It Doesn't Matter Who You Root For: At Least It's Not Maryland

You may not have noticed which team is idling around the ACC cellar looking for someone to put it out of its misery, but it's not Duke this year. Duke is sort of competitive, actually. It's weird, and should put this into perspective: Ole Miss fired David Cutcliffe so they could hire Ed Orgeron.

Anyway, back to the grim ACC cellar: it is occupied by Maryland, a team that's lost to Middle Tennessee State two years running. You may remember Maryland winning a bowl game to go 8-5 last year or scraping into a bowl game at 6-6 the year before that, but those teams were remarkable shambling piles of incompetence that somehow scraped up enough wins despite being statistically horrendous. Maryland was below average in ever single major statistical category except scoring defense last year and still managed to win eight games.

Ralph Friedgen is an old hand at 62 who's had his day in the sun with the Terps but is now driving them straight into the ground. He probably doesn't have the energy anymore to keep up the frenetic pace required to be a major college football coach. Looks like we'll have another head to add to the dead pile-

A buyout of any sort - even in the form of a loan from the school's endowment - would raise questions in the current economic climate, said former U.S. Rep. Tom McMillen....

"As a normal practice we don't get involved in the day-to-day," said McMillen.... "But as a fiduciary, to take on a $4 million liability plus hiring a new coach? Given the economic times we're in, there would have to be an awfully compelling case."

Huh, that's a new one. I don't think I've ever heard of a a coach not getting fired because it was too expensive. Maybe there is something to this so-called "global financial meltdown" after all.

And with that, Maryland may be the BCS program in the worst shape for the next five years. Friedgen is a zombie coach, dead but still ambulatory, until such time as his buyout descends to a level that Maryland can pay. Unless the Terps can scrape together the dough to replace Fridge, they're going to have to endure one or two full recruiting cycles during which players know full well that the guy they're signing up to play for will not be there for more than a year or two. They're going to have to put up with a coaching staff that's spiraled towards ineptness, and once the two-to-three total bomb recruiting classes get a death grip on the program, some other guy is going to have to come in and attempt to right the ship.

That sounds like a guaranteed decade of misery. Even Washington State has hope for 2018.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.