According to ESPN Analytics, Maryland has a 7.3% chance to beat Nebraska and a 1.9% chance to beat Ohio State. Barring a shocking result in either of those two games, they’ll return to College Park with a record of 2-4 (0-3) heading into their Homecoming game against Rutgers. Even if they blow the Scarlet Knights out of the water, it’s hard to imagine that Smith doesn’t dismiss Locksley on October 18th with five games left in the season.

Jeff Ermann mentioned on Inside Maryland Sports (IMS) Radio’s podcast earlier this week that the three candidates he could see named as the team’s interim head coach would be Aazaar Abdul-Rahim (Co-Defensive Coordinator/Associate Head Coach for Defense/Cornerbacks Coach), Matt Barnes (Special Teams Coordinator), or Kyle Schmitt (Tight Ends Coach). Schmitt would be particularly notable as he was quarterback Malik Washington’s head coach at Archbishop Spalding High School.

Despite all of this, Maryland has eight games left in their 2026 season and a roster full of players who will at the very least be playing for pride and future opportunities. Locksley mentioned during his press conference earlier this week that the offensive coaching staff would be simplifying their scheme for Washington following his ugly four-interception performance against the Bruins. While he’s shown flashes of brilliance, he’s also shown a lot of the same issues that plagued him as a true freshman: slow reads, sloppy footwork, and poor accuracy particularly on short and intermediate passes.

While Locksley and offensive coordinator Clint Trickett spoke about a desire for a strong rushing attack before the season began, what’s played out over the last few weeks has been anything but. After rushing for 365 yards and six touchdowns in their season-opener against Hampton, they’ve accumulated just 228 yards and four touchdowns on the ground during their last three games combined. Their running back room has been decimated by injuries, so much so that they turned to backup quarterback Cardell Williams in the backfield on numerous occasions last week, but the offensive line also hasn’t opened nearly enough holes in the running game.

The lack of a competent rushing attack isn’t new for Locksley during his tenure as head coach. The 2021 season was really the lone year in which the Terrapins could rely on the run during the past eight years. Otherwise, the fate of the offensive unit was placed squarely on the shoulders of quarterbacks Taulia Tagovailoa, Billy Edwards Jr., and now Washington. While that may win you games against the likes of Hampton or UConn, it’s extremely difficult to have success with such a one-dimensional attack in conference play.

Defensively, this year’s unit has seen most of the same issues that have plagued them over the last few years come back to haunt them. They had a whopping 19 missed tackles against Virginia Tech, which led to a large number of explosive plays for the Hokies. Defensive coordinator Ted Monachino’s unit has also allowed the 70th-most yards per game in the country, and they haven’t even reached the heart of their conference schedule yet. As a team, penalties have once again become an issue as they rank 59th in penalty yards per game.

Smith and Maryland’s boosters spent a lot of time and money to retain most of the young talent from last year’s roster, and gave Locksley a chance to build on the young foundation he’d assembled before the 2025 season. However, just four weeks into the year, the wheels have already started to come off and it’s clear that a change will have to be made. The only questions now are how ugly this might still get on the field, and when Smith will finally elect to pull the plug.

The post Locksley’s Fate Looms Over Next Three Games appeared first on Baltimore Sports and Life.

Mike Locksley has not been fired yet, but the writing on the wall is pretty clear. At the minimum, yesterday was the unofficial end of his era.

What come’s next?

Part I: The rationale for moving now

In-season firings used to be a sign of panic. They are now a sign of organization, and last year’s cycle made that clear.

Virginia Tech fired Brent Pry on Sept. 14th, three games into the 2025 season. The Hokies hired James Franklin on Nov. 17th on a five-year, $41.75 million deal, gave him a full portal cycle, and he brought 29 transfers with him. That Virginia Tech team came to College Park and won.

Moving on from Locksley is inevitable.  Knowing that, there isn’t great rationale for waiting, even when factoring in the $1M that could be saved by waiting until after the season.

The money

Half the buyout comes due as a lump sum within 60 days of termination. Locksley would be owed 65 percent of his remaining compensation under the “best interests of the University” provision, with no mitigation or offset, meaning Maryland pays in full regardless of what he earns elsewhere. His total contract runs $30.5 million through 2028, with 2026 compensation of $6.4 million.

Set that against the roster. Maryland is spending an estimated $21 to $25 million on players this year. The buyout is roughly 40 percent of one season’s roster budget, and waiting until December saves about a million dollars. A million dollars is real money. It is not worth six weeks of head start in a coaching market where the good candidates come off the board in November.

Worth remembering the context: last November, Athletic Director Jim Smith retained Locksley and publicly committed to more NIL money, explicitly noting a buyout that would then have been $13 million. Maryland chose to spend on the roster instead of the coach. The buyout has dropped by roughly $3 million in the meantime.

The roster argument

The strongest case for acting early has nothing to do with money. Maryland is going to lose a large portion of this roster in the portal no matter what happens, because that is what happens to a 2-2 team heading into a Big Ten schedule with a coach whose future is in the news every week. The only variable is whether the next staff is in place to start recruiting against that exodus in November or in January.

Franklin got the full window at Virginia Tech and turned it into 29 transfers and a 3-0 start. That is the entire argument.

Part II: What the Maryland job actually is

Every coaching search runs aground on the same thing: administrations describe the job they wish they had. Here is the one Maryland has.

The structural problems

• Maryland is not a historical power. The program has one claimed national title, in 1953, and has never been a consistent Top 25 presence in the modern era. It has produced nearly 200 NFL draft picks and fifteen first-rounders, including Vernon Davis and Darrius Heyward-Bey in the top ten, so the talent has always come through. The winning has not followed it.
• College Park sits between two pro markets. Baltimore and Washington both have NFL teams, and Maryland will never own a fall Saturday the way Penn State owns central Pennsylvania or Nebraska owns a state. Any plan that depends on becoming the region’s primary football interest is a plan that fails.
• The spending is mid-pack and the gap at the top is enormous. Maryland’s roster sits 36th nationally and 10th of 18 in the Big Ten, against a conference average of $27 to $31 million. Ohio State and Oregon spend $48 to $54 million. Maryland is not underfunded so much as unexceptional, and unexceptional in the Big Ten means losing to Ohio State by 40.
• The endowment is the smallest among the peers worth comparing to. $2.2 billion, roughly 25th to 30th among Power Four schools. Michigan is at $18 billion, Texas’ system at $42 billion. This is the ceiling on how fast Maryland can move.

The assets, which are more real than the fanbase thinks

• The recruiting base. The DMV produces elite talent every year, and Maryland has proven it can win those battles. Zion Elee is the highest-rated recruit in program history. The staff has also pulled blue-chip players out of Virginia, including Jaylen Gilchrist and Messiah Delhomme.
• The facilities are no longer an excuse. Jones-Hill House and the SECU Stadium upgrades brought Maryland into the modern era. This is not a program asking recruits to overlook the building.
• The alumni earn more than the peers Maryland loses to. Median alumni income ten years out is roughly $68,000, second in the Big Ten behind Northwestern and top five among all Power Four schools. That is ahead of Penn State at $65,000, Ohio State at $63,000, Georgia and Alabama. Maryland graduates make money.
• And they made it themselves. Roughly 90.7 percent of Maryland’s wealthy alumni are self-made, second nationally behind only Caltech and ahead of every SEC school, Michigan and Texas. Sergey Brin and Kevin Plank are the headliners. This is an entrepreneurial alumni base, not an inherited-wealth one, and it should be approached completely differently than Penn State approaches its own.
• Fundraising momentum is real. $945 million raised toward a $2.5 billion campaign by late 2025, with an annual target around $320 million. For a school that joined the Big Ten in 2014, that trajectory is good.

Part III: An honest ledger on Locksley

Whatever happens, the accounting should be fair, because the next hire depends on diagnosing the actual failure rather than the convenient one.

What he did well

• He took a program at its lowest point after the Jordan McNair tragedy and the DJ Durkin fallout, and he restored its credibility. That is not a small thing and it should not be written out of the story.
• Three straight winning seasons and bowl wins from 2021 to 2023, which Maryland had not managed in decades.
• He recruits. High school and portal both. The talent on this roster is better than the results, and the 2026 class and retention effort were genuinely good work.
• He is from here, he cares about here, and he has been an ambassador for the program in a way a hired gun would not be.

The primary knock

The criticism is not that Maryland lacks talent. It is that the talent does not get better once it arrives.

Maryland returned 71 percent of its production this season, second-most in the country. It brought back its quarterback, its best edge rusher and most of its young core, and Jim Smith gave the program more money to do exactly that. Four games in, the Terps have been outscored 89-29 in their last two and lost to a team that finished 3-9 last year by 51 points.

Development, not acquisition, is the failure. And that is the specific thing the next hire has to be evaluated on.

Part IV: Who is actually running this search

This gets skipped in most of these conversations and it probably matters more than the candidate list.

Jim Smith has never hired a football coach

Maryland’s Athletic Director since July 2025 is a revenue executive, full stop. He arrived from the Atlanta Braves, where he spent five years as senior vice president of business strategy. Before that he was president and CEO of the Ohio State University Alumni Association, running more than 80 staff and a $17 million budget. Before that he held senior roles at Arthur M. Blank Sports and Entertainment, running all revenue and marketing for the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United and helping develop the $1.6 billion Mercedes-Benz Stadium, including negotiating naming rights, sponsorships and suite sales. He is a Northwestern graduate with a master’s from Ohio State.

Three things follow, and all three shape what happens next.

• The search will be consultant-driven. Smith’s own hire was run by the firm TurnKeyZRG, and he said on arrival that he planned to lean on the counsel of Gene Smith, the retired Ohio State athletic director. That points toward a more professional process than Maryland’s hiring history suggests, and toward Ohio State-tree names surfacing.
• Retaining Locksley last November was a finance decision. A revenue executive looked at a $13 million buyout and declined, then publicly committed to spending on the roster instead. That number is $9.94 million now and drops to $8.9 million in January. He will move when the math clears, and he will be less sentimental about it than a football lifer would be.
• He is better equipped for Maryland’s revenue problem than its football one. That is not a criticism. It is the most important thing to understand about this administration, and we return to it in Part VI.

And Maryland already has a General Manager

Geroy Simon has held the title of Executive Director of Revenue Share Management and General Manager since January 2025, hired by former athletic director Damon Evans. Simon is a Maryland alum who ranks second in school history with 185 receptions, a Canadian Football Hall of Famer, and a decade-long CFL front office executive who was Edmonton’s assistant general manager and then interim general manager.

His job is narrower and more technical than the title implies. Maryland describes it as department-wide revenue-share management: player contracts, roster construction, multi-year salary cap management, analytical modeling and budget forecasting across football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball. He is effectively the chief financial officer of Maryland’s rosters rather than a football scouting director.

That distinction matters for what follows, because what Maryland lacks is not cap management. It is the football side of personnel.

Part V: The candidates, ranked

Ranked by fit with the job described above rather than by name recognition. The question is not who is the best coach. It is who is the best coach who would take this job and succeed at it.

1. Charles Huff, Memphis

Pros. The most obvious fit on the board, and ESPN named him specifically as a top candidate if Maryland opens. He is from Denton, Maryland. He won a Sun Belt title at Marshall in 2024, then improved Southern Miss by six wins in a single season, and now runs a Memphis program that has vaulted its last three coaches to Power Four jobs. He has SEC, Big Ten and NFL assistant experience, including time with Nick Saban. He has demonstrated the one thing Maryland most needs: taking over a roster and making it better immediately.

Cons. Four jobs in four years is a pattern, and Maryland would be asking a coach who keeps moving up to stop moving. If Memphis wins big this fall he will have better options than a Big Ten team that just lost 54-3. Maryland would likely have to be aggressive and early.

2. Jake Dickert, Wake Forest

Pros. Not on anybody’s Maryland list, which is exactly why he belongs on it. Dickert has taken two genuinely difficult jobs and won at both, going 32-24 between Washington State, which he held together through conference collapse, and Wake Forest, where a 9-4 debut with a roster projected among the ACC’s weakest got almost no national attention. He is 43. If the diagnosis is that Maryland needs someone who develops and overachieves rather than someone who buys talent, he is the profile.

Cons. He grew up in Wisconsin and played there, and ESPN links him directly to that job if it opens. Maryland would be a consolation prize in a cycle where he may have a better one. No DMV ties.

3. Billy Napier, James Madison

The JMU job changes everything about this candidacy. Napier is not a fired coach sitting at home. James Madison hired him on Dec. 6, 2025 on a five-year deal worth $1.05 million a year, to replace Bob Chesney, and he inherited a program that had just gone 11-1 and reached the College Football Playoff.

Pros. He is 62-35 as a head coach. At Louisiana he went 40-12 across four seasons with four Sun Belt title game appearances and two AP Top 25 finishes, both program firsts. He is 46. Every recruiting class he signed at Florida ranked in the Top 20 nationally, and he is regarded as a recruiter and developer first, which is precisely the diagnosis on Maryland. He learned under Nick Saban at Alabama as an analyst and then wide receivers coach. And Harrisonburg is two hours from College Park, inside Maryland’s recruiting footprint, which means he already knows the players and the high school coaches who matter here.

Cons, and they are specific rather than vague. Florida went 22-23, and the number that should worry Maryland is that his teams went 5-17 against ranked opponents and 0-14 against ranked opponents on the road. He was fired on Oct. 19th, 2025 after a 3-4 start, and he declined to give up playcalling even when his offense struggled and the calls to do so got loud. A Big Ten schedule is nothing but ranked opponents, many of them away from home. His career-long weakness is the exact thing this job demands most.

And he just got there. Leaving JMU after one season, having signed a five-year contract in December, is a real obstacle. Chesney stayed two years. Cignetti stayed five. Napier would be the fastest jump of the three, and JMU would have every right to be furious about it.

4. Glenn Schumann, Georgia Defensive Coordinator

Pros. ESPN describes him as possibly the most established name in a picked-over coordinator market. He is 36, has spent his entire career at Alabama and Georgia, and was a candidate for the North Carolina job that went to Bill Belichick. He would arrive with recruiting credibility and a defensive identity, which is the half of the roster Maryland has most consistently failed to build.

Cons. No head coaching experience, no regional ties, and an industry source told ESPN that Florida State makes more sense for him. Georgia is a great place to wait. Maryland would need to significantly outbid the market to move him, and hiring a first-time head coach is precisely the bet Maryland made in 2019.

5. Dan Mullen, UNLV

Pros. 113-65 as a head coach, with consistent success at Mississippi State, a national title game appearance as a coordinator, and one of the better quarterback development records of his generation. He went 10-4 in his first year at UNLV after three years away. ESPN specifically flags him as a fit for Big Ten or ACC openings this cycle. Maryland has a young quarterback who needs coaching, and Mullen is a quarterback coach first.

Cons. He is 54 and Florida ended badly, with real questions about his appetite for recruiting and the off-field demands of a modern job. Maryland would be hiring a proven ceiling-raiser who has already shown he can plateau. This is a three-to-five-year bet, not a ten-year one.

6. Bryant Haines, Indiana Defensive Coordinator

Pros. Broyles Award winner as the nation’s top assistant, architect of the No. 2 scoring defense on a national championship team, and the most prominent branch of the Cignetti tree. He is 40, with Midwest roots and coaching stops in Virginia and North Carolina.

Cons. ESPN notes NFL teams will likely want him as a coordinator, and he may go that route. He has never been a head coach, and the Indiana halo is doing a lot of work here. Being the coordinator on a title team is not the same as being the person who built it.

7. Mike Shanahan, Indiana Offensive Coordinator

Pros. Coached a Heisman winner and the No. 1 overall draft pick, ran an offense that finished third nationally in scoring and 12th in rushing. He is 36.

Cons. Same caveats as Haines, plus ESPN explicitly reports he is in no rush to leave Cignetti. Maryland has now hired an offensive-minded coach who could not fix an offense; hiring another offensive coordinator is a bet that the problem was the person rather than the approach.

8. Jim Schwartz, unattached

Schwartz was born in Halethorpe, went to Mount Saint Joseph in Baltimore, and was a four-year letterman at linebacker at Georgetown, where he was a team captain, an Academic All-American and a distinguished economics graduate. His first coaching job was as a graduate assistant at Maryland in 1989, working with linebackers. He later coached outside linebackers for the Ravens from 1996 to 1998. This is a Baltimore person whose career started in College Park.

Pros. He is available right now, which almost nobody on this list is. Schwartz resigned as Cleveland’s defensive coordinator in February after being passed over for the head job in favor of Todd Monken, and because he was under contract through 2026 he has been sitting out the season. No buyout to negotiate, no season to wait out. He has been a head coach, taking Detroit from 0-16 to a playoff berth in 2011. He won Super Bowl LII as Philadelphia’s coordinator and was AP NFL Assistant Coach of the Year in 2023, when his Cleveland defense led the league in total and passing defense and allowed the fewest yards per game by any team since the 2014 Seahawks. His trademark is building around dominant interior defensive linemen, and the list of players who became All-Pros under him runs Haynesworth, Suh, Dareus, Mario Williams, Fletcher Cox and Myles Garrett, who won Defensive Player of the Year twice in his scheme. Maryland’s defensive front is its most talented unit and its least productive.

Cons. The college experience is real but it is from 1989 to 1992. Four years as a young assistant at Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina Central and Colgate, and nothing since. That means no current recruiting relationships, no NIL fluency and no experience managing a roster of teenagers in a portal era. He went 29-51 in Detroit. He is 59, and he stepped away from the Eagles entirely in January 2021 citing health, which is a fair thing to ask about rather than to speculate on.

Our read: the most interesting name nobody in College Park is saying out loud, and a genuinely better fit than the NFL-coordinator profile usually is, because he has actually run a building and he actually knows this one. Also the one candidate where a specific question needs a real answer before anything else: does he want to recruit?

9. Arthur Smith, Ohio State Offensive Coordinator

Pros. An actual former head coach, with three seasons running the Atlanta Falcons and three as an NFL coordinator before returning to college. He understands managing a building and a staff, which is a real and underrated part of this job.

Cons. His Atlanta tenure was mediocre, he has no college recruiting track record to speak of, and the NFL will likely come calling again. The profile is a program manager rather than a program builder, and Maryland needs the latter.

10. Brian Fleury, Seattle Seahawks Offensive Coordinator

Pros. The most interesting name on the list and the one with the deepest Maryland roots. Fleury is a Maryland native who began his playing career as a quarterback at Maryland before transferring to Towson, then returned to College Park as an intern and graduate assistant in 2003 and 2004. He later coached special teams and defensive backs at Towson. He is now the offensive coordinator for the defending Super Bowl champions, and his background is unusually broad: defensive quality control, offensive quality control, tight ends, run game coordinator, and stops with four NFL organizations.

Cons. He had never called plays at any level before this season. He has never been a head coach, never recruited, never managed NIL or boosters. The point our reader made is the right one and worth quoting back: this is not dropping down a level, it is a different job. Recruiting, collectives, donors, and coaching 18-year-olds instead of grown professionals. Being excellent at scheme does not make someone a leader of an organization, and the failure rate on NFL coordinators taking college jobs is high. If money is comparable, the question is genuinely which job he would rather do.

Our read: a fascinating candidate for a program with a stable infrastructure and a patient administration. Maryland is neither of those things right now.

The Biff Poggi question, which is its own category

Poggi belongs in this conversation and he does not belong on that list, and both things are true for the same reason.

He’s connected as anyone to Maryland’s actual recruiting base. He grew up in Baltimore’s Little Italy, graduated from Gilman in 1979, and coached there for nineteen seasons, winning thirteen state titles. In 2008 he wrote a $60,000 check to start a football program at Saint Frances Academy, a historically Black Catholic school in Johnston Square, then left Gilman to coach it and reportedly invested around $2.5 million of his own money, including funding 65 scholarships. He turned it into one of the best high school programs in the country, to the point that local teams stopped scheduling it.

That program is on Maryland’s roster right now. DeJuan Williams and Ryan Manning came out of Saint Frances. Carlton Smith spent his junior year there. Poggi made his money as a hedge fund manager, founding his own investment firm in 1986, which means he understands the collective and donor side of the modern job from the inside rather than as a thing coaches complain about. He was also generous enough with his assessment of this Maryland team in the preseason to predict eight wins, which has not aged well, but he gave it honestly.

Now the part that matters. He went 6-16 as the head coach at Charlotte and was fired with two games left in his second season. Michigan brought him back as associate head coach, named him interim for the Citrus Bowl after Sherrone Moore was fired, and then hired Kyle Whittingham for the full-time job while Poggi openly wanted it. He is 66 years old and is spending this fall as a Big Ten Network studio analyst, out of coaching entirely.

A 6-16 record at Charlotte is not a small thing to explain away for a Big Ten job, and Maryland cannot afford a hire that requires explaining. The honest read is that Poggi is the wrong answer to the question being asked and possibly the right answer to a different one.

Our recommendation: Maryland should hire Biff Poggi. Not as head coach, and not as general manager, because that job belongs to Geroy Simon and Simon is doing something different than the title suggests. Hire Poggi as director of player personnel, or whatever Maryland wants to call the football-side talent job, with real authority over evaluation, the collective’s football priorities and Baltimore-area recruiting.

The division is clean. Simon runs the cap across three sports. Poggi runs the football talent pipeline in the region he built his life in. His interim stint at Michigan drew praise specifically for culture work, reducing opt-outs and making the building a better place to be, which is the soft-skill problem a program about to lose its roster most needs solved. Pair him with a head coach who develops players and Maryland has covered both of its actual weaknesses. Hire him to be the head coach and it covers one and makes the other worse.

The James Madison pipeline, which Maryland should be studying closely

Three consecutive James Madison head coaches are now the most instructive thing on this entire board, and two of them have already been Maryland’s problem.

• Curt Cignetti coached the Dukes from 2019 to 2023, went 52-9, and turned it into the Indiana job, where he has been wildly successful and won a national championship.
• Bob Chesney replaced him, went 20-5 in two seasons, took James Madison to the College Football Playoff, and left for UCLA. He is 4-0 and beat Maryland 54-3 three weeks into his first season in Los Angeles.
• Billy Napier replaced Chesney and is there now, at a program that has produced two Power Four head coaches in consecutive hiring cycles.

James Madison is 130 miles from College Park. It is not a better job than Maryland by any conventional measure. It has a smaller budget, a smaller stadium, a smaller alumni base and no Big Ten media money. And it has become the single most reliable producer of Power Four head coaches in the country, while Maryland has produced two 4-8 seasons and a 54-3 home loss to the guy who just left.

That should be uncomfortable reading in College Park, and it is also the most useful thing available. Whatever James Madison is doing in evaluation, development and roster construction is working at a fraction of Maryland’s resources.  A program that wanted to learn something would send people to Harrisonburg rather than to a search firm.

The shape of the list

One pattern is worth naming. Of the ten names seriously in play above, only three are currently winning as head coaches somewhere. The rest are coordinators, former NFL head coaches or recent firings. That is what the market looks like for a job like this one, and it is why the search process matters more than the list. Maryland’s hiring history is a history of picking from the second tier and hoping. Huff, Dickert and Napier are the three currently doing a version of the job Maryland needs done. Everyone else is a projection of some kind.

Part VI: What Maryland should do regardless of who coaches

1. Get the roster spending to the conference median

Maryland spends $21 to $25 million against a Big Ten average of $27 to $31 million. Closing that gap costs roughly $6 million a year. That is less than the buyout, and it is the single clearest fixable disadvantage the program has. It will not make Maryland Ohio State. It will make Maryland competitive with Rutgers, Illinois, Purdue and Wisconsin, which is the actual competitive set.

2. The alumni giving gap is the biggest untapped asset in the athletic department

Maryland’s alumni participation rate is roughly 8 percent. Duke and Penn State are around 18 percent, Virginia 16, Michigan 12. Maryland has 431,000 living alumni who out-earn Penn State’s and Ohio State’s at the ten-year mark.

Put differently: Maryland has roughly 34,000 alumni donors. At Penn State’s participation rate it would have 77,000. The money exists in the base already. What does not exist is the habit, and habits are a marketing and stewardship problem, not a wealth problem.

And here is the part worth sitting with. Raising alumni participation is the single most relevant accomplishment on Jim Smith’s résumé. At the Ohio State Alumni Association he delivered a 15 percent increase in alumni participation alongside 10 percent annual revenue growth. Maryland hired, more or less by accident, the one executive in the country whose track record maps directly onto its largest structural weakness. Whatever happens with the football coach, that is what this administration should be measured on, and it is what it is actually built to do.

3. Build the pitch around self-made wealth, because that is what Maryland actually has

Ninety percent of Maryland’s wealthy alumni built it themselves, second nationally behind Caltech. That is a fundamentally different donor than a legacy-family SEC school has, and it responds to fundamentally different things: equity-style thinking, measurable outcomes, proximity to the thing being built, and founders talking to founders. Maryland should stop running the Penn State playbook on a Caltech donor base.

4. Under Armour is under-leveraged, but not in the way people assume

The relationship is foundational. Kevin Plank played football at Maryland, the Terps were the first college program to wear Under Armour in 2004, and the two sides signed a twelve-year extension through 2036.

What Maryland should not expect is a bigger check. Under Armour has cut its college commitments dramatically from a 2017 peak of $1.36 billion and paid UCLA $67.5 million in a 2022 settlement to escape a 15-year, $280 million deal. The money is not there and pretending otherwise wastes the relationship.

What is available is more valuable and cheaper, and it happens to be the exact skill set the athletic director brought from building Atlanta United and selling naming rights on a $1.6 billion stadium. Maryland should be Under Armour’s proving ground: first-to-wear product launches, uniform and gear innovation tested in College Park before it goes to market, and Baltimore-DC co-branding that treats the partnership as a regional identity rather than an apparel contract. Plank’s own story and the self-made profile of Maryland’s donor base point the same direction. A founder-themed collective, built around Plank and Brin and the entrepreneurial alumni network, is a more natural fit for this school than a traditional booster club will ever be.

5. Keep the gameday work in proportion

Jim Smith’s stadium plans are sensible. A parking and traffic study, value-priced concessions, fifty new televisions, water stations, and letting fans bring in a sealed bottle all address real complaints, and Maryland ranked second-worst in the Big Ten in gameday revenue.

But keep the scale honest. Maryland football produced about $300,000 in parking and concession sales against roughly $415,000 in game expenses in fiscal 2025. Those numbers are a rounding error against a $21 to $25 million roster. The gameday experience matters enormously for atmosphere, recruiting optics and season-ticket retention. It is not a revenue solution, and it should not be sold as one.

6. You can try to copy Indiana, but there are differences

The Cignetti comparison is the one every Maryland fan reaches for, but there are real differences. Indiana has a substantially larger alumni base, its spending went up dramatically, and Cignetti exploited a specific and now-closed window: experienced players with extra COVID eligibility, available in bulk. That inventory does not exist anymore.

UCLA under Bob Chesney is the better comparison, and Maryland just watched it up close, 54-3. Another JMU coach, another wave of players brought along from the previous job, and a roster he improved immediately through aggressive portal work. Chesney is 4-0 and has won 13 straight regular-season games going back to Harrisonburg. That is the template worth studying, including the uncomfortable part: he arrived with more talent than Maryland has, in year one, because he went and got it.

Part VII: Who we think Maryland actually hires

Huff is the pick because ESPN named him as a Maryland candidate before any of this happened, which usually means agents and industry people already expect it, and because his profile answers the actual criticism of Locksley. He improves rosters immediately at every stop.

Notice that the field is the second-largest number on the board, and that is deliberate. A consultant-run search with Gene Smith advising produces names nobody in College Park is saying yet. Maryland’s own history says the same thing from another direction. Friedgen was an alum, Edsall was a safe regional name, Locksley was in-house comfort, and the one time the program reached for a hot young coordinator it got DJ Durkin. This administration will hire for fit and story at a sensible price.

The variable that moves these numbers most is not anything happening in College Park. It is Memphis’s record. If Huff wins big this fall, Maryland is bidding against the SEC. If Memphis is ordinary, Maryland gets him comfortably.

Where this leaves things

Maryland is 2-2 with a trip to Nebraska on Saturday and a Big Ten schedule that no longer looks like an opportunity. The projection we have carried all season has the Terps at roughly six wins, which was always the number we said should not be enough for Locksley to keep his job.

One more note on the administration. Launching Atlanta United into a market that already had the Falcons, Braves and Hawks, and making it the most successful expansion launch in American soccer history, is the closest available analogue to the College Park problem. Maryland will never out-shout the Ravens and Commanders. Someone who has built an audience in a crowded market before is the right person to try.

The program’s real problem is not that it lacks money, facilities or recruits. It is that Maryland has spent a decade being the place talent passes through rather than the place talent gets better. Whoever coaches this team next has to fix that specific thing, and the search should be run with that specific question in mind.

One last note, and it matters. Mike Locksley took this job at the worst moment in its history and made it respectable again. When this ends, that should be the first paragraph of the story and not the last.

The post What Comes Next: Maryland’s Job, Its Candidates, and Its Actual Problem appeared first on Baltimore Sports and Life.

We start with what we got wrong.

Where Our Virginia Tech Preview Missed

We called Maryland’s interior rush against the Hokie line “the single best matchup the Terps have on the field.” It was the worst. Maryland had ten sacks in its first two games and one against Virginia Tech. It had four tackles for loss. The Hokies converted eight of nine third downs in the first half, scored touchdowns on five of their first six possessions, and won time of possession by more than thirteen minutes. Daniel Wingate’s own explanation was bad angles and missed tackles.

We also built the preview around Maryland’s offensive line against Virginia Tech’s edge rushers. That matchup did not decide the game. Malik Washington threw for 359 yards. Protection mostly held.

We got two things right. We wrote that Luke Reynolds against Maryland’s second level was the likeliest way Virginia Tech would score efficiently, and that Maryland had not faced a tight end like him. Reynolds caught 12 passes on 12 targets for 107 yards and a touchdown. His fourth-and-1 catch, which stood after review with Maryland out of timeouts, ended the game. We also said the missing piece was the run game against a real defense. It was missing.

The pick was Virginia Tech by three. The margin was nine, and it was never that close.

What Happened

The first half decided it. Virginia Tech led 27-14 at the break with 302 yards and went up 35-14 early in the third quarter. Ethan Grunkemeyer finished 31 of 39 for 314 yards and three touchdowns. He added an 18-yard touchdown run on third-and-goal, two plays after Nahsir Taylor sacked him in the red zone. Maryland made the play and then could not finish the series.

Maryland’s offense was fine when it had the ball. The Terps averaged 6.6 yards per play to Virginia Tech’s 5.9 and scored touchdowns on all four red zone trips. It did not have the ball much. Three Hokie touchdown drives ate 6:45, 5:49 and 6:12 of clock, and Maryland’s first two possessions of the second half ended in a three-and-out and a turnover on downs.

The run game was the other half of it. Without DeJuan Williams, Maryland ran 21 times for 64 yards. Running backs accounted for 48 of those at 2.8 a carry. Three first-quarter runs lost yardage. Mike Locksley said afterward that Maryland did neither of the two things it had emphasized since January: run the ball and stop the run.

Penalties came back. Maryland had five in the first half for 39 yards. The yardage was small and the timing was bad. Amari Jackson was flagged for pass interference on third-and-eight to extend the drive that made it 27-14. Eyan Thomas jumped offsides inside the five on that same drive, and Virginia Tech scored on the next snap.

Then the two-point tries. Maryland went for two after its first fourth-quarter touchdown and again after its second. Both failed. Kick both extra points and the score is 35-28 with the same clock. Locksley said Maryland was playing to win and declined to hide behind analytics. There is some math backing the decisions; I hated the call on first try. Get the deficit to 14, and not put yourself in a position where you would need to convert a 2 point attempt. The second attempt, their chasing the previous miss, and when you fail to convert you need multiple scores without enough clock left.  The 21 points Maryland allowed before halftime mattered more, but this was still annoying.

Some of the night was good. Washington completed 30 of 43 passes for 359 yards and three touchdowns with no turnovers. Through three games he is 83 of 115 for 892 yards, six touchdowns and no interceptions. Chris Durr Jr. caught 12 passes for 109 yards and two touchdowns, his second straight game with double-digit catches. Kaleb Webb caught five for 98. Dorian Fleming caught six passes, more than he had in the first two games combined, including his first touchdown of the season from two yards out. Maryland outscored Virginia Tech 12-0 in the fourth quarter, the reverse of last season’s pattern, though the Hokies were protecting a three-score lead.

One more detail. Jeffrey Overton Jr. had a 49-yard receiving touchdown and a rushing score. He is a Northern Virginia product Maryland recruited.

Locksley Watch

In our season preview we wrote that 4-8, 5-7, or 6-6 with a bowl should not be enough for Locksley to keep his job, and that 7-5 would at least make an argument. After the Virginia Tech loss, 6-6 is Maryland’s single most likely finish.

Who UCLA Is

UCLA went 3-9 in 2025. Chesney came from James Madison, which made the College Football Playoff last season, and brought eleven former Dukes with him. UCLA used 37 new players in the opener. Chesney has won 13 straight regular-season games dating back to Harrisonburg. He is the third UCLA coach in fifty years to start 3-0, after Terry Donahue in 1976 and Jim Mora in 2012.

The results are 45-24 at Cal, 28-10 over San Diego State and 52-38 over Purdue. The comparison everyone is reaching for is Curt Cignetti at Indiana. Purdue’s Barry Odom made it first, saying Chesney’s team has a style and identity that shows up in all three phases.

Two notes keep this in proportion. UCLA needed 21-point fourth quarters to put away both Cal and San Diego State, and it was shut out in the first half against the Aztecs. And Purdue has now lost 19 straight Big Ten games.

These teams met last October. UCLA won 20-17. Maryland pressured Nico Iamaleava throughout. He went 21 of 35 for 221 yards with a touchdown, threw two interceptions including one returned for a score, and fumbled away a sack. Almost everything around Iamaleava is different now.

The Matchup Is The Run Game

UCLA ran for 369 yards against Purdue and finished with 645, its most in a conference game since 2019. Chesney’s summary was that Purdue knew the run was coming and could not stop it. Wayne Knight, the James Madison transfer, ran for 177 yards and two touchdowns. He had 168 yards and six touchdowns through the first two games, which puts him at about 345 and eight. Anthony Woods is the complement. He ran for 118 yards and two scores at Cal.

Maryland’s run defense numbers still look good on paper. Opponents have run 98 times for 208 yards, 2.1 a carry. Virginia Tech ran 36 times for 131, a manageable number. The Hokie damage came on third down, after the catch, and on missed tackles. Against UCLA those problems will look like run defense. Through two games, before Purdue, Knight was averaging 8.0 yards a carry and Woods 9.3. If Knight gets four yards on first down, the Bruins are always in third-and-short, and Maryland could not get off the field on third-and-long against Virginia Tech.

The other side is just as plain. Maryland’s run game went from 9.1 yards a carry against Hampton to 3.5 at UConn to 3.0 against Virginia Tech. DeJuan Williams misses UCLA, Nebraska and Ohio State, likely Rutgers too, with a realistic return against Illinois on Oct. 31st. Iverson Howard and Harry Dalton have to carry it. Howard has 37 carries for 143 yards and Dalton 30 for 113, both under four a carry, and that includes Hampton. If they can’t do more, this becomes Washington throwing 40 times against a team that wants to shorten the game.

UCLA linebacker Sammy Omosigho has forced four fumbles in three games, two against Purdue. Knight turned both into touchdowns. Maryland has not lost a fumble this season.

Where Maryland Can Attack

Through Cal and San Diego State, UCLA’s defense allowed opponents to complete 32 of 65 passes for 336 yards combined, and held them to 3.4 yards a carry. Then Purdue put up 488 yards and 38 points. Ryan Browne threw for 378 yards and three touchdowns. Xavier Townsend had 162 receiving yards, 152 of them after the catch, including a 75-yard touchdown on the first play of the game.

Browne is the best quarterback UCLA has faced, and Washington is at least his equal on paper: 83 of 115 for 892 yards, six touchdowns, no interceptions. Maryland has three receivers who can win. Durr has 28 catches for 256 yards and three scores. Na’eem Abdul-Rahim Gladding has 17 for 239 and two. Webb has 11 for 167. If the run game gives Maryland anything at all, play-action is the most direct path to points.

Iamaleava is worth watching this week. He left the Purdue game twice, once after cutting a finger on his throwing hand and once after a third-quarter hit, and returned both times. He went 19 of 31 for 276 yards and three touchdowns, his first touchdown passes of the season, two of them to Semaj Morgan.

Keys To The Game

• Win first down. UCLA ran for 369 yards against Purdue. Through the first two games, Knight averaged 8.0 yards a carry and Woods 9.3. Maryland allows 2.1 a carry on paper, but missed tackles on third down cost it against Virginia Tech. Wingate, Carlton Smith and the front have to stop Knight and Woods on first down and force third-and-long. If UCLA stays in third-and-short, it controls the clock the way Virginia Tech did.
• Make UCLA tackle in space. Ryan Browne threw for 378 yards against this defense, and Xavier Townsend gained 152 of his 162 receiving yards after the catch. Durr, Gladding and Webb have to do the same. Cal and San Diego State found almost nothing against this secondary, so Maryland’s receivers decide which version shows up. Early points are also the fastest way to pull UCLA off its running script.
• Omosigho against Maryland’s clean record. He has forced four fumbles in three games. Two came against Purdue, and Knight scored after both. Maryland has not lost a fumble this season. A strip that hands Iamaleava a short field swings the game to UCLA.
• The fourth quarter. UCLA put away both Cal and San Diego State with 21-point fourth quarters. Maryland won the fourth 12-0 against Virginia Tech. Whichever team holds its identity over the last 15 minutes wins a game the market sees as close.
• Also watch the tight ends. Fleming caught six passes against Virginia Tech and his first touchdown of the season. The room now has 14 of Maryland’s 90 receptions, about 15.6 percent. Last season the tight ends drew roughly 18 percent of targets.

The Rosters

These teams were built in opposite ways. UCLA rebuilt nearly the whole roster in one winter. Maryland kept its own.

Chesney signed 40 transfers during the January portal window.  On3 ranked the class No. 11 nationally and No. 2 in the Big Ten. ESPN’s Bill Connelly called it the seventh-best portal haul of the offseason. Many of the additions followed Chesney from James Madison, including Wayne Knight and defensive lineman Sahir West. Omosigho arrived as a four-star transfer. UCLA also signed 18 high school freshmen.

The portal class went heaviest at the lines: nine defensive linemen and eight offensive linemen. An offensive line assembled in January just ran for 369 yards against Purdue.

UCLA ranks No. 25 in the 247Sports Team Talent Composite. Maryland ranked 46th when we checked before the Virginia Tech game. That metric counts only how players graded as high school recruits and ignores what they did after, so it undersells rosters built on transfers who outplayed their ratings.

UCLA has more talent across the two-deep. Maryland has more players who have played together. Through three games, UCLA’s roster has looked more comfortable in its own system than Maryland’s has against a real opponent.

What’s At Stake

ESPN’s Match-Up Predictor gives Maryland a 57.4 percent chance against UCLA. DraftKings has UCLA favored by 2.5 on the road, with a total of 56.5. The model and the market disagree on who the favorite is. A 2.5-point spread works out to roughly a 43 percent chance for Maryland. We side with ESPN. UCLA’s 645 yards came against a Purdue team that has lost 19 straight Big Ten games, and the Bruins are crossing the country to play.

The table below uses ESPN’s game-by-game numbers. At the market’s price instead of ESPN’s, Maryland’s bowl odds fall from 60.0 percent to about 55.

Maryland projects to 5.82 wins. The most likely finish is 6-6 at 30.8 percent. Preseason, the projection was 5.30 wins and a 44.0 percent chance at a bowl. Before the Virginia Tech game it was 6.33 wins and 73.5 percent.

ESPN’s Football Power Index, updated today, ranks UCLA 40th nationally, 7.4 points better than an average team on a neutral field. Maryland is 48th at 5.5. That gap is under two points, which is why home field makes Maryland the model’s favorite. FPI’s own season simulations project Maryland at 5.8-6.2 with a 58.1 percent chance of six wins, close to our numbers. They project UCLA at 7.6-4.4 with a 90.5 percent chance.

The index also shows how the rest of the schedule splits. Ohio State is No. 1, Penn State 11th, USC 18th and Nebraska 21st. Illinois (44th), Wisconsin (53rd), Purdue (75th) and Rutgers (90th) all rank below Maryland.

Most of the schedule moved against Maryland after last night’s loss. Rutgers fell from 84.6 to 81.6, Wisconsin from 66.4 to 59.9, and Illinois from 63.9 to 59.6. Purdue rose from 60.9 to 64.1 after its 0-3 start. Maryland is still favored in five of its nine remaining games. The most winnable are Rutgers at home, Purdue on the road, and Wisconsin at home.

A win over UCLA does not change the most likely finish. At 3-1, 6-6 is still the likeliest result, at 33.2 percent. A loss does change it. At 2-2, the most likely finish becomes 5-7, also at 33.2 percent.

The order of the schedule makes this game matter more. After UCLA, Maryland goes to Nebraska (19.2 percent) and Ohio State (4.4 percent). Lose to UCLA and there is a 77 percent chance Maryland is 2-4 when Rutgers comes to College Park on Oct. 17th. From 2-4, the Terps would need four of their last six, and ESPN’s numbers give that about a one-in-three chance.

Beat UCLA and Maryland is 3-1 with a 74 percent bowl probability. Lose and the season becomes about whether the Terps can win nearly every game they are supposed to win.

Prediction

Last night, I found myself wishing Zahir Mathis was healthy, and giving MD another pass rusher.
I also found myself missing Dontay Joyner in the Secondary.
Also lamented not having DeJuan Williams available at RB.

But you play with who you have available. That’s part of the game.

Maryland couldn’t run effectively last night, nor could they make the plays to get off the field defensively.

If that story continues vs. UCLA, Maryland will lose another swing game.

UCLA’s run game against looks like the biggest threat.

I expect UCLA to look like a team crossing the country, and hoping MD will respond to their loss last night.

Washington and his receivers should find some of the same room Purdue did, especially off play-action. Maryland pressured Iamaleava into three turnovers last October, and his health is a question this week. If the Terps win first down on defense and hold onto the ball, they win.

We picked Virginia Tech by a field goal last week and were short by six. The market has UCLA by 2.5.

Last night was a swing game for MD’s season, and they loss.

Saturday vs. UCLA is another opportunity, and we will see if they can take advantage.

Picking MD here feels homer ish, and more hopeful vs. logical.   Admitting that, I’ll go with Washington to find a way.

EDIT: September 24th

Based on the released injury list, I can’t take MD here.

My pick flips back to UCLA. The report hits Maryland exactly where this game is decided.

Maryland’s running back room is depleted. Dalton, Samuels, Worthy, Boley and Foye are all out, on top of DeJuan Williams. Iverson Howard is the only back on the two-deep not on that list. Howard is at 37 carries for 143 yards. Against a team that wants to shorten the game, it looks like Maryland could be one-dimensional. .

Iamaleava is not on the report. That closes the biggest open question in the preview, and it closes it in UCLA’s favor.

The one break Maryland gets is real. UCLA is missing three defensive backs in Tao Johnson, Dixon and Jamier Johnson, plus two receivers. That is the secondary that gave up 378 yards to Purdue. Washington, Durr, Gladding and Webb should move the ball. Maryland’s problem is that scoring quickly against a team built to run the clock is not the same as controlling a game.

Also Preston Howard is out at tight end, which is another loss.

The pick: UCLA 34, Maryland 27. Maryland’s passing game keeps it close into the fourth quarter, and UCLA’s run game closes it.

The post Maryland Loses To Virginia Tech; Hosts UCLA Next appeared first on Baltimore Sports and Life.

ESPN gives Virginia Tech a 58.3 percent chance to win. The Hokies are three-point favorites and the total is 54.5. Maryland is a slight home underdog, which is itself an improvement. The ESPN model had the Terps at 36.9 percent in August and has them at 41.7 now.

Here is how the game sets up.

The Numbers

Old Dominion put up 310 yards on the Hokies, ran for 123 at four yards a carry, and broke a 76-yard touchdown run.

Every number above is built on four games against lesser opponents.

Maryland’s OL Against Virginia Tech’s Front

Maryland’s offensive line has overpowered smaller teams the first two weeks. The Terps have allowed exactly one sack in two games, on a second-and-one against UConn. That follows a 2025 season in which Maryland gave up nine sacks all year, tied for the third-fewest in the country. Michael Hershey had a couple of false starts yesterday, but is a Rimington Trophy watch list center, Rahtrel Perry has started every game since arriving from Central Connecticut State, Isaiah Wright has 24 career Power Four starts, and Tellek Lockette brought 28 starts and 2,011 snaps from Texas State.

Virginia Tech has twelve sacks in two games, seven of them against Old Dominion, and 8.5 belong to three edge rushers. Mylachi Williams and Cortez Harris each had two against Old Dominion. Aycen Stevens added one and a forced fumble. Between them the trio has four forced fumbles in two weeks. Williams and Harris followed James Franklin from Penn State, where Franklin built a reputation for producing pass rushers regardless of what else was going on. Inside, Kemari Copeland is a preseason All-ACC tackle who had 4.5 sacks last season and was retained when the staff changed.

Against VMI the Hokies posted 16 tackles for loss. That number means less than it looks like, because VMI rushed 43 times for minus-four yards and has won one game in three of its last four seasons. But this is unambiguously the best defensive front Maryland has seen, and SB Nation’s Gobbler Country’s read on the edge group is that it is built to stay effective deep into games. Maryland was outscored 102-34 in fourth quarters last season. That is the specific place where a fresh, deep pass rush does its damage.

Virginia Tech’s edge rushers are built for speed rather than size. Samuel Okunlola is listed at 6-3 and 249 pounds, Aycen Stevens at 6-5 and 260. Maryland’s tackles outweigh them by 60 to 80 pounds. Inside, where the Hokies are heavier with Eric Mensah and Randy Adirika both above 315, the size gap closes. If Maryland can turn this into a downhill, heavy-personnel game, the matchup tilts. If Virginia Tech can make it a second-and-long passing game, the speed on the edge takes over.

The counter-question is whether Maryland’s line can move people. Against UConn, without DeJuan Williams, the Terps ran 36 times for 125 yards at 3.5 a carry. The 9.1 average against Hampton was a different sport. Clint Trickett ran the ball a lot at Jacksonville State. Against Virginia Tech and more equal personnel, we will see how committed and effective MD is at running the ball.

The Terps’ DL Against A Banged-up Hokie OL

Maryland’s defensive front has been the best unit on the field in both games. Ten sacks in two weeks. Hampton rushed 31 times for 10 yards. UConn rushed 31 times for 67, and Kalieb Osborne, who had 92 rushing yards against Lafayette, was held to 30 on 13 carries with 26 of those coming on one scramble.

That is a meaningful result, because Osborne is the kind of quarterback who has historically given Maryland trouble. The Terps kept him inside the tackles and spied him with Carlton Smith. Derrick LeBlanc had two sacks. Zion Elee got his first career sack and stripped the ball on it. Eyan Thomas and DD Holmes had two apiece the week before. The interior has produced in both games; again against smaller, inferior competition.

Virginia Tech’s offensive line looks like a soft spot. The Hokies rushed 42 times for 89 yards against Old Dominion, and their top two backs, Marcellous Hawkins and Jeffrey Overton Jr., combined for 25 carries and 90 yards. Gobbler Country’s explanation is that Old Dominion sold out to stop the run, which is fair and also a plan other teams will copy. Starting center Kyle Altuner missed that game with an injury and his status has not been clarified.

The Hokies also allowed four sacks to Old Dominion. Maryland has ten sacks in two weeks. If Altuner is out again, Maryland’s interior rush against a backup center is the single best matchup the Terps have on the field.

The QBs

Both are playing well and neither has thrown an interception.

Washington was ordinary against Hampton and then went 34-of-41 for 347 yards against UConn with a 170.1 rating, including 18 consecutive completions, the longest such streak by a Terp since at least 1953, and 16-of-16 to open the second half. He had a couple of really spectacular high-level throws. He also had two running decisions which were questionable. A 3rd and short early where he ran vs. making the easy completion to the opening RB. And later in the 4th Quarter with a significant lead, he choose contact vs. getting rid of the ball.  Maybe the 4th Quarter play is more on the Coaches for still having him out there.

Grunkemeyer has been steady so far. The Penn State transfer missed three throws against VMI and then completed 31 of 42 for 327 against Old Dominion, spreading the ball to eleven different receivers. He works short and intermediate and lets the playmakers Franklin has assembled do the rest.

Each has a soft spot worth watching. Grunkemeyer missed Que’Sean Brown deep twice against VMI on throws that would have been touchdowns, and Gobbler Country suggested timing rather than arm. Maryland’s secondary gave up touchdown passes of 36 and 39 yards to UConn, so the Terps have their own reason not to feel good about the deep ball. Washington, meanwhile, has started slowly in both games. He completed four passes for 15 yards in the first quarter against Hampton, and against UConn the first fifteen plays were nearly all passes and produced almost nothing until he took a hard hit early in the second quarter and settled in. Virginia Tech jumped on Old Dominion early and led 34-6 at halftime. A slow Maryland start in a night game against this front is how the evening gets away.

Skill Positions

Maryland’s receiver room has sorted itself out faster than expected. Na’eem Abdul-Rahim Gladding has 14 catches for 187 yards and two touchdowns, including a 60-yarder at UConn. Chris Durr has 16 for 147 and a score, with a career-high ten receptions on Saturday. Kaleb Webb dropped two against Hampton and answered with five catches for 60 yards in East Hartford. That is three functional options, which is two more than the room had a month ago. Really nice game vs. UConn for all three of them, as each made a couple of contested catches, and found YAC.

The tight ends remain underused. Dorian Fleming has four catches on seven targets in two games, and the whole room has drawn 12 of Maryland’s 80 pass attempts, about 15 percent. The two-tight-end plan that was reported in August has not shown up in the passing game. Preston Howard was banged up late, and that’s something to monitor this week.

Virginia Tech’s passing game runs through two players. Que’Sean Brown is the outside threat, and tight end Luke Reynolds has 13 catches for 158 yards and three touchdowns through two games, including eight for 108 and two scores against Old Dominion. Reynolds and Grunkemeyer were teammates at Penn State for two seasons and the chemistry travelled. At his size and speed he is a matchup problem for linebackers and safeties, and Gobbler Country is already making an All-American case.

In the backfield, Maryland’s situation is the bigger unknown. DeJuan Williams ran three times for 116 yards against Hampton, including a 94-yard touchdown, then was hurt in the second quarter and did not play against UConn. Iverson Howard has 26 carries for 121 and three scores, Harry Dalton 24 for 87 and three more. They are functional. Williams is the one who changes the math. Virginia Tech counters with Overton, who went for over 100 on nine carries against VMI, and Hawkins, who scored three times that night.

EDIT: DeJuan Williams is out 4-6 weeks after undergoing a procedure on his knee

Matchups To Note

• Williams, Harris and Stevens against Perry and Wright. Maryland has allowed one sack. Virginia Tech has twelve. Who wins here? If the Terps keep Washington clean, they can win this game; if the edges get home in the fourth quarter, the pattern from last season repeats itself. MD has a big O-Line. If they can get a consistent ground game going, they can wear teams down. Also helps with the play-action game.
• Luke Reynolds against Maryland’s second level. Daniel Wingate, Carlton Smith, Messiah Delhomme and Lavain Scruggs will all take turns on him. Maryland has not faced a tight end who can do this. It is the likeliest way Virginia Tech scores efficiently.
• Derrick LeBlanc and Eyan Thomas against a Hokie line that may be missing its center. If Maryland wins this one the run game never gets going for Virginia Tech, and Grunkemeyer becomes one-dimensional.
• Goal-to-go, for both teams. Maryland has stalled inside the ten three times in two games, settling for a field goal each time, though it has converted the majority of its goal-to-go trips. Virginia Tech bogged down inside the ten against Old Dominion too, including once at the one. In a game the models see inside a field goal, whoever finishes drives wins.
• Special Teams. The Hokies returned a punt for a touchdown and blocked a punt for another against VMI, and Brown returned one to the one-yard line against Old Dominion. Their special teams coordinator, Doug Shearer, came from four seasons at UConn. Maryland, meanwhile, had zero return yards at UConn, Sean O’Haire missed a 36-yarder, and Bryce McFerson averaged 37.0 on three punts, well below his norms. Maryland has the better specialists on paper – in a game that should be close, their performance could be the difference.

The Rosters

These teams were assembled in opposite ways, and it shows up in the 247Sports composite. Virginia Tech ranks 27th nationally in team talent. Maryland ranks 46th. The Hokies have 29 four-star players on the active roster, up from 17 a year ago, against Maryland’s 13.

The portal explains most of the gap. Franklin treated his first offseason as a volume re-tool, bringing in 29 transfers for a class that ranked 27th nationally, many of them players who had committed to or played for him at Penn State. Grunkemeyer and Luke Reynolds are the headliners. Maryland took 14, ranked 51st, and every one of them graded as a three-star. Gladding and Lockette were the significant ones.

Maryland’s counterargument is the one it has been making all year. The Terps returned 71 percent of their production, second-highest in the country, while Virginia Tech is playing its third game with a roster largely assembled ten months ago.

Bowl Probability With A Win Or Loss

Win Saturday and Maryland is 3-0 with UCLA coming to College Park, and its bowl probability sits around 88 percent. Lose and it falls to about 63 percent. One game representing a 25 point swing in bowl probability.

In our season preview we wrote that finishing 4-8, 5-7, or 6-6 with a bowl should not be enough for Mike Locksley to keep his job, and that at 7-5 there is at least an argument to be made. So run the same exercise against that threshold.

The ACC spent last weekend dismantling the Big Ten, and three of the teams it beat are on Maryland’s schedule. Boston College beat Rutgers, Duke beat Illinois and Wake Forest beat Purdue. ESPN responded by moving Maryland from 56.7 to 84.6 percent against Rutgers, from 44.8 to 63.9 against Illinois, from 48.7 to 60.9 at Purdue, and from 46.2 to 66.4 against Wisconsin. Four games that were coin flips three weeks ago are now games Maryland is favored to win, three of them comfortably. The Terps are now favored in six of their remaining ten.

Win Saturday and the single most likely finish is 7-5 at 31.7 percent, with 8-4 at 22.3. Lose and the most likely finish is 6-6 at 31.7 percent, the exact result we said should not be enough. Beating Virginia Tech makes the likeliest season one that gives Locksley an argument. Losing makes the likeliest season one that does not.

The best case scenario we described in August – beat Hampton, UConn, Rutgers and Purdue, then take four of six from Virginia Tech, UCLA, Nebraska, Illinois, Wisconsin and Penn State – has gone from a 4.5 percent proposition to 12.7 percent. With a win Saturday it is 22.2 percent. With a loss it is 5.9 percent.

Note, these probabilities are built from ESPN’s Match-Up Predictor, and their game-by-game predictions. So far, ESPN is reacting to a 2-0 start against soft competition and to three Big Ten teams losing to ACC opponents in a single afternoon.

The Setting

Kickoff is 7:30 on a Saturday night in College Park, with a national television window. It is the kind of game Maryland has not consistently delivered in, and the crowd will be part of the story. Virginia Tech travels as well as any program in the region, Blacksburg is under four hours from campus, and a sold-out Lane Stadium crowd for each of the first two weeks suggests a fan base that is engaged. A significant share of the stadium will be in maroon.

Some of the surrounding storylines are real without being the story. Franklin spent eight seasons at Maryland across two stints, was the coach-in-waiting before the deal collapsed in 2010, and came up on the same staff as Locksley, whom he replaced as recruiting coordinator in 2003. The two programs are now direct competitors for the same recruits, and the traffic runs both ways: two of Maryland’s better young players, Jaylen Gilchrist and Messiah Delhomme, came out of Virginia. Both staffs will be watching who is in the building Saturday night.

Prediction

Maryland has two of the three things it needs. The defensive front has been excellent, and the passing game has arrived faster than we expected. The missing piece is the run game against a real defense. If MD can run the ball effectively, I think they win. Virginia Tech will try to make MD one-dimensional. If they do that effectively, the odds move in their favor.

We would not be surprised by either result, which is roughly what a three-point spread is supposed to tell you. If Washington starts fast, if DeJuan Williams plays, and if Maryland’s interior keeps Grunkemeyer’s run game from functioning, the Terps win. If the Hokie edge rushers make it a passing-down game and Reynolds works the middle of the field, Virginia Tech could win comfortably.

This is a winnable game for MD. This is a swing game for MD.

Could go either way with the pick, but I’ll say Virginia Tech by a field goal.

The post Virginia Tech at Maryland: The Swing Game Comes Early appeared first on Baltimore Sports and Life.

Our season preview listed eight things to watch in September. The expected result vs. Hampton answered several of them, left others open, and raised one nobody had on the list.

Maryland next heads to East Hartford to face UConn in Week 2.
After that, the Terps will host James Franklin and the Virginia Tech Hokies in Week 3.

What the Terps answered

The run game showed up, as Maryland had 40 carries for 365 yards. Zack Kiesel noted in his preview that Maryland had not rushed for more than 175 yards in its previous three games against FCS opponents. The Terps more than doubled that. They scored six rushing touchdowns, the program’s most since 2001, after managing nine in all of 2025.

The volume matters as much as the yardage. Maryland averaged 25.4 rushing attempts a game last season, the fewest of any offense in Division I. Saturday the split was 40 runs and 38 passes. Even if you throw out DeJuan Williams’ 94-yard touchdown, the second-longest run in program history, it is still 39 carries for 276 at 7.1 a clip.

Locksley did not hedge about why it matters. He has said Maryland’s chance to be successful each week will start with the ability to run the football, and called Saturday a good start.

The defensive front showed up. Hampton ran 31 times for 10 yards. The Terps had five sacks, two apiece from Eyan Thomas and DD Holmes, and Holmes did it lining up on both the edge and inside after making a single start in his career. Maryland forced three interceptions, posted its first shutout since 2022, and allowed Hampton past midfield twice all night.

Messiah Delhomme had two of those picks. He was the player we singled out as most likely to make a leap, and he opened by making one. Jayden Shipps had the third.

And the return game, which was genuinely bad last season at 7.0 yards per punt return and 92nd nationally, produced two returns for 58 yards. New special teams coordinator Matt Barnes had a good first night.

What the Terps did not answer

The passing game was the worst part of a 62-point win, and it was worse than the box score suggests.

Malik Washington went 19-of-31 for 186 yards, the second-lowest total of his career. He completed four passes in the first quarter for 15 yards. Locksley said Washington forced some things and was pressing early, and named the quarterback’s reads as the specific fix. Washington said he needed to watch the tape before evaluating himself, which is the right answer and also not a rebuttal. The telecast relayed that Washington had shared he wanted to hit more singles this year vs. always looking for the big play. He missed a number of each opportunities last night.

We argued Maryland had removed the nation-leading 39 drops and the receiving production in the same transaction, and that the room was a coin flip rather than an upgrade. Week 1 came down on the unhappy side. Maryland’s receivers dropped four passes with Washington in the game, starting with Chris Durr dropping the first throw of the season. Locksley volunteered that Kaleb Webb had two in the first half and that dropping the ball has not been like him. Webb, who reportedly rose to the top of the depth chart in camp, finished with one catch for nine yards on five targets.

The tight end plan did not show up either, at least not in the passing game. Maryland was reported to be planning significant two-tight-end personnel as a way to manufacture throws around a thin receiver room, and Clint Trickett developed a Mackey Award winner at Florida Atlantic. Saturday, Dorian Fleming, AJ Szymanski and Preston Howard combined for five targets out of 38 attempts, about 13 percent, against roughly 18 percent of completions a year ago. The TE blocking was strong, and helped the running game. There was less production in the passing game than you’d hope for, even if they weren’t needed to produce vs. Hampton.

Maryland scored touchdowns on roughly eight of ten trips inside the 20, which is a large improvement on last year’s 37.8 percent, worst in FBS. That’s good, but there is still room for improvement. Both failures were goal-to-go, and both looked exactly like 2025. First-and-goal at the Hampton 7 in the first quarter produced a run for minus-one and two incompletions, and a 26-yard field goal. Against an FCS defense.

What UConn actually is now

Kiesel covered the background in his two-game preview, so the short version: Jim Mora left for Colorado State, Jason Candle arrived from Toledo with a nearly new staff, and the roster turned over with close to 60 portal additions. The 9-4 UConn team people remember does not exist.

What replaced it looked good. UConn beat Lafayette 56-7 for 671 yards, a program record, and led 21-0 after one quarter. The quarterback competition resolved in favor of Kalieb Osborne, the Toledo transfer who followed Candle east, and he went 19-of-26 for 265 with two touchdowns and an interception while leading the team with 92 rushing yards. He threw for 124 and ran for 45 in the first quarter alone.

A dual-threat quarterback already fluent in his head coach’s system is a different assignment than a first-year starter learning one, and Osborne scrambled for two touchdowns when the pocket collapsed rather than throwing the ball away. Defensive Coordinator Ted Monachino’s preference is man coverage on the outside with pressure behind it. Man coverage against a quarterback who runs when nothing is open is how explosive plays happen.

The Huskies gave two things away, though. They were penalized for 134 yards, and Candle said afterward there is no appetite for the pre-snap operation problems, which is a first-year staff talking.
The UConn Defense had two sacks, four tackles for loss, and 209 yards allowed to a Patriot League team that threw 42 times.

Is Maryland an improved team on the ground?  Ground success vs. the Huskies would certainly tell you more than anything we saw against Hampton.

What we are watching Saturday

• DeJuan Williams’ health. This is the top item and it was not in anybody’s preseason plan. Williams picked up a knock (Minor knee tweak) early in the second quarter, which is why the leading rusher finished with three carries for 116 yards. Iverson Howard handled the rest of the night and scored twice, and Harry Dalton averaged 5.6 a carry, so the depth held up against Hampton. Williams is assumed to be available vs. the Huskies. If he’s not, that could impact the expected result.
• Whether the run commitment survives adversity. Forty carries against an FCS team that allowed 233 rushing yards a game last season is easy. The test is what Trickett calls on second-and-8 in the second quarter of a one-score road game. Last season Maryland ran it more than 30 times in exactly two games all year.
• The drops. Four in Week 1. If that number stays in the same neighborhood against an FBS defense, the receiver rebuild has not fixed the problem it was supposed to fix, and the preview’s coin-flip framing lands on the wrong side.
• Washington’s first quarter. He completed four passes for 15 yards in the opening period and settled in later. If MD is going to surprise this year, Washington has to be consistently excellent. Will be looking for a rebound performance vs. UConn.
• Tight end usage. Target share was down in Week 1. If it is down again, the two-tight-end plan is a talking point rather than a scheme.
• Whether Zion Elee shows up. One tackle in the opener. The five-star was supposed to help replace Zahir Mathis, and Maryland’s pass rush was excellent Saturday without much from him. Both of those things can be true and only one of them is sustainable.
• The interior of the defensive line against real linemen. Thomas and Holmes were dominant against FCS blocking. UConn just rushed for 301 yards on 40 carries. This is a better test of the group for the MD lineman.
• Field position. Sean O’Haire and Bryce McFerson are plausibly the best specialist tandem in the Big Ten, and the coverage and return units were bottom-third in the conference last year. Week 1 was encouraging on both counts. A road game decided by a possession is exactly where that shows up.

Where the numbers sit

ESPN gives Maryland a 73.6 percent chance to win, down from 77.7 before the season. Maryland won 62-0 and the model likes them slightly less, which is not a criticism of the Hampton performance so much as an acknowledgment that UConn also looked good and the two updates did not cancel out.

The betting market is more bullish. Maryland is favored by 13.5, which converts to something in the neighborhood of 79 or 80 percent using a normal model and a typical college scoring-margin spread. When a predictor sits below the spread, it is usually seeing something in the efficiency numbers, and Maryland’s passing efficiency is the obvious candidate.

Rerunning our full-season math with Hampton banked and UConn at 73.6 gives 5.27 expected wins against a preseason 5.30, with bowl probability at 43.2 percent against 44.0. One week in, nothing has moved. Our projection stays 5-7 with 6-6 live.

Maryland did what it was supposed to do to a FCS opponent.  Not a lot to take from a game when you have physical mismatches everywhere, particularly on the lines.
Next Saturday at UConn we will start to find out more about the Terps.

The post Maryland Heads To UConn To Face The Huskies appeared first on Baltimore Sports and Life.

Throughout head coach Michael Locksley’s tenure in College Park, Maryland has dominated the months of August and September, compiling a 21-5 record before the calendar flips to October. They’ll likely be heavily favored in their first two games against Hampton and UConn, opening as 45.5-point favorites against the Pirates this weekend. These games ought to provide Locksley with the opportunity to get a number of different players on the field and give his offense some time to gain comfortability with new offensive coordinator Clint Trickett’s scheme.

Speaking of Trickett, it’ll be interesting to see what his offense looks like to begin this season. Under Pep Hamilton last year, Maryland ran a very pro-style scheme with quarterback Malik Washington spending a significant amount of time under center and not using much tempo. This was a clear departure from Locksley’s preferred scheme, which is much more spread out and uses tempo as a tool to keep opposing defenses off-guard. Trickett’s offense seems much more in line with these preferences, as he’s successfully blended Air Raid passing principles with a fast-paced rushing attack at both Marshall and Jacksonville State. Expect to see the offense moving much more quickly, and for Washington to use his legs as a weapon more often.

Defensively, Locksley will be hoping that continuity leads to success as defensive coordinator Ted Monachino enters his second season working with players like Sidney Stewart, Daniel Wingate, Trey Reddick, Jamare Glasker, and Messiah Delhomme. His scheme is typically aggressive, preferring to play man coverage on the outside with a number of exotic blitz packages. He’ll also mix up his zone coverages, using a combination of one and two-high safety looks with late rotations common to confuse opposing quarterbacks.

Maryland’s new special teams coordinator is Matt Barnes, and he’ll have two of the better specialists in the conference to work with this season. Sean O’Haire returns for his second year as the Terrapins’ starting kicker, after converting 21 of his 24 field goal attempts and earning First Team All-Big Ten honors in 2025. Bryce McFerson is back for his third season in College Park, and earned Second Team All-Big Ten honors last year after putting together the sixth-best punting average in program history.

Game One: Hampton Pirates

Maryland has faced off against an FCS opponent five times under Locksley, and has won those games by an average of 43.6 points. Last season, they beat Towson by a score of 44-17 in their third game of the season. However, despite what should be a clear advantage in the trenches, they haven’t run for more than 175 yards in their last three matchups against FCS teams. Locksley and Trickett have made it clear that they’ve placed a large emphasis on running the ball more efficiently this season, so look for them to pound the rock early and often on Saturday night.

On the opposite side of the ball, Maryland’s defensive front ought to have a significant advantage in the trenches. Defensive coordinator Ted Monachino will likely experiment with a handful of different combinations as he attempts to replace starting pass-rusher Zahir Mathis who suffered a season-ending injury during practice last month. Five-star phenom Zion Elee is set to play a significant role immediately, and having success getting to the quarterback right off the bat would do wonders for his confidence. Monachino received a major boost earlier this week, when Locksley announced that starting cornerback Dontay Joyner, who’d been dismissed from the team following his arrest in June on harassment-related charges, would be returning to the team after all for the 2026 season. After so much time away from the team during the summer, he’ll likely need to be eased back into a starting role.

Game Two: UConn Huskies

Maryland’s first test against an FBS opponent in 2026 will come in East Hartford, where they haven’t played since 2013. UConn has a new head coach in Jason Candle after Jim Mora left for Colorado State after leading the Huskies to a 9-4 record last season. Candle comes from Toledo, where he’d been on the coaching staff for 18 years including the last ten as head coach. As is typically the case when a coaching change occurs nowadays, their roster has been completely overhauled with nearly 60 additions in the transfer portal. Two of those additions were quarterbacks Jake Merklinger (Tennessee) and Kalieb Osborne (Toledo), who are still competing for the starting job prior to their season-opener against Lafayette.

It’s often difficult to know what to expect from a team like UConn whose entire roster has been turned upside down from last season. While Maryland will likely be heavily favored, it’ll be important for them to build on what ought to be a strong performance against Hampton and not allow the Huskies to hang around longer than they should.

The post Previewing Maryland Football’s First Two Games appeared first on Baltimore Sports and Life.

There is a real case that this team is better than 4-8. There is also a real case that the players most responsible for last season’s few strengths are the ones who left. Both cases are built from the same roster, which is what makes this an interesting season rather than an obvious one.

This is a long look at the whole roster: what we like, what we are still asking, and what the first month should answer.

The short version

What we like:

• Linebacker is the surest group on the roster, and Daniel Wingate may be the best player on the team.
• Sidney Stewart and Zion Elee give Maryland a real edge tandem even without Zahir Mathis.
• Michael Hershey is settled and genuinely good at center, and he is a developmental success story.
• The tight end room is deep, talented and about to be used more.
• Sean O’Haire and Bryce McFerson are plausibly the best kicker-punter tandem in the Big Ten.
• Jamare Glasker and Messiah Delhomme are two secondary pieces worth building around.

What we are asking:

• Can this offense score inside the twenty after finishing last in FBS in red zone touchdown rate?
• Does the run game move at all, and how much of Clint Trickett’s rushing résumé was scheme?
• Who catches the ball in a room that returns 37.8 percent of its production?
• Can the interior defensive line hold up after losing two starters from a unit that was already 99th against the run?
• Does the secondary survive losing an NFL third-round pick and an all-conference corner in the same year?
• Can Maryland finally win a close game, and hold up in the fourth quarter?

Setting the table

The 2025 season had two halves and no middle. Maryland started 4-0, beating Florida Atlantic, Towson, Northern Illinois and then Wisconsin on the road, 27-10. It then lost eight straight to finish 4-8 and 1-8 in the Big Ten. The first three of those losses came by a combined ten points: four to Washington, three to Nebraska, three to UCLA. The Terps went 0-3 in one-score games on the year.

Two numbers explain most of it. Maryland finished last in FBS in red zone touchdown rate at 37.8 percent, and it was outscored 102-34 in fourth quarters. That is an offense that could move the ball and not finish, attached to a defense and a roster that could not hold up late. The Terps also forced 21 interceptions and were still outscored on the season, which puts them in a group of three FBS teams that managed that particular trick.

Locksley responded with two significant hires. Clint Trickett arrives as offensive coordinator from Jacksonville State, replacing Pep Hamilton after one difficult year. Trickett comes out of the Dana Holgorsen tree, having played for him at West Virginia, and his Jacksonville State offense led Conference USA in total yards. Matt Barnes takes over special teams, hired in March on short notice after Chili Davis was promoted and then poached by the Minnesota Vikings. Barnes is a Frederick native and Urbana High graduate returning for a second Maryland stint, having previously run the Terps’ special teams from 2016 to 2018 before three seasons at Ohio State and coordinator jobs at Memphis and Mississippi State. Ted Monachino returns for year two as defensive coordinator, with Aazaar Abdul-Rahim as co-coordinator.

The roster churn cut both ways. Maryland kept Malik Washington, Stewart and most of its young core, which in the current era is its own kind of win. It lost Aliou Bah to LSU and Alan Herron to the NFL on the offensive line, Kevyn Humes to Rutgers and Dontay Joyner off the roster in the secondary, and Dillon Fontus to Syracuse up front. Safety Jalen Huskey went to Jacksonville in the third round of the draft. Zahir Mathis, a Freshman All-American, was lost for the season to an August injury.

The Offense

Quarterback

Malik Washington is the reason for most of the optimism around this team, and the reason is legitimate. He became Maryland’s first freshman to start a season opener since 2012, started all twelve games, and completed 273 of 473 passes for 2,963 yards with 17 touchdowns and nine interceptions. He also announced early that he was staying, which mattered.

The efficiency numbers are the other side. Washington completed 57.7 percent of his throws and posted a 118.4 passer rating that ranked 108th out of 117 qualifying FBS quarterbacks. ESPN put him in its eighth tier of quarterback situations. On The Solid Verbal, Ty Rubenstein’s critique was about touch: that Washington throws nearly everything at maximum velocity and needs to modulate on the five-yard out and the fifty-yard ball alike.

That critique deserves a large asterisk. Maryland’s receivers dropped 39 passes last season, more than any unit in the country. Some meaningful share of the completion percentage belonged to the room rather than the arm. The complication is that Maryland removed the drops and the production in the same transaction, so we will not know how much of the accuracy problem was his until he is throwing to people who catch it.

One underrated asset: Washington was Maryland’s second-leading rusher with 303 yards at 5.4 a carry. In a spread system that is a cheap way to add numbers to the run game, and Trickett’s offenses have historically used the quarterback.

Behind him the depth is unproven but interesting. Cardell Williams arrives from Sacramento State having thrown for 1,651 yards and ten touchdowns while also, per our earlier reporting, running for 382 yards and twelve scores. If that rushing line holds, he is an obvious short-yardage package waiting to be built, and Maryland was last in the country inside the twenty. Jack Capaldi, Max Lawrence and freshman Nathan Bernhard round out the room.

Running Back

This is the group most people have ranked last on the roster, and the production supports that. Maryland attempted 305 runs last season, fewer than any offense in Division I, and averaged 104.3 rushing yards a game, its lowest figure since joining the Big Ten in 2014. The per-carry average did climb from 3.6 to 4.1.

DeJuan Williams is better than his rushing line suggests. He led the team with 927 all-purpose yards, set a Maryland single-season record for receiving yards by a running back with 426 (breaking Bruce Perry’s 359 from 2001), and led all Big Ten backs with 45 receptions. He was named the team’s Freshman Offensive Player of the Year. He also ran for 501 yards on 128 carries at 3.9 a pop with two runs longer than 20 yards all season, which is the part that has to change.

Worth remembering who he is. Williams was a four-star out of Saint Frances who chose Maryland over Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State. A back with that profile averaging 3.9 is at least partly a blocking and play-calling story rather than a talent story.

The depth is where the questions live. Harry Dalton arrived from USC with real high school recognition in Virginia and has eight career carries for 44 yards. Terrez Worthy is the most explosive name on paper, having led all juco rushers with 1,492 yards and ten touchdowns at Lackawanna in 2023 and averaged 5.4 a carry at Temple in 2024 with a 75-yard touchdown against Tulane, but he left Temple four games into 2025 for personal reasons and finished with 71 yards on 23 carries. He also returns kicks. Iverson Howard, a three-star per 247 and an ESPN 300 four-star per ESPN, averaged 3.2 on 39 carries and handled kickoff returns.

Locksley said in camp that Williams, Howard and Dalton have all come along and given him hope the run game shows up. Inside MD Sports reports that nobody behind Williams has separated. When the coach and the people at practice every day see it differently, September settles it.

Wide Receiver

The honest answer here is that nobody knows, and anyone claiming otherwise is guessing.

Only 37.8 percent of Maryland’s receiving production returns. Shaleak Knotts, Jalil Farooq and Octavian Smith Jr. are all gone, and the nation-leading 39 drops went with them. The addition-by-subtraction argument has genuine merit. It is also true that the top returning receiver is Kaleb Webb with 22 catches for 318 yards, and that Maryland threw for 98 yards against Rutgers, its lowest total since 2022.

The reasons for optimism are real even if unproven. Chris Durr, in from Wyoming with 45 catches for 469 yards, won the Torrey Smith Wide Receiver Award in the spring and has reportedly built strong chemistry with Washington. One source described him as potentially the best after-catch runner Maryland has had in a while, which is the most useful trait a receiver can have in a spacing offense trying to manufacture easy yards. Jeff Ermann independently reported the same buzz in August. Na’eem Abdul-Rahim Gladding caught 51 passes for 667 yards and six touchdowns at Old Dominion with 100-yard games against Coastal Carolina and Appalachian State, earned All-Sun Belt honorable mention. Webb has reportedly moved to the top of the depth chart, and he was a top-200 four-star who was targeted oddly infrequently last season despite being more reliable than the players around him.

There is more talent in this room than the production suggests. Ryan Manning, who has three career catches, was a top-100 national receiver coming out of Saint Frances. Zymear Smith was a four-star ESPN 300 signee who picked Maryland over Alabama, Penn State and South Carolina, redshirted, spent a stretch at defensive back and is now back at receiver. Sean Williams was a top-five player in D.C. Ejani Shakir caught 43 passes for 724 yards at Independence C.C. Jordan Scott was the No. 2 juco receiver in his cycle and spent a season at Florida State, though he did not crack the rotation here last year.

One structural note that matters for the red zone. This is among the tallest receiver rooms in the Big Ten. Scott is 6-foot-7. Webb and freshman Josiah Teasley are 6-5. Jayden Kitchens is 6-3. Spacing does not solve the goal line, where the field shrinks, but catch radius might. If Maryland finds red zone touchdowns this fall, jump balls are a plausible mechanism that has nothing to do with the run game. The counter-question is the right one: whether these receivers separate at the top of a route against Big Ten corners, which is a different job than winning contested balls in the Sun Belt or Conference USA.

Tight End

This may be the most improved situation on the roster, and it is the clearest place to check whether the new scheme is real.

Dorian Fleming tied for second among Big Ten tight ends with 40 receptions for 351 yards and three touchdowns, earned honorable mention All-Big Ten, and is on the John Mackey Award watch list for a second straight year. His nine catches against Washington were the second-most by any FBS tight end in a game last season and the second-most by a Maryland tight end in thirty years. He shared the team’s spring leadership award with Mathis.

Preston Howard is back after three seasons at Maryland and a year at Auburn, where he started seven games. He has been candid that Auburn was not his best year or his best headspace, and he is reportedly in the best shape of his career. AJ Szymanski is a legitimate in-line blocker at 6-6 who played all twelve games with three starts. JT Taggart, Willie Taggart’s son, gives the room another body, and the freshman class adds three more.

Trickett developed Harrison Bryant into a Mackey Award winner at Florida Atlantic, and Maryland is expected to play a significant amount of two-tight-end personnel as a way to manufacture throws around a thin receiver room. Maryland’s tight ends caught 49 passes last season, under 18 percent of Washington’s completions. If that share does not climb, the scheme change is smaller than advertised.

The caveat comes from Fleming himself. Drops were a problem for him and his blocking was inconsistent, and he has said his own next step is being seen as a physical blocker rather than only a pass catcher. Two-tight-end sets only work if the second tight end can block. Otherwise it is an announcement to the defense.

Offensive Line

Start with the good number, because it is a very good number. Maryland allowed nine sacks last season, the fewest by any Big Ten team since 2020 and tied for third-fewest in the nation.

Now the complications. The same unit graded in the high 40s and low 50s as run blockers across most of its starters, and Inside MD Sports reports the sack total was aided by an inordinate number of screens under Hamilton. So the line’s best trait was partly a play-calling artifact, and Trickett is being asked to improve its weakest trait while running a scheme that may put its strongest at risk. Two starters are gone in Bah and Herron.

Michael Hershey anchors it and deserves more attention than he gets nationally. He came out of high school a three-star ranked the 213th defensive lineman in the country, choosing Maryland over Charlotte, Yale and Delaware. He started all twelve games at center, allowed zero sacks and ten pressures, posted an 83.5 PFF pass-blocking grade, and now sits on the Rimington Trophy watch list with Phil Steele rating him the eighth-best draft-eligible center in the country. The Athletic included him among the top interior linemen in a re-rank of the 2024 recruiting class.

Rahtrel Perry returns at left tackle after starting all twelve games, a Central Connecticut State transfer who was a first-team All-NEC pick and a top-ten portal tackle when he arrived, with two years of eligibility left. Isaiah Wright started all twelve at left guard and has 24 career Power Four starts across Rutgers, Buffalo and Maryland, and he is moving to tackle this fall. Tellek Lockette is the headline addition, a Texas State transfer with 28 career starts and 2,011 snaps whom Pro Football Network rated the top offensive lineman among small-school transfers to the Power Four. He allowed no sacks and no pressures in 131 snaps last season before a lower leg injury ended his year, which is excellent and a small sample at the same time.

The upside piece is Jaylen Gilchrist, an ESPN 300 signee who was the 80th overall recruit in his class and lost 2025 to an injury in the opener. He is the highest-rated lineman on the roster and is competing for a starting guard job as a redshirt freshman. Ryan Howerton, a 6-6, 332-pounder who moved in from tackle, and Amory Hills are in that competition too. The belief inside the building is that this group is nastier and more physical than a year ago. The running game will be the evidence either way.

The Defense

The returning production, read closely

Maryland brings back 74 percent of its defensive production and eight starters. It does not bring back the players who earned recognition.

Jalen Huskey was the team’s Defensive Player of the Year, a captain and a second-team All-Big Ten safety with 72 tackles and four interceptions, and he ranked sixth among Big Ten safeties in PFF total defense grade before Jacksonville took him 100th overall. Cam Rice was honorable mention All-Big Ten on the defensive line and graduated. Dontay Joyner was honorable mention All-Big Ten at corner with eight pass breakups and left the program in August. Dillon Fontus started inside and transferred to Syracuse. Zahir Mathis was a Freshman All-American with 8.5 tackles for loss and six sacks and is out for the year.

Stewart and Wingate are the returning honorees. That is not a prediction of collapse. It is a reason to hold the 74 percent lightly, because volume and quality are not the same thing.

One note on how the units get counted. Maryland lists Stewart and Elee at linebacker, our depth chart puts SAM with the defensive line, and Inside MD Sports grouped edges with the line for its rankings. Count the edges as line and the front looks good, because they are the two best young players on this defense. Count them as linebackers and the line looks thin while the linebacker room looks excellent. We are treating the edges as part of the front here.

Edge

Sidney Stewart’s freshman season was outstanding: 32 tackles, 10.5 for loss, seven sacks, seven quarterback hits, two pass breakups, a forced fumble and a forced safety. He arrived a three-star and a top-40 player in Maryland who chose the Terps over West Virginia, Boston College and Indiana. Keeping him was a real offseason win.

Zion Elee is the highest-rated prospect the program has ever signed, a five-star already named to the Shaun Alexander Freshman of the Year watch list. He is listed at SAM in an OR with Stewart, which means Monachino has a decision about how to get both on the field.

Mathis’s injury is the complication. He and Stewart combined for 13 sacks and 19 tackles for loss last season, and half of that is gone. The listed replacement at JACK, Nahsir Taylor, had 19 tackles, three tackles for loss and two sacks in eleven games. The underlying question is whether Stewart can be a primary rusher rather than a complementary one. At 6-2 and 255 he is built more like a base end than a prototypical edge, and being the player every Big Ten tackle game-plans for is a different job. Maryland On SI’s Jaden Golding is betting yes and projects double-digit sacks. That is the optimistic case and it is a fair one.

Interior DL

This is the group we are watching hardest.

Maryland allowed 175.6 rushing yards a game last season, 99th in FBS, with Rice and Fontus playing. Both are gone. Add up the 2025 tackles for every projected interior contributor, across four different programs, and the total is 82. Wingate had 102 by himself. Their combined tackles for loss come to nine. Stewart had 10.5 alone.

The counterweight is pedigree, and it is not nothing. Bryce Jenkins was a four-star ESPN 300 signee and the No. 2 recruit in D.C. in his class. DD Holmes was also a four-star ESPN 300 and the No. 2 player in D.C. in his. Derrick LeBlanc, in from UCF, was the 51st overall recruit in the country out of high school. JaMarcus Whyce is a four-star freshman who ranked 17th in Ohio. EJ Moore was a Phil Steele FCS Freshman All-American before he arrived. Eyan Thomas, a second-team All-NEC pick at Saint Francis, is the returning piece at 6-3 and 328. Lavon Johnson comes back from Texas, and Armon and Jayvon Parker arrive from Washington with size and 32 combined games.

Counting stats are a poor way to judge young rotational linemen, so we would not write this room off. Jenkins and Holmes are entering the years when interior linemen typically arrive. But this is the group Big Ten offenses will test first, and we will have to wait and see if there is improvement here or not. I like some of the depth that was added, but we have to see them perform.

Linebacker

It’s been argued by some that Wingate, not Washington, is currently the best player on the team. It is defensible.

Wingate had 102 tackles, sixth in the Big Ten and 35th nationally, with 6.5 tackles for loss, 1.5 sacks and a pick six against Florida Atlantic. He is the first Terp to reach 100 tackles since Tre Watson in 2018, and he did it playing through a high ankle sprain for most of the season without missing a snap. His teammates voted him the Louis L. Goldstein Gold Helmet Award as the program’s most outstanding player. He is on the Butkus, Bronko Nagurski and Chuck Bednarik watch lists. Monachino called him the player who holds the whole thing together and said there can never be enough of him. Lavain Scruggs said a fully healthy Wingate is a complete monster.

Trey Reddick started ten of eleven games with 53 tackles, 5.5 tackles for loss and two sacks, and he is a 6-4 athlete who was a three-time state champion at Phoebus and chose Maryland over Wake Forest, North Carolina and Penn State. The knock is that his length and his habit of launching at ball carriers produce some missed tackles. Carlton Smith finished fourth on the team with 64 tackles despite one start as a true freshman, tied for second in quarterback hurries, and picked Maryland over Alabama, Miami, Penn State and Notre Dame. He looks like the next one.

Stephen Dean III arrives from VMI, where he led the Southern Conference with 117 tackles as a captain and added 9.5 for loss. Locksley has pointed to his physicality and special teams value. Jordan Williams is the roster’s most unusual story, a grad transfer who spent four seasons playing college basketball at Texas A&M, Vanderbilt and Rice before returning to a sport he last played as a high school sophomore, when he was a Texas state MVP. His father played five NFL seasons at running back and his brother is on Tampa Bay’s roster.

The returners here combined for 23 starts, against one start for the group that came back a year ago. The depth thins after the top four, though Kaden Carter is a four-star freshman rated the seventh-best inside linebacker in his class and Travares Daniels II was a top-100 player in Florida. Unproven is not the same as untalented. How many snaps Wingate and Reddick hold up for will decide whether this is a strength or a thin strength.

Secondary

Maryland finished third-to-last in the Big Ten in passing yards allowed and last in the conference in passing touchdowns allowed. It gave up 43 percent on third down, and only Illinois and Northern Illinois were held under 215 yards through the air. Then it lost Huskey and Joyner. That is the case for worry, and it is a strong one.

The case for optimism starts with Jamare Glasker. The redshirt senior tied for the team lead and ranked fourth in the Big Ten with four interceptions, including three straight games with a pick, the longest such streak by a Terp since William Likely III in 2014, and he returned one for a touchdown against UCLA. He added six breakups and 32 tackles. The staff believes he is a quality No. 1 corner and that belief looks earned.

Amari Jackson gives Maryland experience opposite him, with 28 starts across four years at Boston College, two career interceptions including a pick six, and an ESPN ranking of 82nd overall and fourth among corners changing schools. Abdul-Rahim coached him at BC, so the install is not starting from zero. The caveat is durability: injuries have cost him significant time each of the last two seasons, including a torn ACL that ended 2024.

Jordan Scruggs was added in mid-August after a court granted him a sixth year of eligibility, and he raises the floor. He has 35 career games and 20 starts across Washburn, Central Missouri, Hutchinson C.C., South Alabama and West Virginia, and his best season came at South Alabama in 2024 with 69 tackles and a 96-yard interception return. He was rotational at West Virginia rather than a full-time starter, he is 5-11 and 166 pounds, and he arrived roughly two weeks before the opener. Floor-raiser, not a Joyner replacement.

The young corners are interesting. Sean Johnson comes from the Archbishop Spalding pipeline. Lloyd Irvin III and true freshman Hakim Satterwhite add depth. Judah Jenkins started as a true freshman in 2024, missed all of 2025, and moved back from safety for camp. Ricardo Cooper Jr., a converted receiver and former walk-on who was voted Maryland’s special teams player of the year, could see real defensive snaps.

At safety, Messiah Delhomme is the player we would bet on to take a leap. A four-star ESPN 300 signee who chose Maryland over Ohio State, Alabama and Florida State, he played all twelve games as a true freshman with 39 tackles, four pass breakups, an interception, a fumble recovery and a tackle for loss. He led the team with 12 tackles against Indiana, picked off his first pass against Nebraska, and was one of only eleven players nationally to block two kicks. He said in camp that the game has slowed down for him and credited extra film work with the assistants. That is standard camp fare, except the room just lost a third-round pick, so his development is load-bearing.

The spot next to him is a three-way question. Lavain Scruggs, a 6-3, 215-pound redshirt senior from Baltimore, started all twelve games and ranked third on the team with 64 tackles, adding two interceptions and three breakups, with a career-high eleven at Illinois. Across sixteen career starts the production has been steady and the coverage moments have not always been. Jayden Shipps, a sophomore from Spalding, played all twelve games as a freshman with eleven tackles and a sack, and coaches like what they have seen. Darrell Carey is the wild card, a DeMatha product and the class’s top-rated signee who flipped from Penn State after James Franklin’s firing and turned down Indiana and Oregon. He will play. Gavin Edwards adds depth, though the jump from Division II North Greenville and a spring at Austin Peay to the Big Ten is enormous.

One quieter thing to keep in mind across the whole defense. Maryland forced 21 interceptions and recovered two fumbles, a national low. The fumble number should improve. The interception rate is the least stable component of turnover margin and probably will not hold. The Terps were outscored even with that margin.

Special Teams

The specialists are excellent and the operation around them was not, and both halves need saying.

Sean O’Haire went 21-of-24 on field goals and 29-of-29 on extra points, earned first-team All-Big Ten as a redshirt freshman and led the conference with 1.75 made field goals per game, ninth nationally. His 87.5 percent conversion rate is the second-best single season in program history, and his 21 makes and 92 points set Maryland freshman records. He has never missed an extra point in college. He came from Richmond after going 12-for-12 in his first season ever playing football.

Bryce McFerson averaged 44.2 yards a punt, second in the Big Ten and the sixth-best single season in Maryland history, with 14 punts of 50-plus and 19 inside the 20. He was second-team All-Big Ten and earned a third career Ray Guy Award list selection. His 366 yards on eight punts at UCLA set a school record. He was the top-ranked punter in the country out of high school and averaged 45.1 at Notre Dame before transferring.

Everything else was bottom-third. Maryland ranked 92nd nationally in punt return average at seven yards, 14th of 18 in the Big Ten. It allowed 8.5 yards per punt return, fifth-worst in the conference. It averaged 18.4 yards per kickoff return, 15th. Net punting was 38.5, 13th, despite an elite leg. And a recurring short-kickoff problem handed opponents field position repeatedly.

That is why the Barnes hire matters as much as the returning talent. His Ohio State résumé includes three Big Ten titles and two College Football Playoff trips. The return jobs were still unsettled through camp, with Cooper, Howard, Durr, Gladding, Zymear Smith and Justin DeVaughn among the names. DeVaughn is worth watching for a specific reason: the redshirt freshman from Mervo recently ran the second-fastest 110-meter hurdles time in Maryland history and finished fourth at the Big Ten championships. Whether track speed becomes football speed is an open question, but Maryland needs somebody to be dangerous with the ball.

The bigger question underneath all of it

Read this roster by recruiting profile rather than last season’s box scores and a different team appears.

Locksley has recruited the DMV well. That is not in dispute, and it is why outsiders keep calling this roster underrated. Biff Poggi’s version was that Maryland has always had good skill players and now has a quarterback too. The talent has been arriving for several years, and the record over the last two seasons is 8-16.

So the question this fall is less about whether the talent is here and more about whether this staff converts it. That is a development and scheme question rather than a roster question, which makes Trickett, Barnes and Monachino’s second year the things to judge in September. Not the star ratings.

Worth saying in the other direction too, because recruiting rankings are a starting point rather than evidence. Hershey chose Maryland over Charlotte, Yale and Delaware and is now a Rimington candidate. Gladding was a zero-star recruit who led his team in catches and touchdowns. Development runs both ways, and this staff has a track record of finding players other people missed.

There is also a resource dimension worth naming. Poggi has described rosters at the top of the Big Ten running $40 to $50 million, and said a team spending $25 million is still shorthanded. Maryland is not in that business. Retention is the lever this program can actually pull, and it pulled it with Washington and Stewart; but when you are starting from an overall talent deficit to begin with – and you lose Mathis and Joyner before the first snap of the season – that obviously hurts.

The Schedule

Twelve games, with ESPN’s Match-Up Predictor win probability for each.

Three non-conference games, and each carries a different kind of test. Hampton is about installation and health. UConn is the one Maryland fans are most nervous about and, we would argue, the one where the fear is most out of date. This is not the 9-4 team people remember. Jim Mora left for Colorado State, Jason Candle arrived from Toledo with an almost entirely new staff, the offensive coordinator behind a 36.9-point offense left for TCU, and a wave of players hit the portal. That said, Candle went 81-44 at Toledo with two MAC titles and no losing season in ten years, and a brand-new staff in Week 2 is a variance game. The failure mode is treating a road opener like a walkover.

Virginia Tech at home in primetime is the game most likely to define how this season gets remembered. ESPN has Maryland at 36.9 percent, which says the model believes James Franklin’s first-year reload took. Maryland On SI’s staff mostly disagreed and picked this as the signature win. That is a wide gap between local sentiment and the numbers. Watch Penn State transfer Ethan Grunkemeyer at quarterback and Brent Pry running the Hokie defense. This is also the last meeting for a while, with Virginia Tech having bought out the 2027 and 2028 games and Maryland replacing them with Baylor. Franklin now recruits the same DMV players Locksley does, and Darrell Carey is on Maryland’s roster because Franklin got fired at Penn State.

What the math actually says about a bowl

The popular route to six wins goes like this: bank Hampton and UConn, take care of Rutgers at home and Purdue on the road, then find two among Virginia Tech, UCLA, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Maryland’s overall bowl probability is 44 percent.

ESPN has Maryland at 56.7 percent against Rutgers and 48.7 percent at Purdue, so those are coin flips rather than banked wins, and sweeping all four so-called must-wins is a one-in-five proposition. Maryland is projected at 20.9 percent at Nebraska and 20.9 percent against Penn State at home, and those add up. Most realistic six-win seasons include a game nobody has penciled in, which is a more forgiving picture than a checklist implies.

The schedule’s shape still matters. ESPN’s numbers give Maryland 2.78 expected wins across the first four games and 2.52 across the last eight. The Terps have gone 1-14 after September across two seasons, so the front-loading is not a small detail. A 3-1 start keeps everything open. A 4-0 start, which is an 18 percent proposition, would change the season entirely. A 2-0 start is a 77 percent proposition, which is to say it should happen and would not tell us much on its own.

What we will be watching in September

• Rushing attempts against Hampton. Maryland ran the ball more than 30 times in exactly two games all of last season. A number comfortably north of 35 against an FCS opponent would signal a real philosophical change. The box score will not tell us much. The play-calling will.
• Tight end target share. The cleanest early read on whether the two-tight-end plan is real, and whether Fleming’s blocking has come along enough to run it.
• Whether a goal-line package exists, and who is in it. Maryland was last in FBS inside the twenty. If Cardell Williams is part of the answer, we should see it in Week 1.
• Snap counts up front. Specifically Elee, Nahsir Taylor, and how the interior rotation sorts out among Jenkins, Holmes, LeBlanc and Thomas.
• Where Jordan Scruggs lines up. He has had roughly two weeks in the system, and Hampton is his only live audition before Virginia Tech.
• The safety next to Delhomme. Lavain Scruggs, Shipps or Carey. This is the most open competition on the roster.
• The return game and the short kickoffs. The least glamorous item here and the one that quietly cost field position all last year.
• Fourth quarters. Opponents outscored Maryland 102-34 in the fourth last season. Nothing in the offseason obviously addressed depth or conditioning. If that flips, a lot of coin-flip games flip with it.

Projection

Our projection is 5-7, with 6-6 well within reach and 4-8 in play if September goes badly. We would take the over on a 4.5-win total and we would not be surprised by a bowl. ESPN’s per-game numbers produce 5.30 expected wins and make five the single most likely outcome, which is close to where the roster review landed independently.

That is a notch below most published previews. College Football News says 6-6. Both Solid Verbal hosts said 6-6, with Rubenstein saying he sees a step forward here. Maryland On SI’s staff went 6-6, 6-6 and 7-5. Poggi predicted eight or more. CBS called the Terps the most underrated team in the Big Ten, though that label came from the one panelist who ranked them sixth while three others had them 16th, and the unofficial Big Ten media poll had Maryland 15th.

We may well be too low. The gap between our number and theirs is mostly about how much credit to give returning production that does not include last year’s best defenders. Reasonable people are weighing that differently.

What would move us is specific and it arrives quickly. If Maryland converts in short yardage, if the tight ends get used the way the scheme suggests they will, and if two of those young interior linemen show up, this is a bowl team. All three are answerable by the end of September. Beat Virginia Tech and the conversation changes on the spot.

I feel teams are built from the lines out, and it seems like MD has more size and strength on both sides of the ball this year.
That’s encouraging, but like everything with MD; you want to see talent and projection translate to production.

MD Football can be a frustrating watch year-to-year, because the roster often has a number of talented pieces, but their depth will get pressed and limitations get exploited over the course of a season.

This roster again has some legitimate talent and but also questions everywhere.

It’s hard not to bring everything back to Locksley and Washington though.

The fanbase in-general feels burned.  Lots of seasons of irrelevance do that.
Locksley is appreciated as a recruiter, but people want results.
He’s especially under-the-gun due to the magical turn-around experienced at Indiana.
The Hoosiers story aside, I think we can universally agree that this is a difficult job.
You aren’t spending at the levels of the Conference Powers, nor do you have their history.
If you bring in quality talent, you aren’t always in a position to then keep those players from being poached by programs with more spending power.
You can have recruiting and portal success overall, but still not have the same roster depth that an additional $25M buys.

Those are all valid thoughts, but no MD fan wants to hear that in Year 8 of Locksley’s tenure.
Especially with Washington back under center for Year2.
There is a genuine feeling amongst MD fans, “If we can’t make a leap now, when can we?” 
There is also the wonder of, “If Washington is really strong this year, will MD be able to keep him?” 

The possibility of retaining Washington for 2027 is a question for another day.
Right now, you are hoping that Washington takes all of the Freshman year experience, and is ready to pull everyone up a notch.
If he’s excellent week-to-week, the questions at RB and WR decrease.
If he’s regularly putting points on the board, then the Defensive Front 7 can be in position to pin their ears back and get after QB’s – which would of course make life easier for the Secondary.

Maryland finishing 4-8, 5-7, or 6-6 with a bowl shouldn’t be good enough for Locksley to keep his job.
At 7-5, there is at-least an argument to be made.
Really, the schedule is about as kind as MD is going to get.
A real breakthrough season would be beating Hampton, UConn, Rutgers, and Purdue – and then winning 4 of 6 vs. Virginia Tech, UCLA, Nebraska, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Penn State.
That’s really the year MD needs to get more fans to buy in, and for the program to be better positioned going forward.
It’s also a very tall order when it feels like MD could lose any of the non Hampton games.
What will hold my interest this Fall is that with Washington on-board, MD should have a viable chance to win every game that isn’t in Columbus, Ohio.
We will see how it shakes out.
Lot of pressure on the 20 year old Washington to lead this group But it’s fun entering the year knowing he has the potential to be great.

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The first three of those eight straight losses being by a combined 10 points against Washington, Nebraska, and UCLA.

Once the wheels came off, MD wasn’t able to get back on-track, and the losing snowballed.

Now here in June, we’re a couple of months out from the 2026 season.

The seat is hot for Head Coach Mike Locksley as he enters Year 8 at the helm.

If expectations were rising after three straight bowl years in ’21-’23, current expectations for MD are minimal after back-to-back 4-8 seasons.

There is some legitimate talent on the roster.

If Coach Locksley is going to continue to lead the program; it’s imperative that the roster talent translates into results this year.

Let’s take a look at the roster that exists, and review some of the questions we have for this program as the season nears.

OFFENSE
QB: 1. Malik Washington, 2. Cardell Williams, 3. Cal Wither, 4. Nathan Bernhard
RB: 1. DeJuan Williams, 2. Iverson Howard, 3. Henry Dalton II, 4. Terrez Worthy, 5. Liam Wilson
WR-X: 1. Kaleb Webb, 2. Jordan Scott
WR-Z: 1. Na’eem Abdul-Rahim Gladding, 2. Ryan Manning
WR-H: 1. Chris Durr Jr., 2. Zymear Smith
TE: 1. Dorian Fleming, 2. Preston Howard
LT: 1. Rahtrel Perry, 2. Michael McMonigle
LG: 1. Jaylen Gilchrist, 2. Ryan Howerton
C: 1. Michael Hershey, 2. Trevor Szymanski
RG: 1. Tellek Lockette, 2. Amory Hills
RT: 1. Isaiah Wright, 2. Carlos Moore

DEFENSE
SAM: 1. Sidney Stewart OR Zion Elee
DT: 1. Eyan Thomas, 2. Lavon Johnson, 3. Armon Parker
NT: 1. Bryce Jenkins, 2. Joel Starlings, 3. Jayvon Parker
JACK: 1. Zahir Mathis, 2. Nahsir Taylor
MIKE: 1. Trey Reddick, 2. Stephen Dean III
WILL: 1. Daniel Wingate, 2. Carlton Smith
FCB: 1. Jamare Glasker, 2. Lloyd Irvin III
BCB: 1. Dontay Joyner, 2. Sean Johnson
NICKEL: 1. Amari Jackson, 2. Jayden Shipps
FS: 1. Gavin Edwards, 2. Darrell Carey
SS: 1. Lavain Scruggs, 2. Messiah Delhomme

SPECIAL TEAMS
K: 1. Sean O’Haire
P: 1. Bryce McFerson, 2. Philip Noyes
LS: 1. Luke O’Hare
KR: 1. Iverson Howard, 2. Ricardo Cooper Jr.

QB:
Malik Washington: Sophomore, Completed 273 passes, 2,963 yards, 17 td’s.
Cardell Williams: Senior, Sacramento State transfer, threw for 1,651 yards and 10 touchdowns in 2025 while also rushing for 382 yards and 12 touchdowns.
Cal Wither: Laurier (Canada) transfer. 1st team All-Canada last season. He threw for 2,472 yards for the Golden Hawks in 2025, with 26 touchdowns and just 4 interceptions.
Nathan Bernhard: Freshman, 3 star, Class of ’26.

RB: 
DeJuan Williams: RS Sophomore, In ’25, 9 starts, led MD with 927 all-purpose yards. 4 star. Saint Frances.  Chose MD over Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State.
Iverson Howard: Sophomore, 3 star, ESPN 300, 4 star per ESPN,  led MD in kickoffs in ’25.
Henry Dalton III: RS Freshman, 3 star, USC transfer.
Terrez Worthy: Senior, 3 star, Temple transfer. Known for big speed, had a JUCO season before joining Temple.
Liam Wilson: Junior, Started 23 games for Maryland’s Baseball team in 2025.

WR:
X: 1. Kaleb Webb, 2. Jordan Scott
Z: 1. Na’eem Abdul-Rahim Gladding, 2. Ryan Manning
H: 1. Chris Durr Jr., 2. Zymear Smith

Webb: RS Senior, Tennessee transfer before ’25, 4 star.  Played all 12 games in ’25.
Scott: Senior, FSU transfer before ’25, 3 star  Was #2 JUCO per 247. 6’7, 220.

Abdul-Rahim Gladding: Junior, ODU transfer, 3 star.
Manning: RS Jr, 3 star, Saint Frances, Top 100 WR in the Nation.

Durr: Junior, Wyoming transfer, 3 star.
Z. Smith: RS Freshman, 4 star, ESPN 300, chose MD over Bama, Penn State, and South Carolina.

Ejani Shakir: Junior, Independence CC transfer, 43 catches, 724 yards, 6 TD’s last year.
Jayden Kitchens: Freshman, 3 star, 24th overall player in MD.
Sean Williams: RS Junior, was a Top 5 player in DC in HS.
Josiah Teasley: Freshman, 3 star, 23rd overall player in VA.

TE: 
Dorian Fleming: RS Jr, 25 HM Big Ten. Georgia State transfer before ’25, 2024 All Sun Belt Conference,
Preston Howard: RS Senior, Auburn transfer (former Terp), 3 star.
AJ Szymanski: Senior, was in all 12 games last year, with 3 starts.
JT Taggart: Sophomore, was in 11 of 12 games last year. Out of HS was a 3 star, ranked 31st amongst all TE’s. Son of Willie Taggart.
Damon Hall Jr: Freshman, 3 star, ranked 31st amongst all TE’s. Recruited by Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and Michigan.

O-Line:
LT: 1. Rahtrel Perry, 2. Michael McMonigle
LG: 1. Jaylen Gilchrist, 2. Ryan Howerton
C: 1. Michael Hershey, 2. Trevor Szymanski
RG: 1. Tellek Lockette, 2. Amory Hills
RT: 1. Isaiah Wright, 2. Carlos Moore

Perry: RS Senior, Central Connecticut State transfer before ’25, 2024 All NEC 1st Team, started all 12 games for MD in ’25.
Gilchrist: RS Freshman, 4 star, ESPN 300, 80th overall, injured in the ’25 Opener.
Hershey: Junior, Started all 12 games in ’25. Academic All Big Ten.3 star, Chose MD over Charlotte, Yale, Delaware.
Lockette: RS Senior, Phil Steele had him 1st team All Sun Belt entering last year. Finished the 25 season as the top graded OL in the Group of 5, according to PFF.
Wright: Graduate, Started all 12 games for MD in ’25.

Moore: RS Senior, 3 star, Elon transfer before ’25, started 10 games in ’24 with Elon.
Howerton: RS Soph, 3 star per 247, 4 star per Rivals, UA All-American Game invite.
Watkins: RS Soph, 3 star, 24th overall player in MD.
Hills: Soph, 3 star, 26th overall player in MD.
Bennett: RS Soph, 3 star, action in 2 games last year. Academic All-Big Ten.
McMonigle: RS Freshman, 3 star.
Beymer: RS Freshman, 3 star.
Szymankski: RS Soph, 3 star, Chose MD over Pitt, VaTech, Syracuse.
Robsock: RS Soph, 3 star, 33rd overall player in PA.
Folivi: RS Senior.

D-Line:
SAM: Sidney Stewart OR Zion Elee
DT:  Eyan Thomas, Lavon Johnson, Armon Parker
NT: Bryce Jenkins, Joel Starlings, Jayvon Parker

Stewart: Sophomore, was Freshman All-American in ’25, out of HS 3 star, Top 40 player in MD, Chose MD over WVU, Boston College, Indiana
Elee: Freshman, 5 star

Thomas: RS Jr, Saint Francis (PA) transfer before ’25, 2nd Team All NEC.
Johnson: Senior, Texas transfer, former Terp, 3 star.
A. Parker: R-Senior, Washington transfer, played in 8 games last year. 6’3, 320.

Jenkins: Sophomore, 4 star, ESPN 300, 2nd ranked player in DC.
Starlings: RS Jr, 3 star, saw action in 11 games in 2025.
J. Parker: R-Senior, 24 games across 4 years with Washington. 2024 Academic All-American. 6’3, 330.

Derrick LeBlanc: RS Jr, UCF transfer, out of HS was a 4 star, Nation’s 51st overall recruit.
DD Holmes: RS Sophomore, saw action in 9 games, including 1 start in ’25.  Out of HS was ESPN 300, 4 star, and rated 2nd best player in DC.
EJ Moore: Junior, saw action in 11 of 12 games. Before MD was a Phil Steele 2024 FCS Freshman All-American.
Joshua Simmons: RS Sophomore, 2025 Academic All-Big Ten.
Delmar White: RS Freshman, 3 star, Top 40 player in Maryland.
JaMarcus Whyce: Freshman, 4 star, 17th ranked player in Ohio.
Cam Brickle: Freshman, 3 star, IMG Academy.
Jianni Davis: Freshman, 3 star, 31st overall player in Maryland, son of Vernon Davis.

LB:
JACK: Zahir Mathis, Nahsir Taylor
MIKE: Trey Reddick, Stephen Dean III
WILL: Daniel Wingate, Carlton Smith

Mathis: Sophomore, Freshman All-American in ’25, out of HS 4 star, ESPN 300, # 1 player in Pennsylvania, 2025 UA All-American, Choose MD over OSU, FSU
Taylor: Sophomore, saw action in 11 games, and had 2 sacks. Was 3 stars out of HS, 32nd rated player in Maryland.

Reddick: Junior, 3 star, 5th on team in tackles and TFL’s in ’25. 14th ranked player in VA, Chose MD over Wake, UNC, Penn State. .
Dean III: R Senior, 3 star, VMI transfer. Had 117 tackles (including 9.5 for loss) last season.

Wingate: Senior, 2025 HM Big Ten. Top 25 player in MD, Top 100 LB in the Nation, Choose MD over BC, WVU, Penn State.
C.Smith: Sophomore, 3 star, 3rd on team for tackles in ’25.

Darius Grimes, RS Jr, saw action in all 12 games in 2025.
Travares Daniels, RS Freshman, 3 star, Top 100 player in Florida.
Kaden Carter, Freshman, 4 star, rated as 7th best ILB in the ’26 Class.
Kellen McConnell, RS Sophomore, Academic All-Big Ten.
Keyari James, RS Sophomore, Academic All-Big Ten. 3 star.

Secondary:
FCB:  Jamare Glasker, Lloyd Irvin III
BCB: Dontay Joyner, Sean Johnson
NICKEL: Amari Jackson, Jayden Shipps
FS: Gavin Edwards, Darrell Carey
SS: Lavain Scruggs, Messiah Delhomme

Glasker: RS Senior, Wake Forest transfer before ’25, started 9 games in ’24.  3 picks in ’25.
Irvin III:  RS Sophomore, 3 star, 26th overall player in MD, Chose MD over BC, VaTech, West Virginia

Joyner: Senior, HM Big Ten in ’25. Arkansas State transfer before ’25, played in 24 games, 3rd highest grade at CB in Sun Belt in ’24 via PFF.
Johnson: Freshman, 3 star

Jackson: RS Senior, Boston College transfer, 3 star
Shipps: Sophomore, 3 star

Edwards: RS Jr, 3 star transfer before ’25
Carey: Freshman, 3 star

Scruggs: 3 star, 21st overall player in MD, played in 12 games last year, started 4 in ’24. 4th on team in tackles in ’25
Delhomme: Sophomore, 4 star, ESPN 300, 2nd ranked player in Virginia. 2 blocked kicks, 6th on team in tackles in ’25.

Mekhai White: RS Sophomore, was in 11 games. Was a 4 star recruit out of HS, made switch from WR to CB in ’25.
Ricardo Cooper: RS Jr, was in all 12 games, had a pick, named MD’s Special Teams Player of the Year.
Judah Jenkins: RS Sophomore, Academic All-Big Ten. Appeared in all 12 games in ’24, and zero games in ’25.
Alex Moore: RS Jr, was in 11 games in ’25.

Special Teams
K: Sean O’Haire: RS Sophomore, 21 of 24 on FGs.
P: 1. Bryce McFerson: RS Senior, 2025 2nd team Big Ten

What Do We Like?

Washington is back for a second year, and he gained extensive experience as a Freshman.
ESPN looked at the QB situations for all 138 FBS schools, and has Washington in their Tier 8. 

Talent and experience under center is a good starting point.

I liked the addition of Lockette in the portal.
The starting O-Line looks capable, with some upside capability if Gilchrist is productive.
There would be a noticeable drop off if any starters were lost to injury, but there does appear to be growing usable OL depth.

I like Fleming at TE, and was happy to see Howard return.

The RB depth seems like it was solidified in the portal.
I like Williams, and Worthy seems like he has the speed to really factor.
MD hasn’t done enough in the running game the last few years, I’m hoping we see a tick up here.

I like the starting Secondary, and Delhomme.

The kicking and punting game is in excellent shape.

As excited as I am about having Washington back; what I like best about this team is the defensive Front 7.
Stewart, Mathis, and Wingate were excellent last year.  Looking forward to seeing how Elee is added to the mix.
Also excited about Jenkins, LeBlanc, Reddick. Dean was a late addition, and moving up a level; but a lot of experience and production.

What Questions Do We Have?

I like a lot of the experience of the WR’s, but we will have to wait and see both how electric that room is, and who shows up consistently.

Clint Trickett is the new OC, and I’m looking forward seeing what that offense looks like.
BSL Terps Analyst Zack Kiesel said on our message board that, “Trickett is an Air Raid guy, from the Dana Holgorsen tree after playing for him at West Virginia. That offense has evolved a lot from what it was initially under Hal Mumme and Mike Leach, and incorporates a lot more of the run game without the traditional wide offensive line splits. But it’s certainly very different from the pro-style scheme that Maryland ran last season. His Jacksonville State team put up the most yards in Conference-USA last season.”

It’s a new system for Washington, and it will be interesting to see how he adjusts.
I’ll be happy if there is plenty of play-action, and quick reads to get the ball out of Washington’s hands.

I was disappointed that CB Kevyn Humes left the program for Rutgers, and OG Alliou Bah left for LSU.

The primary questions are what would constitute a good year, and what’s realistic?

Maryland’s 2026 schedule is:

Hampton (FCS)
@ UConn
Virginia Tech
UCLA
@ Nebraska
@ Ohio State
Rutgers
Illinois
@ Purdue
Wisconsin
@ USC
Penn State

Clearly they’ll beat Hampton in the opener.

UConn has been improving under Jim Mora Jr, going 9-4 last year, and didn’t lose at home.
I think MD fans have been counting this as an automatic W, and it’s not.
When ESPN’s Match-Up Predictor goes up for the game, I’d guess MD is given a 55-60% chance of winning.
It might not be an auto-win, but it’s a game MD has to win.

Virginia Tech at home vs. James Franklin will be interesting.
These schools were scheduled to also play in ’27 and ’28, but VaTech bought out those games. (Maryland replaced the Hokies with Baylor in ’27 and ’28.)
Franklin’s direct history with MD, coupled with his time at Penn State doesn’t have him particularly popular in College Park.
These programs will compete for lots of the same players going forward.
Franklin hit the ground running and brought in a strong recruiting class.
Virginia Tech was a proud program under Frank Beamer; it’s not difficult to see them emerging again under Franklin.
This will probably be a pick’em type game; but again – it’s a game MD needs to win, particularly because it’s at home.
Probably plenty of Virginia Tech fans there.

There will be varying odds, but the home games vs. UCLA, Rutgers, Illinois, and Wisconsin are winnable.
The Badgers might come to College Park as 10 point favorites, but MD winning any of those games would not be some astronomical upset.
The road game at Purdue also feels winnable to me.

It would be surprising (but not impossible) if they won at Nebraska, or at USC.
It would be pretty shocking if MD beat Penn State.  New Nittany Lions HC Matt Campbell has something like 50 transfers, so who knows what they’ll look like – but he’s a quality HC, and I’m going to assume PSU will again have plenty of talent. The Nittany Lions will also travel well, and fill a good portion of the stands.

Ohio State is 9-0 vs. MD, and only 2-3 games have been competitive.  It’s a pretty easy guess that the Buckeyes will be too much for the Terps.

So, 1 (Hampton) automatic win, and 2 (Ohio State, Penn State) automatic losses.  7 games (@UConn, VaTech, UCLA, Rutgers, Illinois, @Purdue, Wisconsin) where ESPN’s Match-Up Predictor will likely give them anywhere been a 41 to 60% chance to win.  2 games (@Nebraska, and @USC) where they’ll probably be given a 30-40% chance to win.

How good are they in those pick’em games?
Are they able to pull an upset anywhere?

A high quality year would be 8 wins, and a decent bowl.
The young players (Washington, and the Defensive Lineman) all have big years; feel good about their progression as a team in ’26, and decide to run it back 1 more year.
There are a lot of upper classman in the 2 Deep.  Another part of a quality year would be further emergence of other Freshman and Sophomores.
MD is probably not in a position where they can beat Ohio State; but you can’t get run off the field at this point of Locksley’s tenure either.
MD has some real ability on the DL, and experience on the O-Line. They should not be getting manhandled in the trenches vs. their fellow Big Ten teams.

What’s a good year? A good year would be not letting the talent on the roster go to waste.
Play solid complimentary football, with a strong defensive Front 7, and excellent Special Teams.
Get a ground game going.  Keep Washington up-right and available.

Locksley is fighting for his job, and his players should be playing with a chip on their collective shoulders.
They all have something to prove.

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We’ll spend plenty of time between now and then looking at Coach Mike Locksley’s roster.

Here, we’re just thinking about logical steps MD could take to boost their attendance and the game day experience.

I expect the number one response from most will be, “They could win more!”

And that’s understandable, and their is plenty of validity there.

The fanbase as a whole will be in a prove-it-to-me mode, wanting the Terps to show they can win games after September.

And of course Maryland competes for the attention of sports fans in D.C. and Baltimore. And if you want more of those fans to be thinking about attending games in College Park; you’ve got to give them reasons to pay attention to the program.

Maryland Football’s home attendance percentage is 78.5% over the past three seasons. This mark is 8th-worst among all Power Four programs.

Maryland football has a stadium atmosphere problem as much as a product problem, and the two are self-reinforcing.
A quiet, half-empty stadium makes the experience worse, which suppresses future attendance, which makes recruiting harder, and so on.

Maryland has talent on their roster, but expectations will be minimal for the Terps season. They’ll be picked to finish near the bottom of the Big Ten by most prognosticators.

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The Offensive Problem: Maryland averaged just 101.3 rushing yards per game, which ranked 124th-best in the nation and second-worst in the conference behind only Minnesota.

The Terrapins have struggled to run the ball consistently for the majority of the last decade or more, and are regularly dominated up front by bigger and more talented defensive lines. Last season, offensive coordinator Pep Hamilton threw nearly every formation, personnel grouping, and run scheme into his gameplans to no avail. Towards the beginning of the year, he used multiple tight ends and even a fullback at times with quarterback Malik Washington under center in an attempt to help the running game. When that didn’t work, he utilized more spread formations with Washington in the shotgun and three or more wide receivers on the field. Maryland also mixed together both zone and gap schemes, but failed to gain any sort of traction on the ground.

The Offensive Solution: Maryland is replacing two of their starting offensive linemen from last season (Aliou Bah, Alan Herron). They added Texas State transfer Tellek Lockette, who’s expected to likely take up a starting role on the interior of the line. Former four-star recruit Jaylen Gilchrist, who missed the majority of last year due to injury, is also expected to compete for a starting job. Otherwise, returnees Michael Hershey, Rahtrel Perry, and Isaiah Wright will likely take up starting roles again in 2026.

DeJuan Williams returns as the Terrapins’ starting running back, following a season where he impressed with his pass-catching abilities but rarely saw holes he could exploit in the running game. They also added USC transfer Harry Dalton III to the roster, and will get Bud Coombs back after he suffered a season-ending injury during camp prior to last year. With a signal-caller like Washington behind center, Maryland’s rushing attack doesn’t need to be one of the best in the conference. But it does need to keep the offense ahead of the chains consistently so that they aren’t constantly forced into obvious passing situations.

The Defensive Problem: Maryland’s defense allowed opposing offenses to convert 45.22% of their third-down attempts, which ranked 119th-best in the country and second-worst in the conference behind only Illinois.

While defensive coordinator Ted Monachino’s unit performed well in certain aspects (sacks and takeaways), they were one of the worst in the nation at getting off the field on third downs. One of the primary reasons for this was their performance against the run, allowing an average of 186.9 rushing yards per game which ranked 107th-best in the country. They consistently allowed opposing offenses to stay ahead of the chains and convert manageable third downs.

The Defensive Solution: Maryland is replacing four of their interior defensive linemen from last season (Dillan Fontus, Dimitry Nicolas, Cam Rice, Sedrick Smith). They added four in the transfer portal (Lavon Johnson, Derrick LeBlanc, Armon Parker, Jayvon Parker) and two more in their incoming freshman class (Cam Brickle II, Jamarcus Whyce). These players will need to step up, along with returnees Bryce Jenkins, Joel Starlings, and Eyan Thomas to improve their lackluster run defense and keep opposing offenses behind the chains on a more consistent basis.

The Terrapins ought to have one of the best young pass-rushing corps in the country, featuring returnees Zahir Mathis and Sidney Stewart alongside incoming five-star freshman Zion Elee. But a pass rush’s effectiveness will be greatly handicapped if the offense isn’t forced into obvious passing situations with more regularity. If you want to win on third down, you have to win on first and second downs, where Maryland will need to show vast improvement in 2026.

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