Maryland men's basketball looks to outperform The Athletic's bleak 2025-26 outlook

Ahmed Ghafir
Oct 1
3 min read

Maryland men’s basketball will kick off its lone exhibition game when they face UMBC on Oct. 27 before facing Coppin State on Nov. 3in Baltimore for the regular season opener and Georgetown on Nov. 7 for the home opener, kicking off the beginning of the Buzz Williams era.

The biggest question all offseason still lingers nearly 30 days away from game one: what will the new-look Terps look like? The Athletic ranked Maryland 13^th in their preseason conference rankings while tabbing the Terps among the ‘NCAA Tournament-caliber” Big Ten teams ahead of the 2025-26 season.

“To stick with the formula he won with at Texas A&M, Williams needs Rice/Watts/Adams to be Wade Taylor IV and Zhuric Phelps while the bigs clean up the misses. By getting Washington and Payne to follow to Maryland, Williams has the rebounders. I’m not so sure he has the firepower on the perimeter. This works if Rice is closer to what he was at Washington State than what he was at Indiana. Perimeter shooting and spacing are also concerns. The three perimeter starters are all mid-to-low 30s 3-point shooters, and Washington shot 18.9 percent from 3 last year. It’s hard to win in today’s college basketball with that kind of shooting. It also usually takes Williams a few years before he starts to stack winning seasons.”

The Athletic cautioned to not “be surprised if it takes a few years” for Maryland to reach postseason play under Buzz Williams, though ESPN points to the Terps on the right side of the bubble in their updated preseason bracketology. Still, the biggest question remains what type of team Maryland assembles on the floor. The program announced that Kansas transfer Rakease Passmore will miss the 2025-26 season due to a torn Achillies, while freshman guard Darius Adams is expected to be full-go for the exhibition game at the end of the month.

It’s expected that Maryland will be able to lean on its veteran tandem in Pharrel Payne and Solomon Washington, while Indiana transfer Myles Rice has put together a strong offseason where he’ll look to take over at the point with David Coit, the second transfer from Kansas, stabilizing the backcourt. Beyond that, Maryland hasn’t entered a season with so many unknowns arguably since Gary Williams retired as head coach.

“Yeah, every now and then we'll talk about dribbling better or trying to shoot a different ball, but more importantly, who they are as young men and who they're going to become,” Williams said about the roster development back in July. “I try to invest most of my time in the summer in getting to know who they are, what's important to them, what they like, what they don't like. How can I help them? What are their trigger points? And you can only do that through time. And so we utilized our first three weeks. We never practiced five on five whatsoever just because I wanted to be in the gym. I wanted to sweat with them. I wanted to actually learn their game.”

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