Good luck recruiting with DJ Durkin, Maryland
Stunned. Perplexed. Baffled.
Those were my reactions to the news on Tuesday that Maryland’s Board of Regents made it “their top priority” to keep DJ Durkin as the program’s head football coach after 2.5 months of serving a suspension while he was investigated for the allegedly toxic culture he was responsible for.
By now, everyone knows the death of Jordan McNair from a May workout was what sparked the external investigation by ESPN, and how that eventually led to the resignation of strength and conditioning coach Rick Court. It was under Durkin’s watch that Court was allowed to function in the matter that he did.
An independent commission’s report found that Court humiliated teammates by throwing food, weights and even a trashcan full of vomit at them. That same report found that Durkin showed players horror movies while eating breakfast with serial killers, people drilling eyeballs and bloody scenes of animals eating animals. That, according to Durkin, was a motivational tool.
So yeah, I was stunned, perplexed and baffled that Maryland’s Board of Regents said, “we need to make it our top priority to keep this guy around.” ESPN reported that if Maryland President Wallace Loh didn’t keep Durkin, the university would’ve then fired Loh and hired a president who would keep Durkin.
What? How backwards is that? Even for college football, that’s perplexing.
As a result, Loh is retiring at the end of the school year. He didn’t want to be a part of a university that made decisions like that, even though he’s been the president there for eight years.
Now imagine a 17-year-old kid and being on board for that. I can’t.
Imagine following all the updates in this story — from the McNair family suing Maryland after it was admittedly guilty of not following proper heat stroke protocol to hearing about the culture Durkin allowed from the report — and thinking “sign me up!”
What parent is going to want to trust Durkin to take care of their child? While Maryland said that the McNair death and the “toxic culture” were separate issues, they’re all under the program’s umbrella of turmoil. Not to go all Darren Rovell here, but I can’t help but think of how much the Maryland brand has suffered the last few months.
And to be fair, it wasn’t like Maryland had an established national brand to begin with. Programs that win four games in a season usually don’t.
That’s what’s baffling. With the Urban Meyer scandal about his involvement with allowing Zach Smith to stay on staff, we at least knew what the strain was. Meyer was arguably the program’s most successful coach ever, and obviously the university wanted to do whatever they could to keep him.
Why Durkin? Why is that high-level donors reportedly went to bat for a guy who was 4-8 last year? I mean, he’s 10-15 with a 5-13 record in B1G play in two seasons in College Park. What about Durkin is so great that he’s going to be worth the crap storm that all of this is going to continue to bring?
I don’t have an answer to that. Maryland’s Board of Regents apparently does, though.
Maryland board chair: "We believe that Coach Durkin has been unfairly blamed for the dysfunction in the athletic department. He bares some of the responsibility, but not all of it."
— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) October 30, 2018
We live in a world where public opinion and perception dictates so much of someone’s image. Even if Maryland’s Board of Regents felt that the reports were “blown out of proportion,” it still doesn’t change the facts.
Durkin had a player die as a result of one of his offseason workouts, which resulted in a several-month investigation that found Durkin’s motivational tacts involved showing grotesque horror films and trusting a strength coach who believed in humiliating players.
What are we missing here?
We’re missing the irony. Not that results on the field should impact decisions like this, but let’s be honest. This is college football, where tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue are to be made from winning games. It’s naive to think that winning and losing isn’t at the basis of every decision, for better or worse.
Nobody tell the Maryland Board of Regents but interim coach Matt Canada already surpassed Durkin’s 2017 win total and there’s still a month to play. The Terps are quietly 3-2 in one of the toughest divisions in the country and in position to potentially tie their best B1G season since joining the conference in 2014. And who brought Maryland to the B1G? Loh, of course.
Instead, though, Loh was all but forced to retire while Canada will go back to what he was originally hired to be. He’ll be Maryland’s offensive coordinator, and he’ll have to somehow go recruit kids to come play for Durkin. Canada, who wasn’t even at Maryland until the 2018 season, will have to somehow recruit for someone who had his dirty laundry out for the world to see. That topic is getting discussed at every living room he walks into.
That’s only the half of it. Not that Maryland is beating the big boys for recruits consistently, but can you imagine being a school like Boston College or Virginia? That’s the easiest negative recruiting pitch in the world. It’s not a coincidence that we’re less than 2 months from the Early Signing Period and Maryland has 10 verbal commitments in a 2019 class ranked second-worst in the B1G and No. 71 overall.
Oh, and the Terps don’t have a single verbal commitment from a top-20 recruit from the DMV. You know the area that Durkin vowed to “rope off.”
For crying out loud, ESPN reported that several current Maryland players walked out of the meeting with Durkin. How in the WORLD does Maryland expect Durkin to move past this and lead a locker room? And honestly, why does it want him to?
That’s what I keep coming back to. It’s the “why.” Why is Durkin worth keeping around? Is the university worried that he’ll sue for being fired “with cause,” and it’ll get itself in more legal drama than it’s already in? That’s still not a good enough reason to decide a coach under fire is more important than the president of the university.
There’s also the fact that Maryland could’ve just paid Durkin his $5 million buyout and ridded itself of his stench. But apparently that was even too much for the university. It simply attempted to continue like business as usual.
Maryland attempted to escape this bizarre chapter by taking the path of least resistance. It instead chose what looks like a roadblock.
A stunning, perplexing, baffling roadblock.