This is how I picture the Sean Miller meeting went

I was originally going to write something about where Maryland goes from here on their ill fated coaching search. But I wouldn’t be doing justice to the scope of Kevin Anderson’s comedy of errors as an athletic director if I didn’t spend some good solid time on it. He’s done all he can to drag Maryland’s reputation through the mud. Now it’s my turn.

I’m surprised that it has taken me so long to completely lose faith in Kevin Anderson’s ability to competently perform the specific tasks that his job requires. I imagine this issue has infiltrated other areas of his life, like returning from the grocery store with all of the items crossed off the list, 20 different IOU’s, and possibly an expired can of corn. During his brief stint at the position, he has had three major tasks placed in front of him. Replacing the head football coach, followed by replacing the defensive coordinator, and the monumentally daunting task of somehow replacing Gary Williams.

Now, the head football coach issue is the most forgivable of his decisions in my opinion. The firing of Ralph Friedgen (a necessary move at some point due to his age and rapidly approaching culmination of his contract) was handled with all of the delicacy of the Manson murders. Friedgen deserved much better, especially in a year where he somehow coaxed a 9-4 record from what appeared to be an exceedingly average team heading into the fall, and earned ACC Coach of Year honors. Friedgen was forced to accept his ACC Coach of the Year after he had been relieved of coaching duties for 2011. You kill Old Yeller after he gets rabies or eats a whole wheel of cheese and poops in the fridge, not when he brings in the paper and inexplicably cooks you dinner.

The hiring actually could have gone very well. I am among the group that believes Randy Edsall is a very talented football coach, and a great hire. Being from Connecticut, I can definitively say that UConn football wasn’t even used as a punch line before Randy Edsall, because no one would have gotten the joke. To build a program from a middle of the road 1AA team to playing in a BCS bowl game says everything that you need to know about his work ethic .

The biggest thing that made the Edsall hire questionable in the eyes of so many Terps fans was that the very public frontrunner for the job was offensive savant Mike Leach. If Edsall had been the prime target from the beginning, his supporters would have been able to build a sense of anticipation for the hire due to his considerable accomplishments in the Big East. Unfortunately, Mike Leach’s accomplishments dwarfed those of Edsall, and a lot of fans were crestfallen when Maryland “only got” Randy Edsall.

After Don Brown left for Connecticut (enjoy him Huskies fans, it may take a year to integrate his system, but it’s an all out attack – like a poor man’s Rex Ryan defense), there were whispers of Randy Shannon coming to College Park to fill the DC position. Say what you want about Shannon as a head coach, but his track record at Miami as a purely defensive coach was borderline peerless. Outside of a “disappointing” 2004 season when the Hurricanes finished 28^th in total defense, his units finished an average of 5^th in the country from 2001-2006. The rumors died relatively early, but after hearing the name of such a talented (and probably overqualified) candidate, the fans expectations were again obviously high. An average coordinator from a conference renowned for its defense would have been somewhat deflating, but ultimately acceptable.

However, Kevin Anderson’s decision to promote former Southern Miss defensive coordinator Todd Bradford to DC parallels favorably with me drinking expired milk from the fridge: you check the numbers and like you thought, they’re definitely bad. But there’s no other apparent option because going to get new milk requires too much work. And you end up kicking yourself for not acting on such an obviously time sensitive issue earlier when you’re paying for it soon afterwards. The Southern Miss defense gave up 30 + points in more games than they didn’t last year. They were also statistically the fourth best defense in their conference.

And now onto the coup de grace. Granted, this was the most difficult hand that Anderson has been dealt for a number of reasons. He had to replace a legend, on very limited notice, at the most important position on the Maryland athletic staff. But, against all assumptions of common sense, Anderson once again undertook a very public courtship of Sean Miller for the job.

After his first two debacles, I figured if Kevin Anderson was willing to pursue just one high profile candidate yet again, there is no way he would do unless said candidate made his intentions clear with either a verbal guarantee or a contract signed in blood. Whatever happened out in Las Vegas - whether Miller was simply using Maryland to pressure Arizona into meeting his demands, or if Anderson and Bisciotti sold the program about as well as Tommy Callahan sold brake pads - he still looks terrible. Again, he stubbornly pursued a strategy that had ended calamitously twice before, and it ended with an extremely public and highly embarrassing failure, to the surprise of only him. He has convincingly fit the definition of insanity.

Putting a call in to Brad Stevens – who was quoted as saying he would only leave Buter ‘if they kicked me out’ – before the somewhat disappointing but unfortunately realistic option of Mike Brey was another extreme miscalculation. Now Terps fans, who started the weekend giddy with the possibility of landing a coach befitting to replace Gary Williams, are forced to just be happy with whoever heeds Anderson’s pleas and steps up on a podium in the next week. All that hangs in the balance is the stability of a proud, successful program, and the first Maryland recruits that I’ve been legitimately excited about in 5 years. (Maybe if we convince him we DON'T care, he WON'T screw it up...I'm out of ideas.)