What a difference a week makes for Maryland men’s basketball, huh?
Just a week ago, Maryland had barely survived a home game against Nebraska. The Terps were winless on the road. Kevin Willard was 4-20 in conference road games as the head coach at Maryland. A season that was going well enough to make fans imagine a top-four seed in the NCAA Tournament was possible was starting to look like it might teeter back toward the bubble.
As of today, Maryland might well be one home win against Wisconsin away from being right back in the conversation for a top-four seed.
The Terps had a very good week, recording road wins at Illinois and Indiana. The Illinois game was of course a blowout, with the Illini depleted by a flu bug. There’s no metric for “flu” on a team’s NCAA Tournament profile, so that won’t matter come Selection Sunday. The Indiana win was feverish. It was tremendously well played in certain moments, quite poorly played in others and saw a dramatic late swing in which Maryland blew a double-digit lead and then had to rally from down multiple possessions in the final minute in order to finish with one more point than its beleaguered opponent.
It was a phenomenal victory.
A week ago, the narrative was that the Terps were an awful road team, which could prevent them from reaching any significant heights this season. Even after the Illinois win, would the narrative have changed had Rodney Rice’s 3-point attempt late in the Indiana game rattled out? Or if Indiana had managed to get the ball back inside for a buzzer-beating game-winner?
I ask these questions because I’m not sure what the narrative is for Maryland basketball now. Do these two results outweigh Willard’s history in the Big Ten otherwise? Willard deserves a lot of credit for the Terps’ win at Indiana. In the final 90 seconds, he drew up a play during a timeout that saw Julian Reese (hardly a factor in the second half) smartly attack Malik Reneau, who was playing with four fouls. That quick bucket prevented Indiana from putting the game on ice. Then after a tough Ja’Kobi Gillespie basket in the waning seconds, his team had been coached not to commit an immediate foul but instead to foul 65.5 percent free throw shooter Trey Galloway. He missed the front end of the one-and-one, giving Maryland the chance to tie or go ahead.
Maybe Kevin Willard isn’t a bad coach on the road after all?
Maybe it is just incredibly difficult to win on the road in the Big Ten and this particular team was still learning how to put it all together? The Terps’ road record no longer defines them because they’re not winless.
And this pair of results may well prove to be the turning point for Maryland’s season. All four of the Terps’ road losses had been close games into the final few possessions. The results just happened to be the same. They didn’t need to win these games by double figures (although they did at Illinois). They just needed to learn how to weather the storm, stay in the moment and not make critical, game-defining mistakes. They instead allowed the home team to be the one to combust when the game was on the line at Indiana.
If that’s the lesson Maryland indeed learned and now it’s ready to close on the road, things really could get interesting for this team. The Terps figured it out at Indiana despite their best player (Derik Queen) finishing with just seven points. In fact, they won these two road games in very different ways. The Illinois game saw their frontcourt dominate. Against Indiana, their backcourt carried the load.
I mentioned that Wisconsin matchup this week. Maryland is currently tied for fifth place in the league with Illinois, with both teams sitting at 6-4. The Badgers will come to College Park at 6-3, giving the Terps a massive chance to record a win that would lock up a tiebreaker (since there is no return trip to Madison) against one of the other teams that could be in contention for a double bye in the Big Ten tournament.
Conveniently, Maryland students return to campus this week and the atmosphere should be a bit more electric for this game than it was for the Minnesota and Nebraska games.
This was a very good week for Maryland basketball. I’m still not fully certain what the reasonable expectations are for how to define this as a successful season. But this week went a long way toward believing there still can be significant expectations at all.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Maryland Athletics