Mark Turgeon

ATLANTA — Mark Turgeon has taken a measured approach to the Terrapins men’s basketball team’s road woes this season.

Using past experiences as a guide, the second-year coach regularly explains that the youthful Terps are right on track. Road wins, Turgeon reasons, will arrive when his unit has a bit more seasoning.

But chronically inconsistent play is beginning to test Turgeon’s philosophy. After falling at two conference cellar dwellers in nine days, a once-promising campaign is quickly losing traction. And Turgeon — whose Terps face Wake Forest on the road tomorrow — is growing frustrated with his own inability to solve the team’s ever-evolving problems.

“We just didn’t play very smart,” Turgeon said shortly after the Terps notched a numbing 78-68 loss at Georgia Tech on Wednesday. “If I had an answer, I’d fix it.”

Turgeon has been searching for that answer for more than six weeks. The Terps have dropped away games in seemingly every imaginable way this season, stumbling to a 1-6 ACC road record.

They scored just 14 first-half points at Miami, tallied 21 turnovers at North Carolina, allowed 11 3-pointers at Duke and lost on a buzzer-beater at Florida State. But those defeats all came against more experienced squads with NCAA tournament potential. The Terps’ most recent shortcomings have proven far more confounding.

Over the past 10 days, Turgeon’s squad has lost to two young teams that boast a combined 9-21 ACC record. And they did it in front of sparse crowds. Suddenly, age and raucous environments are no longer the blame for the Terps’ woes.

So what’s the problem? Why did they fall flat in consecutive must-win road games against inferior competition?

Center Shaquille Cleare thinks he has the answer. The issue doesn’t reside with the coaching staff, he said Wednesday. It falls on the players’ inability to carry out Turgeon’s instructions.

“I just think guys need to pay attention more in timeouts,” Cleare said. “Guys be gazing around or whatever, and that hurts me as a player. I can see exactly what Coach is drawing up and he’ll be like, ‘Do you understand?’ We’ll be like, ‘Yeah,’ and then act like we didn’t know what happened.”

Cleare’s observation backs up Turgeon’s chief complaint this season. He knows his players have enough talent to run the sets and plays he designs. But for whatever reason, they’re unable to get the job done when the game’s on the line.

That lack of execution has been on full display in the Terps’ past two road losses. In both contests, Turgeon called several second-half timeouts in an effort to keep the Terps within striking distance. But players’ performances hardly changed.

They kept forcing one-on-one situations instead of finding the open man. They failed to help teammates on defense and drifted away from the team’s inside-out principles on offense.

“It’s really just focus and mental toughness,” guard Seth Allen said. “You know, when you’re tired, you’ve got to be able to listen and do what Coach says.”

The Terps have surely spent plenty of time listening to Turgeon since Wednesday. Instead of heading back to College Park after the Georgia Tech loss, they flew to Winston-Salem, N.C., yesterday for two days of team meetings, film sessions and practices.

After Wednesday’s letdown moved the Terps even further away from the NCAA tournament discussion, the stakes may not be as high as Turgeon would prefer. But that hardly changes the extended road trip’s top objective. The Terps are facing a Demon Deacons team tomorrow that they routed, 86-60, in one of their best shooting performances of the season at Comcast Center.

It’s time, players figure, to finally help their coach squelch those nagging road woes.

“We’re just a different team on the road,” center Alex Len said. “We’ve got to play the same on the road the way we play at home.”

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