There were only 12, 316 people in attendance at Lincoln Financial Field to watch the Falcons play, but the Falcon faithful still managed to have a decent following to see BG beat Temple 70-16 Saturday.

It was sort of surprising to see so much orange against a backdrop of not much cherry and black.

In fact, since the football season started, whoever has covered the game for the BG News has taken it upon themselves to do an away football game version of the BG News’ people on the street.

In games at Oklahoma and Northern Illinois, it was easy to find students from those school to poke fun at Bowling Green, talk about how they were going to beat us or just plain old not even give our fine town acknowledgement of existence.

This was not the case in Philadelphia, as finding students was a difficult task. And while the task was accomplished, the fans weren’t too peppy when it came to rooting for the home team. In fact, it would’ve been much easier to find fans of the Falcons.

It appeared as if at least 1,000 Falcons’ fans made the trip on the Pennsylvania turnpike (which costs 18 stinking dollars). And even though the fans were outnumbered, they still made some noise at the Linc.

Fans made a ruckus when P.J. Pope made his big plays, the first of which was a diving and bobbling catch in the endzone and the second of which was a 77-yard scamper untouched to paydirt.

They oohed and ahhed as the Falcons moved the ball up the field with record-breaking ease in the first half and stuck around for the entire second half of the Falcons’ most lopsided win of the season on their second-farthest road trip of the season.

The fans even cheered hard for the second and third string players as Jason Washington and Dan Macon rolled into the endzone for the Falcons’ last two touchdowns of the afternoon.

And did the Falcons walk away and ignore their faithful following? I think not.

The Falcons went to the south side of their sidelines to hang out with the fans and revel in the victory.

To make matters even better for the Falcons, they left the game with more fans than they came with.

As they walked into the tunnel to the locker room, fans from Philadelphia were giving them high fives and telling them “good job.”

To me, this looks like a step in the right direction.

To me, it appears as if the team loves their fans as much as the fans love them.

And judging from the fans at the tunnel, it looks like the Falcons are getting something they never had before: a national following.

Hey, even the Yankees had to start small before becoming America’s team.