Everything Mike Locksley said after Maryland football's deflating 24-20 loss vs. Washington

Ahmed Ghafir
Oct 4
7 min read

Everything that Maryland head coach Mike Locksley said after the 24-20 loss to Washington:

Opening statement

“Give credit to Washington, coach [Jedd] Fisch, his staff, great ball game. But what we learned today as a team, you got to learn how to put people away, especially good teams like Washington. And when we have them here at home – speaking of home, I got to give our fans a tremendous amount of credit for creating one hell of an environment for our players and making it a great environment for us. We're a young, talented, inexperienced team, but there's zero doubt my mind that we’re talented. And much like I said before, every thing that we've made corrections with, we’ve seen them go execute. Today was the first day we didn’t do it. We knew that it would come down to our skill today - running, blocking, tackling, catching and throwing. And Washington did a little bit better than us, and especially in critical situations where they needed to make plays they did. These are great lessons for us. I'm looking forward to getting this stuff fixed with our team. We'll learn from this, and I expect this team will respond the way. I told them in the locker room, we’re going to learn a couple things about ourselves. One, how to manage success, which I didn't think we did a great job of it. In the bye week of managing the success without the distraction and the things that pop up. And now we want to see how we manage adversity. This is the first bit of adversity we'll face together as a team with dealing with a loss and I'm looking forward to seeing just how these guys respond. We got another great opportunity next time mayor here at The Shell against Nebraska and I promise you our guys will show up. We'll be prepared and we'll be working to get us back on the right track.”

On abandoning the run in the second half

“I think for us, it goes back to we're an RPO system. We still have run-pass options where today, what Malik faced was, at the end they mixed between cover two and man. And so we got into if we're getting covered two, we need to run it. If they're playing a little more man, then we've got to create a win one on one man battles, which today, we didn't win enough of them. We didn't make enough good throws.”

On what Locksley says to fans about pointing to this loss as consistent failure after bye week

“I would say that we're defined in the present. I won't get into - this year's team can't be like any other team to be compared to, because it's this year's team. And so do I expect it? Of course. It should be expected for me, but for us, I mean, we're defined by what we do this year, what we're doing with this team. And so if you look at comparison, and you look at history, I think you can say that but I can tell you based on what I've seen from this team, how I saw they responded in the locker room just now, we'll be defined by what we do and how we move forward.”

On whether there was a sense of an inevitable loss when Washington was driving

“No, because we don't really watch the scoreboard. Be honest, we play to the next play. We worry about trying to execute, and it comes down to executing, which again, as I said before in the third quarter, on offense and on defense, I didn't feel we executed great in the late third quarter. We got a touchdown drive, I think the second drive of the second half. And then on offense, we couldn't generate enough explosives.”

On whether there’s a mental hurdle Mike Locksley needs to get over to win after the bye week

“No, I think I'm good on the mental piece. I usually take care of my mentals. I think what I have to do is focus on evaluating kind of what happened, why it happened, and how I can get it fixed. And to me, that's what good coaches do. I'd like to say I want to be defined by how we move forward, not by the history of what we've done here.”

On WR Jalil Farooq’s third down drop

“We expected man coverage. We had, we call it a slot fade. Before the ball is even snapped we said Jalil is going to have an opportunity to win here. And you know what? Nine, ten times out of ten, Jalil typically is going to make that play. I'm going to bet on Jalil Farooq to make the play. It don't come down to that. I mean we kicked way too many field goals in the first half where we had opportunities. And those type of things are things that get you when it gets you. Kicking field goals when you have advantageous field position and those are things that come back to bite us and it did today, which we got to learn from.”

On QB Malik Washington

“I would say this because he didn't play his best game today obviously, quarterbacks like head coaches are judged on winning and we didn't win. I would say that today may have been the first day I saw him look like a guy that kind of was being because Ryan Walters did a really good job of mixing man, zone, cover two, cover one. And this was the first time he faced it. But as I told him even before the half, and with that interception before a half, these are the things that I know Malik Washington will put in this toolbox. We'll be able to show him on tape. We've already started the correctional piece of, when you end a half of drives like that, the one thing and only thing you can't do is turn it over. And that's the learning part of me and us having to coach him through it. Just like we’ll coach Jalil through finishing the ball. Looking at it on tape, I'd say he's got his hands above his eyes to look it in.”

On the targeting, officiating

“You know what? I'm not going to get into judging referees. I'll let y'all do that. I know this - everybody in the country does the seat belt stuff, but we must have a reputation because of the I thought he did the seat belt, which everybody does. They felt he brandished a weapon, I guess is what I was told on the field. But those calls aren't the reason we won or lost this thing. We got to take care of business on the field. Our players know we won't be given anything, so we wanted to take it or earn it, and we didn't do that today.”

On watching fans leave in the third quarter

“We don't pay attention. I know it's too good of a ball game for me to lose my focus on those types of things. We try to concern ourselves with what’s happening on the field once the game starts. Great, unbelievable environment that our fans created so I’m not going to beat our fans up. It's our job to keep them in the stands by executing and playing in the right way. And you know what? We're looking forward to watching this to get the tape fixed and see how this team handles adversity. This is the first piece of adversity we'll have. We'll find out next Saturday.”

On the impact of Sidney Stewart’s absence in the second half

“I've talked all year long about not having great depth. And when you lose three people at the outside linebacker position against a dynamic quarterback like the quarterback we had, and some of those misses were self-inflicted by us. And so when I talk about managing success as well as managing some adversity, we put ourselves in a position where you lose Nahsir [Taylor], you lose Sid and you lose DD [Holmes] and we run out of bodies. But we had chances to take care of it on the field. So we got to get that done. To me, that's where my energy and focus will be is. How do I get us to score touchdowns in the red area? Tackle better in the second half. When we started missing tackles in the second half is where things changed and that's where I saw us kind of play too many plays on defense because of us not getting off the field and then us also not sustaining drives on offense.”

On the running vs. roughing the kicker, whether Locksley thought about accepting and going for it on fourth down

“No, we've looked at that. I think we had all of our timeouts still at that time. So to me, it was a matter of our defense had played pretty well most of the game. We had it back at I think a 20 yard line is where that drive started from. I felt pretty good about our defense. This is the first game that, you know, as I said, I thought they got wore down more than we didn't execute. And again, we knew we had to tackle really well in the second half. On defense, we missed some critical tackles there, finishing on the quarterback a couple of times where he made hell of a plays and broke contain a couple times and we got to get them on the ground when we have opportunities to.”

On first time overcoming adversity, message to the team

“I think the big thing for me was talking about how disappointed I was for them because they created this environment with how they played the first four games. It’s kind of like as a parent, you're disappointed when your kids don't get the kids feel and live through the success that they created. And so there's a lot of guys that, for the first time, they’ve now want to look at themselves like I have to as the head coach and the leader of this thing to see, what can I do better? How can I help us? How can I help us elevate this week? We knew this game the skill of executing fundamentals and I've mentioned that to those guys that we didn't catch well, we didn't run well, we didn't block well, we didn't tackle well. And these are all things that we can get corrected because they are fundamental things. I saw us make some improvements but what we didn't do was to finish, and we didn't - and to me, that's the part now that the lesson I gotta get taught of finishing, the importance of how you finish. And I'll get that done.”

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