Maryland fell to 4-2 (1-2) following a 31-29 loss to Purdue on Saturday, its first home loss of the season.
“I’ll start off obviously giving credit to Purdue, did a tremendous job. Their staff did, well-coached team as we thought. This was going to be one of these type of games, a 60-minute game and they did the things necessary to win. We had a lot of things not go our way today. Um, but the thing I loved most is that we never stopped fighting and that’s something that I think we’ll be able to build on. We had plenty of opportunities to win this game on the field with our play, not without all the other stuff that I’m sure everybody wants to talk about, but we had plenty of opportunities on the field to win this game. We just gotta execute and take advantage of those opportunities.”
“As I told our team, there’s a lot of football left to be played. Are we disappointed? Yeah, we sure are because we let one slip away here at home. And again, I got to credit—our crowd showed up for us today. They played a major role and you know, we didn’t get it done, but I could tell you that there’s a lot of football left to play. There’s no quit in this team. I saw they’re disappointed, but they also know that we left something out there that we can. If they keep giving this type of effort, I’m confident we’ll be back on the right track here in a week.”
Locksley was also asked a pair of controversial calls: the first being the expected offsides call that led to Chad Ryland’s extra point getting blocked, and second as the illegal receiver downfield call on the two-point attempt that was called back. “They said illegal forward pass,” Locksley said on the official’s comments regarding the blocked extra point. The second, though, didn’t sit well with Locksley.
“I’ll say this, the blocked extra point had a major impact on the game. it’s a one score game. It takes us in overtime. It adjust and changes how they play the game. The illegal man down the field had no impact on the touchdown, so I’ll just leave it at that.”
