMU, took Memphis to overtime, nearly beat Cincy twice, and somehow turned in one of their best defense efforts at home against UConn. At times, they've been strangely competitive for a team with 21 losses. And at other times, they look like one of the 30 worst defensive teams in the nation, which, by the way, they are.
Look at it this way: They've got nothing left to lose.
Maybe that's why they rallied from 18 down to beat USF on Saturday when other teams would have packed it in back in February.
"I hope that is a signature of our group, that they do not quit," Dunphy said. "I've said it a couple of times, this group deserves some credit because their attitude and their way has been pretty positive even when we have lost some games that been very difficult. I think that's part of this team's makeup. There's not any quit in them."
And if they're lucky, maybe there won't be any clothes left in their bags by Saturday.
Pepper snubbed
The American released its regular-season awards list on Tuesday. Not a single Temple Owl was to be found.
First-team all-conference honors went to Cincinnati's Sean Kilpatrick, UConn's Shabazz Napier, Louisville's Montrezl Harrell, Louisville's Russ Smith, and SMU's Nic Moore.
On the second team: Sykes, Cincy's Justin Jackson, Houston's TaShawn Thomas, Memphis' Shaq Goodwin, Memphis' Joe Jackson and SMU's Markus Kennedy, formerly on Villanova.
Worth note, Pepper finished third in the conference in scoring with 17.6 points per game, behind only Kilpatrick and Napier and just ahead of Smith. Kilpatrick, Napier and Smith are all finalists for the Wooden Award, which goes to the nation's top player.