A look inside the Terrapins’ development
Here’s how Locksley, staff prepare players for game day
From the moment he was hired last December, coach Mike Locksley has been consistent in his message about the 2019 Maryland football team. The Terps are what Locksley has called a “developmental” program, needing more than a season or two to become competitive in the Big Ten East, perhaps the toughest division among Power 5 conferences.
Even as his team was setting school records for points and pummeling Howard and then-No. 21 Syracuse by a combined score of 142-20 in the first two games, Lockley didn’t waver. He wondered aloud how his players, his staff and even he would react when adversity hit in the form of injuries and disappointing losses.
As Maryland prepared for Saturday’s road trip to No. 17 Minnesota last week, the Terps were trying to rebound from a 34-28 home loss to Indiana, their second straight and fourth in a stretch of five games. Three starters were expected to return after being sidelined with injuries — graduate transfer quarterback Josh Jackson and redshirt sophomore running Anthony McFarland Jr., as well as senior guard Terrance Davis.
Here is a day-by-day look at how
Locksley and his staff got the team ready for a game against the Golden Gophers.
Tuesday, noon, Locksley’s weekly press conference at Maryland Stadium
This part of the routine rarely changes, largely because Locksley’s personality is much more even-keel than most college football coaches. While he certainly gets annoyed at some of the questions he has been asked since preseason camp began in early August, he is more honest and, at times, forthcoming than many coaches he has worked for in the past.
So when Locksley is asked during the course of Tuesday’s session with the local media what being a developmental program looks like “on a daily basis,” the 49-year-old coach goes back to the wellworn cliché about “realizing that it’s a marathon and not a sprint,” but then changes direction.
“But we want to win now, and that’s our goal,” Locksley said. “Always prepare ourselves with the intent to win. But I’ve said, winning isn’t something we talk a lot about. It’s really the process and behaviors that help you win. The way you do that is you clearly define what they are, how you do it. We set standards for how we want to practice, how we want to prepare and how we want to play.”
The reality is that injuries can wreak havoc with everything a team has worked for, especially these Terps, who went into the season with little experience on the offensive line and at cornerback. In the first five games, Maryland lost three offensive linemen — including Davis with a sprained knee — and senior cornerback Tino Ellis with a season-ending “upper-body” injury.
In their place, Locksley started three redshirt offensive lineman as well as a true freshman, Deonte Banks, at corner.
“We know in the long run, they’ll be better for it as we get into the tough part of our season, the end stretch of our season,” Locksley said.
Tuesday, 6:45 p.m., offensive coaches meeting at Gossett Team House
Most teams follow the same schedule. On Sunday morning or early afternoon, the coaches review the tape of the previous game to show to their players that night. On Monday, they do the same for the tape of the team’s upcoming opponent. And on Tuesday and Wednesday, they watch film of practice to reinforce with the players in position meetings what they need to fix.
As Maryland’s offensive coaches congregated in a meeting room to watch Tuesday’s practice, Locksley sat at the back as his offensive assistants — coordinator Scottie Montgomery, offensive line coach John Reagan, running backs coach Elijah Brooks, wide receivers coach Joker Phillips and tight ends coach Mike Miller — flanked the table, along with several support-staff members.
Locksley manned the laser pointer as the tape flashed from play to play, back and forth, with Montgomery offering his opinions on the skill-position players and Reagan talking about his troops, which have been replenished with the return of Davis, as well as junior center Johnny Jordan, who missed time with a foot injury, and right tackle Marcus Minor, who also sat out a couple of games with a fractured toe.
“Five false starts [during the practice],” Locksley said, the frustration apparent in his voice.
“Most of these guys are not focused on the snap, they’re thinking about what’s next,” Reagan said.
Along with the penalties, which have piled up during the losses, there’s also a lack of precision in the way Locksley wants the offense to run. It’s not just the inexperienced linemen. It’s been lack of execution by both his quarterbacks, Jackson and redshirt junior Tyrrell Pigrome, as well as running back Javon Leake.
Locksley attributes the lack of focus, in practice and in games, to Maryland’s players getting distracted by the rest of their life as a college student.
“We started off fast on offense the first couple of games of the year. We just spent 30 days of nothing but football,” Locksley said. “They didn’t have school, they didn’t have girlfriends, they didn’t have tests, they didn’t have all the other things that come along with it. The first two games, we were hitting on all cylinders. The further we get away from training camp, the more distractions and other things they have to take care of.”
Friday, noon, walk-through at Cole Field House Under Armour Performance Center
After two days of practice, meetings among coaches, and coaches talking to players individually and in position groups, fine-tuning the game plan for Saturday’s trip to TCF Bank Stadium has been done as the Terps gather in their indoor facility for a walk-through before getting on the bus to BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport for their flight to Minneapolis.
Standing on the sideline, Montgomery goes over the 15 or so scripted plays Maryland plans to start with against the Golden Gophers. During the hour-long session, defensive coordinator Jon Hoke goes over what the defense expects to see and special teams coordinator John Papuchis calls out his special teams units as well.
Dressed in a dark suit and carrying a laminated playsheet, Locksley walks in the middle of the field, making sure that the plays are run with enough precision that it will begin to look like what the Terps hope to see when they take the field Saturday.
“Details, details, details, details,” Montgomery shouts to his unit.
It is something Locksley has tried to instill since he arrived from Alabama. It’s not only what he wants to see from his players on the field, but off it as well. He talked earlier in the season how linebacker Shaq Smith, a graduate transfer who played his first two years at Clemson, got on a teammate for not keeping his stall neat inside the locker room.
Kevin Glover, a former all-American center under Bobby Ross in the early to mid-1980s who joined Locksley’s staff as director of player development, tells sophomore wide receiver Sean Nelson to tuck in the back of his jersey. After the walkthrough is over, the players will change into suits for the trip.
Saturday, 8:58 p.m., coaches meeting at the team hotel
Two minutes ahead of schedule, Locksley convenes one of the most important meetings of game week. Inside a conference room in the Radisson Blu hotel, Locksley is joined by members of his coaching staff, as well as support staff, strength coach Ryan Davis and one of the team doctors.
Nearly two dozen crowd the room. Locksley starts by getting a recruiting update on the results of games involving players whom the Terps have already received commitments from for 2020, and those they are still pursuing both for 2020 and 2021. He then talks about the tendencies of the officiating staff, in particular the game’s head referee.
“Holding has been his big call, and defensive PIs [pass interference], he called defensive holding multiple times,” Locksley said, telling Reagan, defensive line coach Delbert Cowsette and secondary coach Cory Robinson to inform the players in their respective position groups of that trend.
Locksley goes over the injury report, which for the first time in a month is not that extensive. He tells Hoke to make sure a player who has been battling a nagging injury the past few weeks but has continued to play is honest about how he feels during pregame warmups.
“Make him open up,” Locksley said. Before going over the game plan one more time, Locksley asks for a weather report in trying to figure out what his team will do if it wins the coin toss. While told that the wind will not be as big a factor as it was at Purdue, the glare off the video board might become one.
“If we win the toss, we’ll take the ball to start and go away from it in the first half,” Locksley said.
Locksley breaks the tension a few times, lacing his comments with a few well-placed expletives, joking with his assistants that he won’t second-guess them like Ron Zook, who joined the staff as a special defensive assistant in late summer, did when Locksley worked as Zook’s offensive coordinator at Illinois.
In the back of the room, Zook laughs. Locksley goes over the starting lineup, with Pigrome starting at quarterback over Jackson, senior Terrance Davis returning to right guard after missing four games with a sprained knee and fifth-year senior Ellis McKennie at center ahead of junior Johnny Jordan.
Since it will mark the first time Jordan hasn’t started this season when he is healthy, Locksley tells Reagan to make sure Jordan understands it’s more a reward for McKennie playing well than it is reflection of Jordan’s performance this season.
“We don’t want to lose him,” Locksley said.
Locksley makes it clear that he wants his team to play loose and have fun, and that the coaches should make sure to get that point across. To prove that, Locksley points out a couple of plays that the Terps might try and different formations they might show that they haven’t used this season.
“We don’t want to leave anything in the [playbook],” he said.
Saturday, 11:45 a.m., offensive team meeting at hotel
The players, dressed in suits, fill the room, with the starting offensive line on five chairs in the middle of it for what the team calls its “clap” meeting.
This time, Montgomery is running the show. He goes over everything from the players’ decorum with game officials to the blocking techniques for his receivers on the edge and tells them that because of Minnesota’s ball-control offense, “every freakin’ position is huge.”
To try to counter the Gophers, Montgomery said: “We’re going to run the ball effectively, but we’re also going to use tempo.” He explains that in watching Central Florida, he noticed how receivers after making catches would give the ball back to the officials closer to the line of scrimmage so the offense could get to its next play.
“The biggest thing we’re going to do is we’re going to be aggressive,” Montgomery said. “There’s got to be a mentality of who we are. The people that can control that is the five guys sitting in these seats. It’s going to be won right here in this spot. The game starts there and the game ends there.”
In finishing up, Montgomery points around the room and talks about the opportunity that each player has at Maryland.
“So many people would love to be sitting in this offensive meeting right now, but they can’t, because they’re not good enough, and you guys are,” Montgomery said. You’re damn big-time players, so go play your butts off today. Play to your ability. Do your job, nothing more than that … Do your damn job! Stay in the game and get coached for 60 minutes or however long it takes us.”
Saturday, 6:30 p.m. CDT, TCF Bank Stadium
Locksley has left the postgame news conference, saying many of the same things he did at Maryland Stadium the previous week and the week before that at Purdue’s Ross-Ade Stadium. He credits his counterpart, Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck, for his team’s performance and speaks about a continuing trend of self-destruction.
Three players are brought in: McFarland, who carried 10 times for just 38 yards; senior cornerback Marcus Lewis, whose late first-half interception set up the team’s first field goal of the season; and McKennie.
One of two players, along with Jordan, who spoke so eloquently on the team’s behalf after former McDonogh teammate Jordan McNair’s death in June 2018, McKennie has become one of Maryland’s most respected leaders.
Asked how the game plan was altered dramatically after the two early interceptions, McKennie said: “That is difficult to have to switch the game plan and have to move away from certain things, but again, it’s something you have to do to win football games.
“There’s no quit in this football team and we have pride in what we do every day of the week and it sucks to go out there on Saturdays and that just doesn’t show. I hope people do know that we work hard every day for this football team and we’re trying our best, we just have to execute at a higher level to win.”
McKennie said that it’s also not for a lack of coaching.
“These coaches are working all times of the day. They show up way before I get there and they leave way after I leave,” McKennie said. “They have families, they have kids, but they spend time trying to put together a game plan and doing what they can to make sure we’re in the right position. We just haven’t been executing.”
With Michigan on tap Saturday in College Park, Maryland’s developmental season continues.