Mike Locksley addresses pressure on Maryland to maintain success

Maryland head coach Mike Locksley has built up the Terrapins over the last four years from a cellar-sweller in the Big Ten East Division to a formidable foe for the league’s top teams. The team has gone to back-to-back bowl games for the first time since 2013-14 and won more than seven games last year for the first time since 2010.

There are expectations around the team now but Locksley said the team isn’t feeling any pressure from outside forces about keeping the team on the up and up.

“When you put yourself in the position where we’ve laid the foundation, we don’t feel the external pressure,” Locksley said at Big Ten Media Days this week. “I think any pressure that we have to deal with as a football program or a football family, it starts from within. And for us every year we have to start from ground zero. There’s no building on what you did a year ago. What happened a year ago at being 8-5 has no bearing on how we’ll play this year.”

Since the start of the 1986 season, the Terrapins have made a bowl games three years in a row only twice: 2001-2003 and then 2006-2008. Maryland won at least 10 games every season during that first three-year stretch, which is also the only time it has one that many games in a year since 1976.

Since the team moved to the Big Ten, Maryland has found it difficult to sustain success. The team has had four different head coaches with its best finish in the Big Ten East coming in its first year in the conference in third place.

That’s not surprising considering they are in the division as Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State. But last year was the first non-pandemic season since 2014 that they finished better than fifth in the division.

“I think it’s really important for our players and anybody that’s part of our football family to understand that there’s no building on last year,” said Locksley, who has an all-time record with the Terrapins of 21-28. “You start from ground zero, and what you want to do is take the work you put in a year ago, try to find a way to do it a little bit better, and I think we’ll get the type of results we want at the end of the year.”