With both Penn State and Michigan coming to College Park later this fall, Maryland’s showdown on the road Saturday against No. 4 Ohio State is likely to be the most inhospitable environment the Terrapins will face this season. Here are this week’s Terps Top Three keys.
Into ‘The Shoe’: Maryland will conduct a practice indoors with amplified crowd noise to try to replicate the atmosphere at Ohio Stadium (capacity 102,780), but coach Mike Locksley said that’s typical road-game preparation and not anything out of the ordinary.
“As far as the environment of playing in front of that many people, if you’ve ever been inside the arena, you don’t really notice,” Locksley said. “When we were playing in the pandemic, when there was nobody in the stands, to where we play and there’s 100,000, if your focus is on the right things and where it’s supposed to be, you don’t really notice the crowd. Our way we prepare, we don’t have to make any adjustments going up to Columbus.”
Maryland operates with a no-huddle offense replete with hand signals and doesn’t use a lot “verbiage” at the line of scrimmage, as Locksley put it. On the other side of the ball, safety Dante Trader Jr. said the defense operates in the same manner because “you could be like five feet away” from your teammate and not hear them.
“A lot of communication gets done on the sideline and throughout the week. So it’s like you have to rely on everybody knowing what they’re doing throughout the week,” Trader said.
This will be Trader’s second trip to Columbus, so he’s more versed on what to expect, though that doesn’t stop him from teasing some of his younger teammates.
“I kind of kind of mess with them. Like, “How are you gonna do when you see 100k fans? Eyes gonna get big?” and I’ll just mess with them a little bit.” Trader said. “You got to be ready to go. Young, old — you get on that field, you better be ready to go.”
Strikingly similar: This season is the first time Maryland has started 5-0 in 22 years. The last time — 2001 — was a year this edition of the Terrapins would like to emulate, with then-coach Ralph Friedgen guiding Maryland to its final ACC championship and an Orange Bowl berth in his first season at the helm.
This edition of the Terrapins has charted a strikingly-similar path to their 2001 counterparts, especially in terms of the route each took in their first five games.
Both teams played four of their first five at home with one similar opponent: Virginia, back on the schedule this season for the first time in a decade. Also tied to both seasons is Locksley, who was in the midst of his first stint in College Park in 2001 as a running backs coach on Friedgen’s staff.
The scoring offenses and defenses are nearly identical. Through five games in 2001, Maryland averaged 38.6 points-per-game and held their opponents to 13.2. Through five games in 2023, the Terrapins are scoring 34.6 points-per-game and holding opponents to 14.2.
The sixth game for both teams featured a visit to a ranked conference opponent: No. 4 Ohio State this season, and No. 15 Georgia Tech back then. Knowing that result, Maryland can only hope that the foreshadowing continues.
The Terps trailed the Yellow Jackets late before tying the game on a Nick Novak 46-yard field goal at the end of regulation. They would take the lead on a 26-yarder from Novak in overtime before future College Football Hall-of-Famer E.J. Henderson sealed the 20-17 upset with a fumble recovery.
Schedule setup: The Big Ten announced the future conference matchups for Maryland and the rest of the league Thursday. The schedule, released for the next five seasons, will feature nine league games each season with each school playing every other school at least twice (home-and-home) in a five-year cycle.
Maryland will have five Big Ten home games in the first year of the new system, with Iowa, Michigan State, Northwestern, Rutgers and Southern California coming to College Park in 2024. Rutgers is one of the Terrapins’ “protected opponents” that Maryland will play annually.
The Terrapins will visit Indiana, Minnesota, Penn State and Oregon. The schedule limits Maryland’s trips to the four new West Coast members — the Ducks, along with Washington, USC, and UCLA — to one per year.
“I think all I want is to make sure we’re getting the same treatment that everybody else in our league gets, and just glad to see we didn’t have all four of the new teams and three trips out west, which kind of has typically been how the new kids on the block has been treated since we’ve joined the league,” Locksley said.
An initial version of the future schedule was released in June but was reworked after the Big Ten added Oregon and Washington two months later.
• George Gerbo can be reached at ggerbo@washingtontimes.com.
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