Buzz Williams sees "some growth" in Maryland men's basketball despite third straight loss

Ahmed Ghafir
6 days ago
3 min read

After Maryland men’s basketball’s third consecutive loss of the season while dropping to just 1-5 since the start of Thanksgiving week, head coach Buzz Williams still sees signs of progress.

“We’ve had some growth. Not necessarily can all of it be seen on the scoreboard and I completely understand that’s how we’re judged,” Williams said radio analyst Chris Knoche after the eight-point road loss.

“There were stretches I thought again tonight, when we were playing in that direction, we gave ourselves the chance. Some of the things that have plagued us all year long seemed to be some of the mountains that we couldn’t overcome,” Williams added. “So we’re going to keep trying. We’re going to keep trying and pull in the same direction and we’re going to keep finding ways marginally to find solutions to our problems and try to measure those things every day. We’ve done that over the last ten days and we’ve had some growth. We just got to keep going.”

Maryland found itself in an early hole after Virginia opened the game on a 7-0 run, but a cold stretch over the next ten minutes would allow the Terps to lead by as many as eight points with five minutes left in the first half.

Then Virginia responded with a 13-0 run to end the first half, taking a 24-19 lead into the break. Maryland’s three point shooting helped the Terps eventually tie the game at 33 before Diggy Coit’s two free throws gave Maryland a two-point lead, but that would be short lived - and the team’s final lead of the day.

A quick 10-0 run over the ensuing 2:20 swung all momentum back into Virginia’s favor before eventually clinging to a double digit lead for the bulk of the final 11 minutes of action.

With just one game left for Maryland to find some type of consistency on both ends of the floor, head coach Buzz Williams pointed to his staff ramping up practice and tweaking their strategy “since the loss at Iowa.”

“And that started Monday morning and we’ve seen some growth in those things last week leading up into Michigan and then basically, we kind of went the 2.0 version of that this past week, specific to our team with the responsibilities of what Virginia does well included in that. They were shooting 48% of their shots from three and making 42%. They made one in the first half, they made six - which was a game-changer - in the second half. We had a plan for their offensive rebounding. We did a good job offensive rebounding. The thing that hurt us again was our turnover rate. But like you know as a former coach, those things are all correlated. Some of our breakdowns came from we didn’t get a shot, which led to a broken floor which led to a made three which led to a foul. So that loop, we’re trying to identify and trying to teach a principle, show a picture, teach a principle, show a picture. And our guys are doing better, but again, we’ve got to continue to increase the execution. And coupled with that, we need to find ways for our endurance of that execution to increase.”

Maryland will host Old Dominion next Sunday, Dec. 28 before turning to Big Ten play to open 2026 with home games against Oregon and Indiana looming.

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