In my first article for Baltimore Sports and Life I first want to thank Chris Stoner for reaching out to me to see if I would be interested in providing some Maryland Football content for the site. I am very appreciative of him in thinking of me to see if I would like to be a contributor. For those that don’t know me I am into my 10th Year as an on-air host at 105.7 The Fan in Baltimore, the flagship station for Maryland Football and Basketball. I recently completed my 7th year of being apart of the Network in some way anchoring Football coverage.
(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)
Before I begin to get into detailed coverage of the Maryland Football team in the articles or blogs to come, I want to clear up a major misconception among Maryland fans and outsiders and then address a few sidebars from the move to the Big Ten now over 5 years old.
The major misconception was that Maryland Athletics left the ACC to go to the Big Ten because they were greedy and wanted more money. First, everything is about the money, without money there is no Athletics Program. While yes, the move has and will continue to yield greater revenue, the greed part is simply not true. Maryland was not swimming in dollars and simply saw an opportunity for more and thumbed their noses at the ACC. Totally false! Yet even over 5 years later that narrative still comes up on social media and message boards, among talk shows and water cooler chatter. The truth is the athletic program was going broke, in fact they pretty much were broke and they were forced into spending funds from an auxiliary account to keep things going. Now if you want to blame the department for getting to that point that is at least partially fair (more on that coming up) but it does not change the fact that it was out of necessity that the Terps went to the Big Ten and not greed. Yes, it was billed as much as being a change that was the right academic fit for the University and so on and so forth but that simply was window dressing that nobody bought anyway.
Remember Maryland had already cut some sports to keep running what programs they could and if they had stayed in the ACC, they likely would have had to have cut almost every other sport but Football and Basketball and maybe Lacrosse or Soccer.
Now the reason they were broke is a combination of poor performance/bad timing, being possibly too ambitious and an AD’s flaws. Let’s set the scene first. Maryland Athletics was booming in Football and Basketball in the early 2000s. After Ralph Friedgen took over the Football program, he proceeded to have 3 straight 10-win seasons which yielded solid Bowl games and some wins including over Tennessee, pretty much unheard of even in the Bobby Ross and Jerry Claiborne days. The basketball program had started to string together several successful seasons and trips to the NCAA Tournament under Gary Williams. They reached the pinnacle of success when they went to back to back Final Fours, the second of which yielded a National Championship. Then, however the wheels started to come off. Friedgen would have 4 losing seasons in the next 6 including a 2-10 season and finished roughly only 7 games above .500 the rest of the way until he was fired. Williams’ teams did not have quite that kind of drop off and kept winning but not to the extent that he had been and had two seasons of 19-13 and one at 19-15 along with several .500 or below ACC Conference records. The excitement of MD Basketball started to wane. Williams’ who was burned out and did not like dealing with the AAU culture of recruiting retired after the ‘10-11 season.
To the Athletic Department’s credit, they looked to capitalize on the success and the happy donors, alums and fans by upgrading facilities on the campus. Those projects primarily were the Tyser Tower at then Byrd Stadium (now Maryland Stadium) and the building of a new basketball arena, which would be the Comcast Center (now Xfinity Center).
As they went about undertaking in such projects the Football and Basketball team’s success diminished as I just wrote about as did the donations and the debt started to rise. Maybe you could argue they should have not been as aggressive in getting involved in several projects all coinciding with each other. I think though that is some very easy Monday Morning Quarterbacking given the fact that that was as good a time as ever to fundraise and make improvements to help the athletic program revenue generators continue to have success. When Football and Basketball do well then, the rest of the department can benefit from that as well. Remember no matter how well Lacrosse, Soccer and Field Hockey do, they do not make money. How would Yow have known that after that kind of success the teams would go downward. Yes, you had to anticipate some drop off but not like what happened to both programs especially basketball.
Throw in an Athletic Director in Debbie Yow that never had a good relationship with Gary Williams that might have affected some basketball booster donations along with the fact that she could rub some donors and people in general the wrong way. She also was not always as engaging as she could be to some and that was problematic. When you combine them altogether it ended up being a financial disaster. That is why you had Maryland scrambling to find an alternative and with the Big Ten looking to expand their footprint and get into bigger markets, the timing was perfect for Maryland.
To sidebar for just a second—To be fair to Yow and give the rest of the story, she also cleaned up budget issues she inherited and oversaw a pretty successful run of overall athletics that included bringing back Ralph Friedgen to Maryland who did end up having all things considered a pretty good run with the football program and the hiring of Brenda Frese who won a National Championship and has continued to keep Maryland Basketball in the Top 10 pretty much every year.
On top of the loss of tradition leaving as one of the founding members of the ACC, fans also lamented that Football would struggle in the Big Ten and probably never be able to have any sort of winning season at least in Conference play. While the general sentiment was not off base in terms of the difficultly for the specific Football teams move, it was temporarily squelched after the first season in which the Terps went .500 in their new conference.
Maryland Basketball fans were also disappointed that they would be leaving a premier basketball conference, much better than the Big Ten. First to address the basketball end, I also was disappointed in leaving the ACC on the basketball end much more than football end. The ACC is a gold standard almost year in and year out for basketball but let’s be honest the ACC is no where near what it used to be with the additions of the Boston College’s, Miami’s, Virginia Tech’s and even somewhat recently Notre Dame. The days of the home and home with North Carolina and Duke were gone. The idea of making Pitt a rival was a joke. What kind of ACC were we leaving? The ACC had left Maryland. Given realignment across College Athletics maybe it was the best thing for the ACC to do but the bottom line is the tradition end of it went out the door before Maryland left. The Big Ten has been and is better in basketball than some people want to give them credit for and this season finds the ACC in a down year where the Big Ten is thriving.
On the football end also being a long time Michigan fan, I was actually somewhat excited because of how much the Conference valued football and because I had good knowledge of the Big Ten. I certainly concede that the East Division is a beast, there is no way around it. Even Indiana known as a basketball school has a pretty good football team and now the doormat of the Conference in Rutgers has paid big money and is looking for Greg Schiano work his magic once again in Piscataway. With that there does come a ceiling to the success that Maryland can achieve given the amount of quality programs. I do believe the MD Football program can still produce a fairly consistent string of 7-5 type seasons sprinkled in with a few 8-4 seasons now and again. They certainly can be a more competitive product in the Conference. How long it will take depends on recruiting and development. We will get into that in future articles.
Terps Analyst
Mike Popovec is a Weekend and Fill-In host at 105-7 The Fan. In addition Mike hosts the Pre and Post, Halftime and Scoreboard Updates for the Football Games on the Maryland Terrapins Sports Radio Network. He also hosts the Pre and Post Game Show on weekends for some of the Maryland Basketball Games. Popovec also hosts a local News, Talk and Sports Morning Program at the beach on 92-7 WGMD. He also produces and hosts High School Football Games and Shows throughout the season out of Easton covering the Eastern Shore’s Bayside Conference. He sideline reports for CW54 for the Maryland State High School Football Playoffs with Bruce Cunningham, Doug Duvall and Wally Williams.