PHILADELPHIA– An earthquake hit the University of Maryland yesterday when head basketball coach Mark Turgeon, who had been taking heat from a demanding fan base, stepped down under pressure one month after the start of the season.
Turgeon had been hired by former AD Kevin Anderson in when the Terps were still in the ACC, but rumors were percolating the school might leave for the Big Ten.
He won just enough to keep the wolves from the door and signed a three- year contract extension that was expected to keep him in College Park until 2026. Turgeon stood to make more than $17 million over the length of the deal, but the buyout was reportedly $5 million if taken before May 1 of 2022.
AD Damon Evans pulled the trigger after the Terps, who were ranked in the AP pre-season Top 25, got off a slow start. The Terps were 5-3, suffering an unforgiveable loss to neighboring George Mason at home and then dropping back- to- back games to ACC teams Louisville on a neutral court and Virginia Tech at home in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge.
Turgeon, a Larry Brown disciple who arrived from Texas A & M in 2011, leaves with a 225-116 record and five NCAA tournament appearances in the past seven seasons and won a share of the Big Ten regular season title in 2020 before the tournament was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. After finishing in the top three of the Big Ten in each season from 2015-17, Maryland dropped to fifth last season, but earned a bid to the tournament and reached the second round before losing to Alabama to finish 17-14.
That was not good enough for Terp faithful or Evans who felt the Terps, a basketball school in a basketball hot bed, should contend for a spot in second weekend every year. Maryland only advanced past the second round of the tournament once in the past 10 years.
Expectations have always been high at this school, though. Terp fans got excited again after 6-11 sophomore center Qudus Wahab, transferred in from Georgetown where he had been projected as a future Big East star; and guard Fatts Russell, a one- time first team, all-Atlantic 10 guard from Rhode Island, opted to play a fifth year with Philly friends Donta Scott and Hakim Hart. With that in mind, the slow start only increased the bitterness toward a cold Midwesterner like Turgeon from the fans who never connected with him the way they did with fiery Gary Williams who said Maryland was his dream job and coached the Terps to 11 straight NCAA tournaments from 1994 through 2004, winning a national championship, making to Final Fours and seven Sweet 16s.
Even that wasn’t always good enough for Maryland fans, who always judged Maryland’s success in relation to hated traditional ACC rivals Duke and North Carolina. They is no school in the Big Ten that engenders the same bitter emotions or barometer.
Just a bottom line.
Administrators at Power 5 schools are showing less and less patience with coaches who have average or slightly above average results. They are all looking for the next big thing. We’ve seen it in football when a numerous of major programs have fired their coaches before the end of their seasons. Now, we are seeing it in basketball, although a month into the season seems like a rush to judgment.
Maryland will try to regroup with Danny Manning, who was hired as an assistant last summer and has been named the interim coach for the rest of the season, starting with Sunday’s game against Northwestern. Manning who played with Turgeon at Kansas and was the star of the Jayhawks’ 1988 national championship team, formerly served as head coach of Wake Forest for six years and was fired in 2020 season with a 78-111 record and one NCAA appearance.
He is a short- term solution at best. The Terps will start a national search as soon as the season ends to look for a long- term answers. Hopefully the next coach can supply them.
