Maryland Taking More Steps Towards Becoming Oregon-East By Building a State Of The Art Indoor Football Facility
TT - Some expected news was finally dropped Thursday, when Jeff Ermann of Inside Maryland Sports reported Maryland is expected to convert Cole Field House, the former home of the school’s basketball teams, into an indoor football facility. The football facility rumor has been around for over a year now, with recent rumblings suggesting Cole — an historic campus building with not much current utilization on a key campus location (both in terms of visibility and available space) — could be the destination. Ermann has confirmed those rumblings, and we expect an official announcement within the next week.
What does this announcement mean for the future of the football program? It signals a step into the next tier for Maryland, one that could take the Terps into the kind of success they’ve been pining for — if everything else goes right, that is. Building a fancy indoor facility doesn’t count for any wins on the field, but it can certainly help you get there.
We don’t know what it’s going to look like, but with a rumored price tag exceeding $100 million and Under Armour CEO (and former Maryland player) Kevin Plank as a “major player,” you think he’s going to settle for mediocre? Plank sees Maryland as an opportunity to expand his brand’s national profile — his Oregon, so to speak — and this facility is an opportunity for him to put a building on campus with his company’s signature all over it.
Put together that monetary figure, Plank’s desire to have his alma mater as the focus of Under Armour’s growth, the fact that this is a new facility being designed in 2014 and the renderings we’ve already seen and it’s pretty clear that they intend this to be a state-of-the-art facility that will wow visitors and leave them impressed with both Maryland and Under Armour. The renderings, designed for a different location, likely don’t tell us much about how the new facility will look, but it does give us an idea of the scope of the project they intend this to be.
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I’m just going to tell it straight up, no frills, how this works: Maryland is currently putting the pieces in place to be the Oregon of the East Coast, and if you don’t recognize that, you are either in denial, an idiot, and probably both. You can blindy (or not so blindly, who cares) hate Maryland all you want, but don’t be naive enough to think they are on the cusp of something. Or at the very least going balls to the wall to attempt to be. And yes, it is important to make that distinction because I’m not naive enough to say it won’t fail. But all the wheels are being put in motion.
1) Kevin Plank, the guy who owns and operates Under Armour, has something like 100 trillion dollars and loves nothing more than giving it to the University of Maryland. Much like Phil Knight at Oregon, Plank is involved in everything that has to do with Maryland athletics.
2) The power conference. Moving to the B1G was in my opinion, more to elevate the football program than to get back the millions upon millions of dollars of debt the old AD put the athletic program in. On paper it was a good move because of the more prominent TV deals, but it was also to go into places like Penn State, whoop them, and get that national exposure.
3) The flashiness. We’ve all seen their ridiculous jerseys. It’s a new one every week, just like out in Oregon. It gets eyeballs. It’s a selling point to recruits. We say look at our pride, look at the honor you can bring to the state of Maryland. And they eat it up. And really, why wouldn’t you? You don’t think kids are drawn to Oregon because on the field it looks like they are straight out of a Blackout Tour video? That’s what the new indoor facility will do. Show they Maryland isn’t fucking around.
When it comes down to it, Oregon isn’t some nationally treasured program with a long history of winning. They didn’t start gaining any sort of prominence until 1995 when Mike Bellotti became head coach. Before that they were shitty, and then for a few year under him in the mid 2000s they were still shitty.
The blocks and foundation are being built to try and emulate Oregon’s success at Maryland. I don’t think Edsall is the right coach to take them to the next level. But once they find their guy, the sky should be the limit.