Maryland opens up fall practice with aspirations of making a bowl game in consecutive seasons for the first time in nearly ten years. The bettings odds for Maryland’s win total hover between 5.5 and 6.5 wins for the 2022 season as Maryland returns nearly the entire offense and has ample production to replace on the defensive side of the ball.
On Tuesday, Athlon Sports spoke to anonymous Big Ten coaches to gather a different perspective on the Terps this fall.
Coach #1: “When you talk about the portal, this was a program we figured would benefit from how Mike [Locksley] works in recruiting. They’re a staff that’s aggressive; they go out headhunting for big talent and fit what they do to their personnel, and that’s probably not as popular a method in this league. But they’ve been killed in the offseason by defensive transfers, and that’s the side of the ball where the questions are.”
Coach #2: “Taulia [Tagovailoa] is a star. Does he have a next gear? Can he be a legit superstar? Legit superstars can slow things down. Sometimes you see his tape and he’s close. Sometimes he’s still playing off pure instinct. They have a lot of really good pieces around him, especially at receiver. This could be a really special year for that offense. Sometimes that talent-first mentality can bite them because they’re so aggressive with their calls. It’s like they’re using every play-call to recruit. So they’ll hit a big play, gash you for 50, and just as easily turn it over the next play.”
Coach #3: “They’re going to be must-see, because you never know if they’re going score 60 and win or give up that much. Locksley is fearless; you have to hand him that. They could catch some breaks and just shoot everybody out, but they have a grinding schedule, so it could just as easily fall apart on them.”
Maryland capped off the 2021 season with a 54-10 win over Virginia Tech to give Maryland their first seven-win season since 2014. Quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa admitted the added practices and win fueled additional motivation for the team heading into the offseason.
“I think it gave us a lot of confidence and a lot of motivation to go into the next offseason, working hard and I think it was really the process that we went through before the Pinstripe Bowl and during fall camp practices and coach making it hard on us,” Tagovailoa said during Big Ten media day. “And I think us as a team, we understood that, you know, if we continue to work hard, great things like that could happen for us and we kind of took that mindset and going into spring and as well as summer.”
Maryland opens the season on September 3 for a noon kickoff against Buffalo.