College Football 2018: Grading every new Power 5 coaching hire
4. Maryland Terrapins
New Coach: Mike Locksley
Departed Coach: D.J. Durkin
This is the toughest one to grade because Maryland’s coaching search wasn’t like any of the others. They weren’t so much just searching for a football coach, but someone who could heal the very open wounds in the program surrounding the death of Jordan McNair.
With D.J. Durkin, football was above all, and the hostile nature of practices and workouts directly led to the untimely death of one of his players. The next coach is left to pick up the pieces left behind.
It’s hard to argue that there was anyone better for this job at this time than Mike Locksley.
Locksley has extensive ties to the university and the area, having grown up in Washington D.C., attended school at Towson, and served as an assistant coach at Maryland on two separate occasions, the latest coming during the failed Randy Edsall experiment in College Park that led Locksley to being the interim head coach for the final six games of the 2015 season.
There was some internal pressure to hire Locksley to the full-time gig after that season, but his 2-26 record at New Mexico, teamed with his 1-5 mark during the six-game stretch he was the interim, ultimately led the Terps down the Durkin path.
Locksley spend the last few seasons rehabilitating himself at Alabama under Nick Saban, where he served as an assistant in 2016 and 2017 before being promoted to the offensive coordinator role in 2018. This season, Locksley won the Broyles Award as the nation’s top assistant coach after guiding the Alabama offense to the best season in school history.
The concerns over his failed tenure at New Mexico are warranted, but he took over a tough situation there, and has more than proven himself as an assistant coach. He’s also the healer that Maryland needs at this time, football success be damned. Locksley has the ability to pull the community together in a time that it is sorely needed.