Take a moment and think back to Saturday, Jan. 9.
That was the day Melo Trimble shocked Wisconsin on its own floor with a last-second three and helped his school move to 15-1 on the season.
Back then, the Maryland men’s basketball team looked poised to somehow exceed what were already incredibly high preseason expectations. Back then, Terrapin fans could walk into Xfinity Center, look up into the rafters, and imagine what a 2015/16 National Championship banner would look like — and not feel crazy doing so.
Oh, how times have changed.
Now, the attitude around Mark Turgeon’s group is very different. The Terps have gone just 9-6 since beating the Badgers, and concluded the regular season with a particularly discouraging 2-4 finish. And, according to a recent survey completed by Terps Watch that polled 40 fans of the team, almost no one is having banner-centric daydreams now.
That’s right: Of all the respondents, only one person thinks this talented bunch of players — which was ranked as high as No. 2 this year and had more hype than the Fuller House reboot — will even make it to the Final Four in Houston. No one’s hoping for a title. Just three have Elite 8 hopes.
The survey, which was presented in a few ways including on Twitter and in person, revealed that the most common expected destination for Maryland in the upcoming NCAA Tournament is the Sweet 16, which got 19 votes. 14 fans, meanwhile, think they’ll see one win before Trimble and Co. bow out. Then there are three especially pessimistic participants who are just waiting for an opening round loss.
That’s not all we asked the fans, however – while those results do a great job showing how drastically altered the views of the Terrapins have become, they aren’t the most damning results. The real surprise is when we asked the survey takers to sum up the season thus far in one, lonely word.
Brace yourselves.
“Disappointing” was used five times. “Frustrating” was written four times. “Stressful” showed up twice. Same with “uninspiring.”
There was also a “gutless,” a “collapse,” a “confounding,” an “underachieving,” an “ugh,” and even a “tragic.” Not to mention a “TheWeightOfExpectationsGotToTurgeon’sHead.”
The three most positive answers? A “scintillating,” an “average,” and a “fine.”
Now, everyone has his or her theory as to why Maryland’s been in such a slump recently, and why the regular season as a whole didn’t exactly go as planned. Our responders are no different.
For freshman Jordan Katz, it’s been the unpredictability of the Terps that’s most bothersome.
“Really everyone besides Diamond Stone has been inconsistent in terms of individual performances,” he said. “The team as a whole has also been inconsistent within individual games. There’s been plenty of games where they’ve looked vastly better in the second half of the game than the first half and you wonder why they can’t just do that for 40 minutes?”
Freshman Jared Goldstein is equally as confused.
“We should be a great rebounding team,” he said. “I still don’t really understand why we struggle so much in that area… I also don’t understand this team’s inability to win on the road.”
Luckily, in college basketball, things can improve in the postseason. Time and time again, a school can recover from a lackluster stretch like Maryland just went through and get hot in the tournament.
It’s happened before, and it can very well happen again.
The Terrapins will fortunately have a chance for a tune-up in the Big Ten Tournament before embarking on their journey through the Big Dance next weekend. Can they turn things around and figure out a way to redeem themselves in the eyes of College Park’s faithful?
Sure they can — but first, they need to fix a few things.
“I think they need everyone playing at their best at the same time,” Katz said. “Maryland really hasn’t had a game against a good opponent where their starting five plus Dodd and Nickens have all played well at the same time. Usually 2-3 guys do well, but not everyone.”
“I still think this team can win the national championship,” Goldstein said. “I guess if I had to point to one thing [that Maryland must do], I would say we have to get hot from three. And it can’t just be one guy who gets hot. It needs to be Melo, Sheed, Layman, Carter Jr., and Brantley and Nickens off the bench. If all of these guys are hitting their shots at their normal clip, we’ll be damn near impossible to stop.”
“If that happens,” he added, “I’ll see you on Route One during our championship celebration.”
