Turtledroppings.com – Maryland Football And Basketball Blog

Well things did not go as planned yesterday afternoon.  In fact it was pretty much worse case scenario.  When top seeds struggle in the first round, history seems to dictate that they come out a lot stronger in the second round.  I guess you can add yesterday’s results to the evidence file that supports that theory.  But at the same time, even as it became perfectly clear by the 10 minute mark of the first half that our season was drawing to a close, I don’t think any Terps fans were upset.

Oh sure there may have been some die hards who really believed that we could make it to the Sweet 16 or beyond, I think we all have a little bit of that inside of us to some degree, but overall this loss wasn’t like others.  I didn’t throw my remote, I didn’t dwell on it, I didn’t let it ruin my day.  It was just the inevitable end to a very up and down season.  A season that when all was said and done, ended up with a couple more ups than downs, and that was something we would not have thought after losing that last Virginia game.  So we should be proud of effort this team put forth and the coaching job that Gary Williams put out.

But even as I try to be all Mr. Positivity, let’s not lose track of the big picture.  I’m satisfied with how this team responded, but I am not satisfied with having a program that is constantly straddling the line between bubble team and NIT.  We have got to turn this thing around and go back to being the program we were in the late 90′s and early 2000′s.  

There was a saying that was popular back in World War I, parents of soliders who returned from war would often say, and I’m paraphrasing here so bare with me, ”How can you keep them down on the farm after they have seen the lights of Paris?”.  I think in a way you could say the same thing about Terps fans, once we’ve seen what it is like to be a Final Four team and to win a National Championship, the bar gets raised a little.  Now it is Gary’s job to build on this.  We are, for the most part patient people, we can deal with the occasional re-building season as long as we can see the overall direction things seem to be heading. 

There is still a couple questions going into next season.  Will we land Lance Stephenson?  Will Greivis return after testing the NBA waters?  If the answer to both of those questions, turn out to be yes, well then I think the program is trending upwards.  If Greivis does leave, and if we don’t land Stephenson, well then Gary is going to have to work some magic.  I think he can do it, I believe he can do it, but just keeping this program at a level that just squeaks into the Tournament on a good year, is only going to get him so far. 

Afterall, we have seen the lights of Paris (or perhaps Minneapolis, and Atlanta) and we liked what we saw.  It sure beats sitting around on the farm.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 8:07 am and is filed under Maryland Terps Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.