If I’m being honest, I’ve watched very little Maryland men’s basketball this season … which isn’t a good way to start a column that is ostensibly about Maryland men’s basketball.
But it’s true and I don’t want to lie to anyone. If you had questions about rotations or the development of Darius Adams, I would be the wrong person to answer them.
Still, I reflect a large portion of the Maryland fan base. We might turn a game on for a bit if there’s nothing else to watch, but that’s probably about as much as we’re doing this year. At least the Terps are not going to finish winless in Big Ten play.
The most boring analysis we offer as fans and analysts alike is to constantly suggest a coach should be fired after every loss. Sometimes a coach has truly never taken footing and needs to go. Sometimes time simply has come up and it’s clear (as it was recently with John Harbaugh). But usually, the cries for a coach’s job are somewhere between unnecessary and absurd.
Despite Maryland’s 93-63 loss to Purdue Sunday being its fourth (!) loss of 30 or more points this season and 12th (!) by double digits, Buzz Williams should not be fired by the University of Maryland.
Now that’s a more complicated statement than it seems. There are a few layers to it. The first is that it’s inappropriate to fire a coach in the midst of his or her first season no matter how poorly things are going. If you believed in hiring that coach in the beginning, he or she deserves more than one season to prove him or herself. At least generally.
The second layer is that Maryland can’t fire Williams anyway, so this discussion is irrelevant. Williams did what Lamar Jackson couldn’t. With Maryland’s collective backs against the wall in the midst of the public Kevin Willard-Damon Evans spat, he became the most significant beneficiary by receiving a fully guaranteed deal. If Maryland fires him without cause, they’re on the hook for everything they owe him.
But the third layer is maybe the most important. That’s the layer where we add the addendum “… but he shouldn’t have been hired in the first place.”
I had very low expectations for the Williams hire. Save for one season more than a decade ago at Marquette, his long resume included almost no true accomplishments. He’s been good enough to keep jobs until he’s recognized it was time to get out before people started asking why he hadn’t accomplished anything. There was nothing to suggest he was a rising coach and far more to suggest he was a journeyman.
Far more troubling were the conversations I had with those who covered him during his time at Virginia Tech. It became clear to me what a poor cultural fit Williams would be at Maryland. He ran programs that were insulated. He operated as a singularly powerful force. His emphasis on religion is popular with a specific crowd, but this is not a region where religion trumps reality.
On the court, even I have been shocked by how bad things are. While Williams had a late start in building a roster, his successor at A&M, former Samford coach Bucky McMillan, had an even later start and brought even fewer players from his previous team with him. McMillan built a roster that currently sits at 17-4 overall and 7-1 in the SEC. Injuries have hurt the Terrapins, most notably Pharrel Payne. But Payne played in five of the double-digit losses. This team wasn’t going to be notably better with Payne on the floor.
I think there’s reason to believe things will get better on the floor with Williams as coach. To be fair, how could they possibly not? But the discontent from the fan base isn’t entirely about the performance on the floor. It also has to do with the total detachment the program seems to have from the community. Williams has hardly gone out of his way to ingratiate himself. His news-conference messaging about “lessons learned” is ripe for satire. He hasn’t built relationships with the local basketball community. Landing one local product (albeit a big one) in Baba Oladotun doesn’t change that.
The players have no connection to the area and aren’t being given much of an opportunity to make any. For full disclosure, we spoke with many of them on Glenn Clark Radio before they were officially on campus. They seem like good kids! And I acknowledge that it’s tough to try to market them when none of them are playing particularly well.
That’s why the onus falls more on Williams to go out of his way to show how much he’s taking to the area and to meet alums and fans in the middle. Williams runs things his way. The only relevant question remaining for this team is whether Payne is going to play again this season. It seems pretty obvious he isn’t, but despite that, Williams still refuses to discuss it. His edict is to never talk about injuries. That was disappointing when concerned fans just wanted to know that Payne was OK after a scary fall against Marquette. It’s infuriating when the team is unwatchable and the few people who care would just like to know if there’s reason for optimism that a good player might be back for another season.
Winning can overcome personality differences, but it’s hard to imagine Williams winning at a level that overcomes how unnatural this fit is anytime soon. In the meantime, it would behoove Williams to try to prioritize being the best possible “Maryland basketball coach” over being the best possible “leader of a Buzz Williams program.”
At the moment, he’s making new UMKC coach Mark Turgeon look like a more comfortable cultural fit.
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