Buzz Williams still trying to figure out rotations after Maryland men's basketball's latest blowout loss

Ahmed Ghafir
Dec 6, 2025
2 min read

Maryland men's basketball trailed for nearly all but two minutes on Saturday in the Big Ten opener vs. Iowa, resulting in an 83-64 loss that has become a familiar feeling over the last two weeks under head coach Buzz Williams.

Maryland has now allowed 80 or more points in all three Quad One games, losing all three by double digits in a 30.3 average margin of defeat. Up next, third-ranked Michigan - who beat Gonzaga by 40 points in Las Vegas, one day after the Bulldogs beat Maryland by 39 points.

"Really tough team, incredibly well coached," head coach Buzz Williams told Chris Knoche after the game in his postgame 'press conference'.

"I think since all of those players and coaches have been been together, they've lost five Division I games. They for sure started the game really well. I thought they started the second half just as well. I thought there was a stretch there from the first media timeout, from that point forward, we did fine. We lost the second half by five. We did not play as hard or as together as we have to. We've made considerable progress and lessons learned this week and we've got to continue to stack those lessons relative to the process so we can have some momentum going into games like this that we're going to continue to play. But I was very impressed with their team and their coaching staff and what they were doing."

The Hawkeyes controlled the game from beginning to end, building a double-digit lead ahead of the U-12 timeout of the first half and never wavered, extending the lead to as many as 26 points in the second half.

The confusing part? Freshman Darius Adams played just 17 minutes, largely due to foul trouble, while Myles Rice finished scoreless in ten minutes. Diggy Coit's three made three-pointers helping him as one of three Terps in double figures, while Pharrel Payne added 17 points and 14 rebounds, the latter a new career-high.

"The last four days of work is the first time we've had ten healthy bodies. We don't know what the rotation is or the rotation should be. Collectively, we're trying to find groups that will play hard and play together for longer stretches of time. That's why I called the last two timeouts. I thought that group was playing hard and playing together. We were getting consecutive stops. We were doing OK offensively. We were doing a great job on [the] offensive glass in that stretch and we did a great job of getting fouled in that stretch. We didn't do a great job of making our free throws, but we did a really good job of putting pressure on the rim in that last 15 minutes of the game. But who is it? That's what we've got to figure out through practice so that we're not having to do that all of the times during games. But some of that is this is the first week, two games and four practices so we've got to continue to make progress in that regard."

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