My day started with the alarm going off at 4 AM, waking me from a sound sleep. Got ready and headed to the airport, feeling really weird, as all I brought with me with my iPad.
Had a 6:22 flight out of Hancock to Reagan International Airport. It flew right over the Maryland campus but I was late with my camera and missed the picture. Reagan is in Arlington, Virginia, right on the Potomac, and the flight next went right over DC, giving me an awesome view of the National Mall. Very cool.
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Reagan has a stop on the DC metro mass transport system. It is on the same line (yellow) as College Park, so it was easy for me to walk to the metro stop, plunk down $8 for the fare and find myself at the College Park metro station about 40 minutes later. It was clean, safe and easy.
Walked from there to the tailgate. It was about a mile and gave me a chance to see some of the Maryland campus. It features Georgian themed buildings and reminded me a bit of our campus. Just larger and hillier. A lot larger.
I won’t spend a lot of time talking about the tailgate but wanted to give props to
TexanMark,
JSOrange97,
weedsportwarriors and everyone else involved with making this happen. It was a great time. Big fan of the pork roll, cheese and egg combo. Great job all. Nice to meet some new people, nice to see a bunch of the DC area crew again. It was a great location and a very good time. Sorry we don’t play Maryland more often. If I had a say, we would. I like playing P5 schools that are drivable where we have a strong presence.
Not a fan of the upper deck at their stadium. It is steep, and way too far from the field. I don’t get why this is the case. We had to be close to twice as far as you would be at the top of the upper deck of the Dome and we sat near the bottom of the third deck. And we were really really high in the air. I would estimate we were at least 100 feet higher than we would be sitting in my normal seats at the Dome. On the other side of the field, there is no upper deck at all. Instead there is a huge wall of ugliness that holds the press box and many private boxes. What an ugly, botched, awful setup. The lower section is fine and reminds me of how Archbold looked in the old days. Also, the walk to and from the upper deck is arduous and something many would have problems with. I took the stair case up and my legs were burning with lactic acid by the time I reached the ascent. Took the ramps back down. It was a ton of walking to cover a small distance but was better than those diablo stairs.
I hope some day we get a third level concourse at the Dome. If it happens, I hope it comes with escalators. That is how to make things fan friendly and keep the ADA folks off your back!
Maryland had a very big band that featured 17 tubas. They were good and they played our fight song before the game, which I always think is a classy move, and something we should do for our opponent each home game.
I didn’t eat at the stadium but the food looked quite pedestrian. Pizza, nachos, hot dogs, etc. They did have a small stand that featured crab themed options, like nachos with a crap sauce topping, and crap filled pretzels. That was good. Noticed their condiment station had mustard, ketchup, relish and a big box of Old Bay. Cool. They have a Chik-Fil-A somewhere in the stadium and a couple other stands that did specialty foods but I think they were on the first floor level, inaccessible to Regular Joes like me. I stopped by their bathrooms. It featured stainless steel pee troughs that made moaning sounds and looked forlorned and in much need of TLC. Their stations to wash your hands did not have foot petals and had weird knobs to activate water. A bit shady but still, trough technology is trough technology.
We talked a lot about the game beforehand. I thought the key to the game was whether our defense would be able to stop the UMd rushing attack. I was worried about it. It was our big weakness last season and with Slayton and our top 3 LBs gone, a lot of our key players stopping the run were gone.
Well, we didn’t stop the run. Thought we were pretty good bottling things up inside but the Terp RBs could get to the corner seemingly every time they went wide. We didn’t learn and got hurt here repeatedly. Our LBs looked slow and our DEs looked gullible and weak. Bama does a lot of RPO stuff designed to set up situations where the offense has 2 guys to account for and there is only one defender. Locksley used this stuff almost every big play on third down and it appeared we were totally unprepared for it.
Thought they picked on Cisco on patterns over the middle early. We didn’t do a great job handing over responsibility for coverage on those down and ins and Andre was just a little late a bunch of times. He eventually got a better break on this play and get a pick but by then, it was too late. Maryland did a good job mixing up runs and passes and when they passed, they used a lot of quick developing plays to mitigate our pas rush, largely taking our DEs out of the game. It was a sound gameplan and it was executed perfectly. A lot of the credit goes to the UMd OL which opened holes for McFarland (who was great BTW) and gave Jackson plenty of time to throw.
Thought our defense was stunned by everything the Terps did. Looked like they lost discipline and tried to make big hits and great plays inside of just doing their individual jobs. Thought our DEs were man handled by the supposedly weak link OTs for Maryland. Thought our LBs had a tough day, were out of position a lot. Thought the same was true of our safeties. There were blown assignments in coverage too often and I can’t remember a single time Maryland tried to pass and there was no one open. It was complete breakdown in all aress by the defense. The only starter I think played well was Iffy. Brutal.
On offense, it looked like Maryland did not respect our running game and played to take away with the pass with an extra DB. We tried to make them pay for this with many runs up the middle and had some success doing this. Looked like we got pretty good holes and the RBs had lots of changes to break off long runs. But unlike our safeties. UMd’s were solid tackling in the open field and cut our RBs down without a problem.
Thought our OL was really bad pass blocking, especially the OTs. Devito rarely had time to throw. Seemed like we had a lot of passing plays that took forever to develop, making a bad problem worse. Didn’t like a lot of the calls. Lots of runs on 3rd and 6.
Looked like our WRs had a terrible time getting off the initial bumps they got from the UMd corners and they were rarely open. Their DBs were bigger and a lot stronger and more physical than our guys. It was like it was men playing against boys. Trish was the only guy who got open consistently. We desperately need a big, physical WR who can get open and make catches under direst. Might not have that guy on the team, ready to play right now. Might need to think about throwing it to Hackett more.
Everyine in the stands was upset at all the passing plays where Tommy was flushed from the pocket and ran sideways, towards the sideline, then threw it away just before stepping OB. I kept looking down the field and the fact is, there was no one open for him to throw to. He wasn’t being stupid. If he threw it, it would just get picked off.
Why isn’t anyone open? It seemed like the last 3 years, there was always someone open when Eric started scrambling. The reason is, DBs and LBs were always aware of where ED was and if he got outside the pocket and looked like he was going to make a run, they came flying up to stop him. The scouting report said Eric will hurt you running in broken play situations and take that away whenever possible. The scouting report on Tommy right now says Tommy will not run in broken play situations, is no threat whatsoever and stay with your man no matter what. Until Tommy takes off a few plays and gets big gains (which is open for him over and over), this is not going to change. I am not sure if the reason Tommy is not running is because the staff told him not to, or he is making the call himself (he did run once early and got caught from behind and had the ball knocked away for a costly turnover). But it doesn’t matter. This has to change. Our OL is not good pass blocking and our WRs are not good getting open given their physical deficiencies. In order for us to be successful this season on offense, we need Tommy to be a threat running. If he gets hurt, it will be devastating but this is a risk that needs to be taken. I just don’t see us scoring and moving the ball against good defenses otherwise.
Thought Tommy had a couple bad throws on screens and he has to get dinged for the interception where it iooked like he tried to throw a ball through a defender to get it to his WR. He has thrown at least one pass directly to a defender in the sprung game, the Liberty game and now the UMd game and this has to stop. But overall, he made a bunch of great throws and showed some poise and heart out there. Saw him go to his safety throw a bunch of times when a strong rush or solid coverage dictated it. He needs some help from his OL and WRs and as already said, he needs to show he can hurt defenses with his running ability. He is close.
Thought the RBs played quite well. Both are pretty solid. We had a fair number of plays with both split in the backfield together, especially in short yardage situations but that split backfield wasn‘T very successful. Maybe it will work better down the road.
Our tackles pass blocking is another huge issue. Alexander got beat a lot and did not have a good day. Vetterello also struggled. I think if Heckel can get healthy and free Servais to play LT, it will help the situation a lot. I hope it happens soon. Our OTs struggled at times to even get a hand on the hard charging Terp DEs.
Thought our special teams were okay. Bolinsky was shaky with the long snaps and I think one caused the one missed PATs and another bad one almost caused another miss. That is uncharacteristic for Aaron. Hof was terrific. Thought Riley was good although he asked for a fair catch once on a KO that I thought he should have run.
Ugly game that really hurts the way the program is perceived. Props to Maryland for out coaching and out playing Syracuse in all aspects of the game. I hope we can learn from this and move forward. The defense and offense are capable of far more than we have seen to date. I hope they can start proving this next Saturday.
