Our Pets Heads are Falling Off!

At some point you learn from your mistakes.  No, not the Terps, but your humble author.  After years of jumping to call things a low point, you learn to just stop doing that for fear of what will come next.  Yesterday's lost to Boston U wasn't the first time that Maryland has lost to a team from the lowly Patriot League in Comcast Center, just the most recent.  The Terps led for just 4:00 total yesterday.  For those without the benefit of a calculator, that's just 10% of the game.  The Terps basically let a team from a low-major league come into our gym and do whatever they want.

The Terriers aren't awful, of course.  There's probably little different between them and Oregon State, other than name and that no one on BU was likely recruited to play at an ACC level.  Anyone who thought Maryland would win handily yesterday either doesn't pay attention to Maryland or doesn't pay attention to the sport in general.  BU had already given George Washington and Harvard - two teams better than Maryland - trouble and were picked to win their league.  It's a team likely to play in March, whether in the NCAA or the NIT.

In the postgame, the esteemed Coach Turgeon said the following:

We can’t score 77 at home and lose, so maybe it’s on the defensive end

77 points probably ought to be enough to win in most cases, but the game was 76 possessions.  I don't want to make too much about whether Turgeon understands tempo-free statistics, and I'm sure it's not lost on him that 57% FT shooting and a dozen and a half turnovers are bad looks, but make no mistake that the offense's inability to convert were just as damaging as giving up all those open 3s to BU.

The Terps are left with the very real possibility that they won't finish above .500 overall for the first time in over 20 years.  Even if they win their next two games (no guarantee), they'll need to get to 8-10 in the conference just to get to 16-15 for the season.  While the Seth Allen injury has hurt, that's a very bleak outlook for a program in Year 3 of a rebuild.