Quarterback C.J. Brown takes a snap in the Terps’ 37-0 victory over West Virginia on Sept. 21, 2013, at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore.
After 61 years of playing in the ACC, this university left the conference for the Big Ten this summer.
With the move, the Terrapins football team lost all its in-conference rivalries that developed over the course of more than six decades of competition. The program is no longer facing the likes of Virginia, North Carolina or Clemson on an annual basis. Now, the Terps have to create new rivals by way of Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan and others.
Despite that, one out-of-conference rival still remains for the Terps: West Virginia. The two teams have played 50 times since 1919, and Saturday, they will meet again at Byrd Stadium for the closest thing to a rivalry the Terps have as a new member of the Big Ten.
“It’s exactly what you’d expect: physical, guys getting after each other,” center Sal Conaboy said. “It’s a good game. It’s how you want to play. They’re guys that you want to go against. They’re going to be physical; they’re going to be nasty; they’re coming in to beat us up. And that’s what we like. We want it. We welcome it.”
Now in his fourth season, coach Randy Edsall sees the Terps-Mountaineers matchup as his program’s natural rivalry.
“That’s probably the biggest rivalry I’ve seen since I’ve been here, with no disrespect to the teams in the ACC,” Edsall said. “I see this one as being more intense than some of the teams we played previously in the ACC. I think it’s good that we can get on a bus to go there, they can get on a bus to come here. The fans can go and travel to the games. I think it’s healthy for both institutions and it’s healthy for football in this area.”
Saturday’s game will have a particular edge, considering what happened in last year’s matchup. At M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, the Terps thrashed the Mountaineers, 37-0, earning their first win in the rivalry since the 2003 season.
“This time, they’re coming off a loss to us. I think that’s a very big thing because they had been dominating us in years past,” senior linebacker Matt Robinson said. “We got a shutout versus an explosive offense last year. So now they’re definitely coming in here trying to prove a point at our house. They’ll probably going to try to throw as many balls as they can, tempo us. And we’re just preparing ourselves to defend our home field.”
The Terps’ defense will be faced with the task of slowing down the Mountaineers’ air-raid offense, led by senior quarterback Clint Trickett, who is seventh in the FBS with 713 passing yards through two games.
In the team’s season opener at No. 3 Alabama, Trickett completed 29 passes for 365 yards and a touchdown. He then followed that up by finding 11 different receivers in a 54-0 win over Towson.
“He’s just playing at a really high level,” Robinson said. “We just have to try to get hits on the quarterback, keep pressuring. We’re a pressure defense, so that’s what we try to do: be disruptive and cause him to maybe panic or be back there and have to make split decisions faster instead of letting him sit back there and survey the field.”
The Terps offense, meanwhile, will go against a unique 3-3-5 defensive scheme consisting of three down linemen, three linebackers and five defensive backs. Offensive coordinator Mike Locksley said the key for his unit will be managing the number of defenders in the box while sustaining success in the passing game when the Mountaineers stack their formation against the run.
And if they do that while finding a way to slow down Trickett and the offense, the Terps could come away with their first back-to-back wins over perhaps their biggest rivals in a decade.
“You don’t want them to have the last laugh,” Robinson said. “You just want to leave your mark and make sure that, for me, as I’m leaving here, just get the last win verse West Virginia.”
