OT: Maryland wants to be "Oregon of the East Coast"
http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/terps/bs-sp-terps-football-1013-2015…
"I would think that this is one of the most attractive jobs in the country for somebody who is ambitious and willing to take risks, ... the potential for growth, the potential of this being another Oregon."
Yeah, good luck with that one, Terps.
October 13th, 2015 at 12:51 PM ^
Too bad Under Armor as a brand has never had the strength of Nike, and it is far from its own peak as far as I can tell.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:05 PM ^
Nike was founded in the 1960s
Under Armour was founded in the 1990s
Under Armour has plenty of catch up to do. Using Maryland as a school of strength is a good strategy and they can probably pull the funds to employ a great coach if they want to. I can see UA becoming the #2 in football if they aren't already there. UA and Nike are trending up, Adidas down.
October 13th, 2015 at 3:21 PM ^
Under Armour is a lot younger than Nike, so that's not a particularly fair comparison. But it's a rapidly-growing company. It's gained a good market share in a relatively short amount of time, although it lags a bit in the footwear area.
October 13th, 2015 at 3:28 PM ^
getting Jordan Speith could be a huge boost for them.
October 13th, 2015 at 12:51 PM ^
Talk about your unrealistic expectations.
October 13th, 2015 at 12:51 PM ^
I am not sure I would want to be Oregon this year...
October 13th, 2015 at 1:09 PM ^
I've got the Big Mick
They've got a Duck, I've got a Turtle
October 13th, 2015 at 8:24 PM ^
Ahh now it makes sense. "We want to be the Oregon of this year of the East Coast". That's a reasonable goal.
October 13th, 2015 at 12:51 PM ^
and with the UA/Nike comp I don't think it's a ridiculous comparison. It would have been just as ridiculous to say the same thing about Oregon in the 90's.
October 13th, 2015 at 12:58 PM ^
Agree with this, especially with UA surge as of late. Obviously we all understand that it's a lofty goal, but what else is he going to say? "Ya, we're just out here shooting for 7-5 seasons and weird uniforms."
October 13th, 2015 at 1:06 PM ^
you might start by not firing your coach mid-season because you are delusional about what your program should be.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:22 PM ^
Wait so a program that has been to a bcs bowl, had as many 10 win seasons as michigan since 2000 is delusional for thinking they are better than finising with 4-5 wins and not getting blown out by bowling green at home.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:54 PM ^
Well, it is clear that you didn't pick those yardsticks to support an otherwise unsupportable position.
There is a huge excluded middle that makes your choice selection absurd.
October 14th, 2015 at 10:21 AM ^
Well, they don't have as many 10 win seasons as Michigan since 2000. So there's that. And they have more 2 win seasons than BCS bowls during that stretch. Maryland has been under .500 7 of the 15 seasons since your arbitrary Y2K marker. This year will likely make it 8 of 16. That means every other year, they are under .500. In the last 35 years (arbitrary marker supporting my point), they have 19 seasons finishing with 5 wins or less.
Sure, Maryland would LIKE to be better. But they are not, currently. So yes, I would say they could be described as delusional if they think they are better than 4-5 wins. Because more often than not, that is their actual record.
Hope this helps. Go Terps.
October 13th, 2015 at 2:17 PM ^
But then you better identify a young, up-and-comer coach that has a specific identity that you can sell to recruits, boosters, etc., and give that guy a ton of support.
October 13th, 2015 at 12:58 PM ^
For a sport so obsessed with tradition, everyone sure has a short memory span. Before the mid-90s, Oregon was like the Purdue of the Pac-10.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:04 PM ^
Yep.
But keep in mind lots of youngins on the board so your frame of reference is what you know in your life.
10 years ago Baylor was nothing, TCU was nothing, Utah was nothing. These werent even P5 conference teams. Now they have been top 10 teams of lat, esp the first two.
Boise was nothing 15 year ago. Wisconsin was nothing 20 years ago.
Maryland could be a very good program - like Illinois I think they are massive underachievers. Same for Virginia. Lots of population growth is happening in the DC corridor the past 10 years so their "home ground" has better football than 20 years ago than places like Detroit. Maryland obviously has a specific backer. Just like Oklahoma State with T Boone Pickens - OK State has not gotten as big as Baylor or TCU but was basically Indiana for decades.
If we had this conversation in the late 70s and someone said FSU would be the 1st or 2nd most winningest program in the next 30 years people would laugh. Before Spurrier got to Florida it was basically Purdue. Obviously population has helped them and "southern football culture" but things can change a lot in 20 years.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:08 PM ^
I have a cousin from Florida that was a HS All-American back in the early 70s. He went to Oklahoma. I saw an old article about him and he didn't even consider the local schools.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:12 PM ^
I can't look this up right now but I'm pretty sure TCU has been decent to good for over a decade. Not at the current level obviously but they used to have a top defense every year and upset several big teams en route to winning seasons in the MWC. It earned them a Big XII invite and after a couple year adjustment Patterson has proven he can just flat out coach. Before Patterson I have no idea though.
Baylor was completely terrible until like five years ago.
I can even remember a time when Georgia was one of the top teams in the SEC but could never quite get that title run. Oh. Right.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:47 PM ^
Looks like the upswing for TCU happened in 1998. with Franchione who left for Alabama and then Gary Patterson ever since. I still write 1993 on my checks, so 1998 doesn't seem that long ago.
October 13th, 2015 at 3:50 PM ^
Yup, that's when they got on my radar, during LaDainian Tomlinson's career.
More recently, I think they've benefited from joining a P5, Texas being down, and good coaching.
October 13th, 2015 at 2:01 PM ^
was actually a decent football program in the days of the Southwest Conference. They weren't contending for NC's, but they were consistenlty finishing above 500. The 70's and 80's were actually pretty good decades - a couple of SWC titles, consistently finishing in the top half of the conference and a handful of Top 20 finishes.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:31 PM ^
Utah went undefeated and won a BCS bowl 10 years and a few months ago..
October 13th, 2015 at 2:00 PM ^
They were coached by the Devil!
October 13th, 2015 at 1:30 PM ^
and then fell off the map. People forget Slingin' Sammy Baugh played there. TCU actually was a power before Texas and A&M.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:56 PM ^
Baylor has been a major conference team the whole time, despite being a dreadful program 1995-2010.
TCU was also in the SWC -- so they were not 'major' only from 1996-2011, though they have been pretty good since 2000, finishing in the Top 10 three times while still in the Mountain West.
Utah has been a pretty strong program for 25 years now. Correct, they were not P5, but they've been in BCS-level bowls back to 2004, so I wouldn't call them "nothing."
Wisconsin was nothing 25 years ago, not 20. Your overall point is very well-taken, but I just wanted to add some precision.
Virginia Tech and Kansas State are also formerly moribund programs that became regional/national powers with the help of brilliant coaches. In Kansas State's case, they were the worst major program of all time in terms of winning percentage.
I wonder, however, if an Alvarez or Beamer or Snyder could survive today. All three won through strong fundamentals rather than gimmicky offenses. Alvarez did not start winning until his fourth year. Snyder got K State to a modest winning record in his third year but then dipped under .500 for his fourth. Luckily they kept him and he started winning big in his fifth year.
Beamer is the most remarkable survival story -- by his sixth year his best records were two six-win seasons, and by then he was back down to 2 wins. The kept him in '93, however, and he started winning big. I have a hard time believing that even Wake Forest or Rutgers would keep a coach after that.
Makes me wonder if Edsall -- or whomever -- might have been on the verge of something big. We'll never know for sure. I do think Maryland needs an atmosphere more conducive to football though, and they probably need a nearby power to be down (likely PSU) for a while to really surge. I think it helped that Washington had been down for a while when Oregon kicked it into overdrive.
October 13th, 2015 at 2:25 PM ^
I was actually thinking about these two programs as well when I was reading this chain. Just as a n example, if we choose for a moment to judge bowl performances as a vague indicator of performance, Virginia Tech has been to 28 of them in their existence as a football program. 22 of those have been with Frank Beamer as the head coach. In the case of Kansas State, 17 of their 18 bowl appearances have been under Bill Snyder.
October 13th, 2015 at 5:59 PM ^
a lot of that, however, is there was no micronpc.buffalowildwings Bowl back in 1949. Most teams didn't go to bowls unless they won 9-10 games until the 70s-80s, and both coaches took over in the late 80s.
October 14th, 2015 at 11:54 AM ^
"massive underachiever" too.
The more I see and learn about them and their failings, though, the less likely it appears they'll ever become a consistently good-to-very-good program.
At best, they're #3 (and sometimes lower) in the pecking order when it comes to recruiting their own state, despite being the "flagship" university within a very populous state. In Chicagoland ND is #1, followed by NU, and then comes Illinois neck-and-neck with Wisconsin when it comes to recruiting the Chicago area.
Outstate (and in Chicago), llinois also has to fend off Michigan, OSU, Iowa, Missouri, MSU, and to a smaller extent Northern Illinois, Purdue, Indiana, and Minnesota in recruiting their own state.
They also battle the long-standing (but historically correct) impression that Illinois is a basketball school.
Lastly, have you ever been to Champaign-Urbana? IMO, one of the 3 or 4 worst college towns in the entire Big Ten.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:29 PM ^
Their fans got pretty arrogant in the years following Michael Vick, considering they had little or no prior football success. But they seem to be cycling back to earth now.
Also, I miss your former avatar.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:02 PM ^
They won 8+ games 6 times from 1989-1999.
Maryland has won 8+ games twice in the last 11 years. Playing in a conference worse than the Pac 10/12.
Admittedly they had a nice run from 2001-2003. That's about it in recent memory.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:37 PM ^
me if i'm wrong but Oregon ran pretty much a pro-style offence when joey "ball game" harrington was there... it wasn't until a few years later (2007) after that when bellotti hired some guy named chip from New Hampshire with a wired offence that he learned from some guy at west virgina...
thats when the Oregon got rolling and we all saw it first hand in 2007 with the silence... some of us were there live in person (as i was) and others watched the curb stomping take place on TV...
October 13th, 2015 at 1:38 PM ^
Oregon was 65-48 in the 90's. Not exactly a juggernaut. And the point is not exactly what their record was between 1990 and 1999, it's that they were basically irrelevant until the 2000's.
October 13th, 2015 at 2:00 PM ^
is a relative term. I'm college football fanatic, so everyone is relevant, but Oregon in particular was very much on the radar to casual football fans, having gone to a Rose and Cotton bowl and having a high profile QB in Akili Smith. It was before '93 that they were a faceless program, other than being where Dan Fouts went to school.
October 13th, 2015 at 3:07 PM ^
agreed, they were good with Akili Smith. they also came into East Lansing in the late 90s and beat MSU in a night game. I was there.
Oregon steamroller michigan in 2003 (again, I was there), even though they were not a juggernaut yet, you could tell Beloit had them on an upward trajectory prior to that game.
October 13th, 2015 at 3:43 PM ^
Dan Fouts was the anayst for that 2003 game and he and many others proclaimed it the biggest win in Oregon's history despite the fact that they reached their height under Belotti in 2001 with Joey Ballgame at QB. Oregon was pretty inconsistent the rest of Belotti's career, althougn the were dealing with Carroll and USC at the time.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:09 PM ^
I can't imagine a better strategy for them. One would think UA is on board. Maybe it doesn't work out, but aspiring to be Oregon makes more sense than trying to emulate any other CFB power.
October 13th, 2015 at 6:02 PM ^
is hire a Brady Hoke type to recruit for 3-4 years, then dump him for someone who can coach with great discipline. Maryland is fairly fertile recruiting territory.
October 13th, 2015 at 12:52 PM ^
I want to be a dragon!
October 13th, 2015 at 12:55 PM ^
Dragon or a fire-breathing variety?
October 13th, 2015 at 1:00 PM ^
I want candy for breakfast!
October 13th, 2015 at 12:52 PM ^
This based on what? The uniforms?
October 13th, 2015 at 12:57 PM ^
That was my first thought as well.
October 13th, 2015 at 2:43 PM ^
They hope that UA will buy Chip Kelly for them.
October 13th, 2015 at 12:53 PM ^
They're implying that they have a chance at Chip Kelly. Problem is he doesn't actually have a history with Maryland like Harbaugh has with UM, he probably won't get fired by the Eagles, and if he did leave Philly USC would probably gun for him hard. Nobody chooses the Maryland job over USC.
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October 13th, 2015 at 12:58 PM ^
Thank you! Kelly is very unlikely to get fired less than a year after the Eagles gave him personnel control. As bad as this season is for them, they obviously want to see his vision of a squad come to fruition.
October 13th, 2015 at 12:58 PM ^
this has absolutely nothing to do with maryland wanting to be oregon of the east coast
October 13th, 2015 at 1:00 PM ^
The CEO of Underarmor played football at Maryland and has donated a large amount of money to the program. They want to become Oregon of the East by using that to build their program, like Oregon did with Phil Knight.
October 13th, 2015 at 1:02 PM ^
I'm well aware of UA's connection with Maryland, but you can't be the "Oregon of the East" without a football team that actually puts itself in the national conversation, no matter how much money you throw at the program. Maryland will need an elite coach to get there, and their current program is in absolute shambles.