Maryland football wrapped up its second scrimmage of spring ball and with one left ahead of the Sept. 2 season opener, head coach Mike Locksley credited the “overall execution in all three phases.”
“I thought a week ago, we weren’t very sharp with our special teams substitutions and our execution of the special teams fundamentals,” Locksley said. “This week I saw a major improvement, guys being into the scrimmage, understanding substitutions. When somebody’s down guys were ready to go. We were able to get most of the special teams work, all those special situations, tight punt, pooch punt. We were able to get a lot of good work on the special teams and I thought offensively this week, I saw them make a few more plays. I thought we moved the ball more efficiently on the offensive side than last week. And then defensively, I also saw our defense, they came away with some takeaways here today, which is something we’ve tried to emphasize from the last scrimmage to this one.”
More from Locksley, including updates along the offensive line.
On the battle between centers Aric Harris, Mike Purcell
Mike wasn’t here mid-year. You know, he’s one of those guys that came on once the summer started. Yeah, that’s okay. He ended up missing, didn’t make it here in the spring, was spent some time there at Duke and then came in here in June. And I think he’s really has helped himself and probably one of the guys that has had some of the bigger strides from week one to week three, which you would expect because he had the opportunity to go through the summer PRPs, the player run practices, with us. But I think we started to see him kind of take the next step as he has a good understanding of our system and coach [Brian Braswell] and those guys have done a good job of bringing them along. And we’ve got some healthy competition there at the center position with both he and Aric Harris and…that competition that I feel has made us better as a whole there on the [offensive] line.
On how the starting offensive line is developing
Not there yet, still rotating different groups and different personnel. One great thing about the group up front and the way coach Braswell really has trained all these guys is their position flexibility gives us a lot of different rotations of how we can play those guys. Right now we’re looking for the quality depth of hopefully having ten to 12 guys that can play winning football for us. We still got a couple of decisions to make on the one [offensive] line and we’ve got some really good competition there with some guys competing as well as some of the new guys that just got here that are now starting to feel comfort in our system. Not there yet, but our goal is by the end of this week to kind of have a good understanding of how we’ll play these guys across the board.
On the impact of Jeshaun Jones
Jeshaun, there’s been some ‘aha’ moments, especially from a leadership standpoint. The other day we kind of have one of those tough practices and we backed it up later that evening, and Jeshaun was one of those guys that called the team up before we started practice to kind of set the standard for hey look, we didn’t meet our standard the last practice and now the goal is let’s come back and get better. And so that’s the first time I’ve seen him kind of put itself in that position. It was great to see to me from a leadership standpoint. He’s the guy in that room that those guys lean on. We’ve got a not necessarily just a young room, but an inexperienced room because even with guys like Kaden Prather and Tyrese Chambers coming in, they haven’t had experience in the system. And I know he’s really played a role of kind of coach mentality with all those guys. And I expect Jeshaun to have a big year for us.
On rotation, roster strategy for preseason scrimmage
What we do is our depth chart now is a daily work in progress. Guys go up and down the depth chart based on how they perform the previous practice, previous situations. For us, the rotation for us today, we had certain guys we wanted to see run with the ones because. For instance, you take the quarterback, we know who Lia Tagovailoa is. But if Lia Tagovailoa is not out there, which we found ourselves in that situation in Northwestern a year ago, how does Billy operate this system behind the one [offensive] line? The same thing with a guy like Cam Edge, who’s competing with Billy there for that number two job. We put some thought into how we want to rotate players. Some of our better players that have established themselves from a production standpoint. We wanted to see what some of the younger guys or some of the newer guys are able to do under the lights per se. And so, yes, some thought goes into the rotation from the standpoint of seeing and putting guys in positions to where we can make decisions on their roles.
On DC Brian Williams heading into year two
I think the biggest thing was the experience of the corners. In 2021, we lost Deonte Banks, I think in the Bowling Green game, and he missed the remaining part of the year. And so not having him out there and even at that point, I can remember Tarheeb Still kind of nicked up. So, I think having a healthy Deonte, Tarheeb being healthy and then I thought the major improvement we saw with the confidence of that group on the back end, you know, obviously with Beau [Brade] and Dante Trader kind of taken over in 2022 for some veteran players like Nick Cross and Jordan Mosley. I thought both those guys really did a good job of getting our guys in the right positions from a year ago. So, to me, I think the experience probably played the biggest gain in there, but I also thought coach Williams and the defensive staff did a really good job of mixing the coverages with how they adjusted their front and we added some of the drop stuff that gives people problems and shrink some of the zones.
On how the returning experience impacts the defensive scheme
I think it’s really, really big, really important, especially on the back end on defense that those guys have those short-term memories where when something bad happens, they keep playing and even when they make plays, they just continue to get to the next play. I thought we did a really good job of that a year ago. I thought the defensive staff led by coach Williams really made that a point of emphasis and I saw that really help us.
On Brian Williams’s growth in the program
I think what’s happened with B-Dub in our program epitomizes what our program is all about. You know, I oftentimes talk about us being a developmental program and it’s not just the players, but even the coaches and Brian Williams was part of the original staff. He’s a guy that’s been here to see the trajectory of our program change and has played a major role in helping us get to where we are today. And again, I still think his best football is still ahead of him as he’s become more comfortable and really helped himself on the back end with surrounding him with some great coaches. Those things really played a major role. I think he’s one of the shining stars in this profession and will very soon have an opportunity to hopefully run his own program.
On whether the offense is on track in camp, the separation between the defense
From an offensive standpoint, it’s not a new system. Do we have some new concepts that we run for sure? Josh’s experience and some of the things he’s been able to do since we last worked together, the success he had at Michigan.
You know, especially running the football and some adjustments to things and how we’ve done it but there hasn’t been a big learning curve because there hasn’t been a wholesale change of what we do. And philosophy-wise, philosophy hasn’t changed. But I think what you’re seeing is that the offensive side of the ball is starting to get accustomed and used to the personality that Josh will add to the system.
The big thing when you hire coordinators and with me being an offensive guy is it’s a fine line of me allowing and making sure Josh is able to put his personality as a play caller into what we do and what we’ve done around here successfully, and I’ve seen that transition go really smoothly.
Obviously, we haven’t been in a game situation yet, but we got one coming up in a couple of weeks against Towson here, where we’ll get a better idea of where we are and how far we’ve come.
On game planning vs. Towson
I know right now we’re still in camp mode. We’ve got about another four, five practices to before we kind of start transitioning into our preparation for Towson, so I think by the end of next week, we’ll start working into, Thursday, Friday, I think is when we’ll start on our Towson prep to give us a couple of extra days to get us ready to go and obviously it’s a new team, new coach there at Towson, so we don’t have a great knowledge of what they’re doing or what they run so we’ve got to be really good at knowing what we do well and be ready to make those adjustments once the game gets on us.
On what Locksley wants to see before game planning
It’s mostly these young players, the twos and threes, as they’re trying to create roles for themselves. We’ve got a pretty good understanding now with two scrimmages under our belt, what some of our starters and guys that have been around here have been able to do. Today, we were able to kind of lessen the workload on our starters and really get a better understanding of some of the competitive positions groups that we have going. We’re trying to have guys define roles and so this next week will continue to do competitive things in practice. We’ll continue to evaluate the different position groups that we do have competition at, as well as some of these younger players that will be thrust in the roles, whether it be on special teams or a backup role to help us. And that’s what we want to continue to work on as we get before.
On standouts from second scrimmage
When I’m standing back there, I’m looking at it not from an individual point of view, more holistic and I think the thing that jumps out for me was the efficiency in all three phases. So particular people, maybe haven’t flashed out. I’ll have a chance to watch that here once we kind of get done with some of the festivities we got going on around here. But I was really happy with the style of play on offense, defense, special teams, how we moved around. We stayed off the ground. We minimized some penalties this week. So leaving there, I left there feeling like the Terps got better today.
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