The press releases seemed to come nearly every week. Even after the year from hell that was the 2011 Terrapins football season ended, the stench of failure wafted through College Park as the tally of players leaving the program grew longer and longer. While the losses on the field ceased, they continued off it.
The reminders continue to arrive, even months after National Signing Day. Danny O’Brien, once Byrd Stadium’s beacon of hope, is officially heading to Wisconsin. Defensive back Avery Graham left the program last week, too – the 13th player with eligibility remaining to leave the team since the 2-10 disaster ended.
The departures have been seen as a referendum on the program and the coach in charge of it. In some cases – O’Brien and running back D.J. Adams, specifically – great talent was leaving the program. The exits of other players, meanwhile, pointed to something awry in the locker room. What could be going on under coach Randy Edsall that was bad enough to have so many players heading for the hills?
Maybe, just maybe, the mass exodus from College Park was exactly what Edsall needed.
It’s no surprise that Edsall rubbed some players the wrong way when he took over for Ralph Friedgen. His strict style clashed with the Fridge’s more relaxed ways. Only a few of last year’s Terps were recruited by the current Terps coach. Some absconders were to be expected.
Thirteen? Probably not. But that number is irrelevant now. What matters today, on the seventh practice session of the spring, is that everyone in the supposedly divided locker room had a chance to jump ship. Those who remain have no excuse not to buy into Edsall’s message.
“A lot of guys that were leaving had already made it clear through whether their actions or what they said that they weren’t happy here,” nose tackle A.J. Francis said last Tuesday, adding that he didn’t find out some players – including a few good friends – were leaving until the day after they requested transfers. “If you’re not happy somewhere where you’re devoting 90 percent of your life, you got to change scenery.”
Last year’s locker-room issues, Francis insists, were overblown. That doesn’t mean everyone was on the same page.
This season, Year 2 of the Edsall era, Francis sees things changing for the team. So does the coach himself.
“When we went into spring, we basically had five goals. And the No. 1 thing that we said is, ‘Everybody’s got to be all in.’ Everybody’s all in,” Edsall said. “You can see there’s a whole different attitude. There’s a whole different feeling now.”
If that’s the case, we can stop talking about Edsall the Dictator and instead talk about Edsall the Football Coach. The focus can go back to the football field and quarterbacks, not the locker room and do-rags. We can try to look past the transfers, even as they leave a perilously thin quarterback position and an offensive line in shambles in their wake.
Was it their fault, or Edsall’s? We probably won’t know for some time, if ever. Of course, if we see another dozen players leave after this year, we’ll have some idea what the actual source of discord is.
Until then, at least until the next patch of adversity, the Terps appear unified. They seem on the same page. Now, the important number isn’t 13. It’s 2-10.
“You just got to put it behind you,” Francis said. “I mean, not to sound bad, but we’ve been 2-10 before, and we know how to come back from it.”
schneider@umdbk.com
