How Maryland football OC Pep Hamilton looks to “de-emphasize” quarterback inexperience in fall camp

Ahmed Ghafir
Jul 30
3 min read

This isn’t the first quarterback competition for Maryland football under head coach Mike Locksley, which means there’s no changes in expectation on when a starter will be named.

“We will know who our quarterback is on Sunday before we start preparation for game one. We will know. You will know when we walk out the guy that takes the first snap,” Locksley said ahead of the first practice of fall camp.

But even ahead of fall camp, Locksley knows there’s a similarity among the three quarterbacks in the mix.

“We only need one genre of offense with this group because they're all very similar.”

What is also different about the 2025 competition from years past is that it involves a true freshman quarterback – but not just any true freshman.

Malik Washington, a former top-100 prospect and three-time MIAA champion out of Archbishop Spalding, will now look to build on an encouraging spring ball and make his case to take over as the starting quarterback.

“He is as advertised,” tight end Dorian Fleming said. “[He] can get out of the pocket, can make throws. I haven’t seen a pass that I don’t think he can make.”

Locksley noted that UCLA transfer Justyn Martin’s experience “is a plus for us” as he serves as the only quarterback on the active roster to take a snap in college. Pep Hamilton, who linked Maryland’s 2025 offense to the 2016 Cleveland Browns offense given the youth movement on both rosters, will now look to “de-emphasize” the inexperience in the quarterback room over the next 25 practices.

“That just means that you got to do everything you can keep them out of obvious passing situations. And that's what we're going to do,” Hamilton said. “We're going to try and be creative in how we manage and really mitigate our early downs so that we don't end up with third and long situations where it becomes an uphill battle for any quarterback to be successful.”

A big part of the offense’s success won’t rest on the eventual starting quarterback’s shoulders, but whether Maryland can establish balance on offense with the ground game. Under Josh Gattis as offensive coordinator, Maryland finished with the third-worst rushing attack in the Big Ten, including 116^th among FBS teams. Hamilton noted in the spring that establishing a rushing attack “has to be a focus” for the offense in 2025 with emerging pieces looking to step up at the skill positions.

“We feel like our tight end group is dynamic in a lot of different ways. And our offensive line, even though we have quite a few guys that hadn’t played beside each other in games, we feel like the way that they're working, they're trending in the right direction. They're gonna give us an opportunity to be able to be multi-dimensional in our attack, be able to run the football, protect the quarterback, and ultimately give us a chance to win games when it matters most.”

Hamilton added additional insight into what goes into developing a young quarterback through practice and film.

“A big part of it is just really assigning their eyes and their thoughts pre-snap. We like to tell our quarterbacks, when they see a little, they see a lot. When they see a lot, they don't see anything. And so just having a pre snap routine, that's going to ultimately help them to accelerate this process of elimination right before the ball is snapped. And then the other part of it is that post-snap recognition. So a big part of acclimating any quarterback, especially quarterbacks that are transitioning from high school to college or college to the NFL, is it's just making sure that they're not distracted by all the possibilities, all the variables that can ultimately stymie a quarterback and cause them to be hesitant.”

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