MHERST — It's not as if this scene hadn't been played out before.

Temple's 84-52 men's basketball rout over the University of Massachusetts came just when UMass seemed to be positioning itself for an NCAA tournament run. UMass might now have to win the Atlantic 10 tournament (and the automatic NCAA tournament berth that goes with it) to make the field.

While Saturday's loss was the worst UMass has endured in Bruiser Flint's five-year career, it wasn't the first time Temple has splashed cold water on a UMass parade at the Mullins Center.

In 1998, the Minutemen were 16-5 and riding a 10-game winning streak — and had just entered the Associated Press Top 25 for the first time that season — when they lost 61-47 at home to Temple.

Last year, the Owls won 75-48 in Amherst, UMass' worst Mullins Center loss until Saturday.

UMass (11-12, 9-3 Atlantic 10) will try to pick itself up in tomorrow's home game against Rhode Island (5-21, 1-12), which gave Xavier a surprisingly tough game before losing 79-65 Saturday.

The UMass loss and Xavier's win pushed the Musketeers (10-3) ahead of the Minutemen in the race for second place in the A-10. St. Joseph's (11-1) continued to set the pace with yesterday's 88-78 win over Fordham.

As UMass chases an NCAA tournament berth, the Minutemen also continue to face a built-in problem: an unbalanced and unusually difficult A-10 schedule.

With 11 teams in the league this year, each team must play six opponents twice each, and four others once each for a 16-game schedule. In November, Atlantic 10 associate commissioner Bob Steitz said matchups were made partly with TV contracts and traditional rivalries in mind.

In other words, it was more attractive to match good teams against other good teams as often as possible. But UMass wound up with the toughest schedule that seemed possible at the time, playing Temple, Xavier and Dayton twice each.

Against the four weakest teams (Rhode Island, Duquesne, La Salle and Fordham), UMass has a total of five games. St. Joseph's, Xavier and Temple (9-4 A-10) have six each — which could be a factor in a tight finish.

The Minutemen were also given two games against George Washington, a preseason top-five Atlantic 10 pick. The only contender UMass plays only once is surprising St. Joseph's, which was not considered a contender when the schedule was made. And at that, the Minutemen-Hawks game is at St. Joseph's, where the Hawks are 10-0.

Steitz said that over a five-year cycle, such an imbalanced schedule can even itself out. But that won't happen in the Atlantic 10, which welcomes Richmond next year and will return to a 12-team, two-division balanced format.

For this circumstance, UMass can blame fate or the Atlantic 10. But in the case of Saturday's blowout, the Minutemen can only blame themselves.

Temple was ready for business, and UMass was flat. The game began with Minutemen passes going to players headed in the opposite direction. It ended, symbolically, with a potential dunk slipping out of Ronell Blizzard's hands.

UMass also allowed 23 points off turnovers, and its defense was uncharacteristically soft against a team that rarely has any surprises.

"Temple doesn't run a whole lot of patterns," UMass coach Bruiser Flint said. "They run off screens, square up and take you. That's the way they play."

UMass is still in good position to finish at least second in the A-10 race. The Minutemen would win a tiebreaker against Xavier, having beaten the Musketeers twice.

In fact, UMass' 3-1 record against Xavier and Temple is probably as good as this team could have rightfully expected.

With Saturday's loss, UMass fell six spots to 65th in the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) power rankings. It's the highest ranking in the nation by a team with a losing record.