New Maryland basketball head coach Buzz Williams on Aggie transfers, getting comfortable with Big Ten

Ahmed Ghafir
Jun 23
2 min read

After a whirlwind of an offseason that led first-year head coach Buzz Williams to fill all 15 scholarships, the former Aggie staff that’s now moved to College Park will still have a pair of familiar faces to lean on heading into 2025-26.

That starts with seniors Pharrel Payne and Solomon Washington, who became the first two transfer portal commitments for the program, though their transfer status was solidified the day that Williams left College Station for College Park.

For Payne, a Minnesota native who began his career with the Gophers, will now head back to the Big Ten where he’ll anchor the frontcourt with former Northeastern center Collin Metcalf expected to back him up. Though his fourth and final season will likely mark the first time Payne plays more than 25 minutes during his college career, the Aggie transfer is coming off two of his most productive games in three seasons after averaging 25.5 points and 7.5 rebounds in a pair of NCAA Tournament games to end 2024-25.

“He was tremendous. He never backed away from anything,” Williams said in an interview with BTN at Big Ten meetings in late May. “Not in how we worked, not the pace, not the intensity, not our language, not the different ways that we coach both sides of the ball. He’s a beautiful human being, outstanding person and we’ll need him to be really good for us on both sides of the ball.”

Payne won’t be the only one with Washington stepping as arguably the team’s best defender while he’ll be part of the rebounding solution this fall. Washington will join Payne as culture setters with summer workouts underway as Williams noted, “we know what Pharrel and we know what Solo bring.”

They aren’t the only former Aggies joining the new staff in College Park with Andre Mills and George Turkson preparing for year one after a redshirt season. “They had great growth years on the floor but also in the weight room. I’m excited about their future.”

While the rest of the seven weeks of summer workouts gives Williams and company a chance to get a closer feel for his new-look roster, one priority between now and the season opener is getting a better feel for the new conference opponents. Williams faced four Big Ten teams in his final season with the Aggies, defeating Rutgers, Purdue and Ohio State while falling to Oregon and Michigan, but the new Maryland men’s basketball head coach admitted he doesn’t “know a lot about the league.”

“[I] know a lot of the coaches but hopefully we’ll be able to spend some time this summer maybe better understanding the league. We played five teams, maybe six teams, from the Big Ten last year at Texas A&M…I’m looking forward to – and we’ve even kind of begun to disperse among our staff teams that we’re going to study so that we can have a foundation of what the league is.”

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