Turtledroppings.com – Maryland Football And Basketball Blog

With Saturdays loss to UNC, Maryland falls to 3-5 in the ACC, which also happens to be the halfway point of the ACC season.  I think if you polled any of us prior to the start of the season, most of us would be happy with a 3-5 record.  I think there was a real possibility that this could have been a season where the Terps only win 3 conference games.  And I guess technically it still could be a three win season.  However, watching them compete this past week, I really feel like they are on the verge of winning a game they aren’t expected to win soon.

Before we look forward lets look at the three wins first.  All three came at home against teams that are currently all at the bottom of the conference with 2 wins a piece.  So, you could say Maryland is fortunate that they have won the game they did.  They were certainly there best chances at wins so far, and they took advantage of the situations.

Two of the losses were at home, to the conferences elite (Duke and UNC).  After the Alabama game, I was really worried those two games could be really ugly losses.  However, the Terps were right there in those games.    A stop here, a made shot there, a rebound here, and a couple less turnovers or made free throws and those games may have gone to the good guys.  Still, no shame in the effort in either of those games.  Then we have the three road loses.  Again, nothing to complain about so far.  Sure it would have been great to win any of those, especially the double OT killer at Miami, but they were in those games until late.

So looking forward there is one glaring problem with the remaining schedule.  Five of the remaining games are on the road.  At Clemson, at Duke, at UVA, at Georgia Tech, at UNC all pose a problem for a team that has yet to win a true road game.  Looking realistically at that list, you should think about Clemson and Georgia Tech as games they could win.   Sure they could win a lot of games, but looking at the list, those are ones you would be most confident about.

At home they get Boston College, Miami, and Virginia.  You could say I would be upset if we lost to BC.  I think they should be able to give Miami a run for their money, and at home against UVA you would think the Terps could have a chance if Comcast is rocking.

So in all the road to getting to .500 is going to be tough.  I think we would all consider .500 a success this season.  That being said games aren’t played on paper.  The team has been knocking on the door of getting a big win.  Somewhere along the line it is going to click for 40 minutes and it might be that game we all remember in Turgeon’s first season.  For now we will have to enjoy that win over a rapidly improving Notre Dame team as the best win of the season.  Still, I think we all want the team to play really well and get a big win for Turgeon.  You can tell he is starting to like the way the team is fighting.  Now if the could only box out for the man, he might be very happy.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2012 at 3:43 pm 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.