Maryland Preview: The start of something B1G

His team is getting set to open its Big Ten season with a nationally televised prime time game against a border rival that it has beaten only twice in 42 tries, but Maryland coach Michael Locksley is playing it cool. If there’s a buzz on campus in advance of the Terrapins’ matchup against Penn State on Friday night, Locksley and his team are barely aware of it.

“I’m stuck at [the football compex], so I don’t know what the buzz is,” Locksley said on Tuesday. “One of the things we’ve tried to do is really insulate ourselves and control the things we can control. It’s great to hear that we’ll have the type of crowd that our players deserve to have, and I know that our fans are excited about this game. But for us, our focus is on being the best version of Maryland football that we can be come Friday. All the external noise and excitement about this game – we’re looking at it no differently than the other three [games] that we’ve had.”

Even if Locksley isn’t paying much attention to it, the excitement level in College Park appears to be higher than usual at the moment. Maryland is putting up temporary bleachers to hold an additional 1,000 fans and has employed a lottery system to allocate student tickets, something it hasn’t had to do since a game against fourth-ranked West Virginia in 2007.

Penn State has won its past two games in College Park by a combined score of 136-10, but those numbers don’t mean anything to James Franklin, especially since the first of those two games took place in 1993. Franklin is getting ready for a challenging weekend, and the challenges will begin even before the game kicks off.

This is the second year in a row in which the Nittany Lions are opening their Big Ten season with a Friday night road game, and Franklin learned a bit about what to do, and what not to do, during last year’s trip to Illinois.

“It sounds silly, but one of the challenges is that when you play a Friday game, there’s nothing to do during the day,” Franklin said. “When you play a Saturday night game, there are games on. They can watch games all afternoon.

“What you don’t want to do is lay around and sleep all day. So what time do you wake them up, from a sports science perspective? How much do you meet? How much do you break? What do you do to get their bodies out of the recovery stage and into a compete stage? When we have a Saturday night game, we may allow a little more dead time during the day, [but with] a Friday night game, maybe we want a little less, just because they’re going to be on Netflix and laying around and taking naps all day long, which I don’t think is the right thing for them to do to be ready to play the game.”

With their respective campuses located only 200 miles apart, the two programs are well-acquainted. Penn State has 11 players from Maryland on its roster, including starters Cam Brown, Tariq Castro-Fields and Rasheed Walker, while Maryland’s roster features six Pennsylvanians.

The coaches are well-acquainted, too. Locksley and Franklin served on Ron Vanderlinden’s staff in 2000 and remained with the Terrapins when Ralph Friedgen took over the following year, with Locksley coaching the Terps’ running backs and Franklin coaching the wide receivers. Locksley headed to Florida in 2002 and eventually to his first head coaching job at New Mexico. Things didn’t go so well with the Lobos, as he won only two games in two-plus seasons, but he landed on his feet, returning to Maryland to join Randy Edsall’s staff, then leaving for Alabama in 2016 and working his way up to offensive coordinator. Last December, on the same day that he was named the winner of the Broyles Award as the top assistant coach in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the Washington, D.C., native was hired by Maryland again, this time to be its head coach.

Locksley, who was serving as the Terps’ interim head coach in 2015 when they lost to Penn State, 31-30, in Baltimore, said that he and Franklin share a cordial relationship.

“Obviously, James has had great success as a head coach at Vanderbilt and now at Penn State,” he said. “I’m always glad to see guys do well in all the games, except the ones we play them in.”

With new quarterback Josh Jackson leading the way, the Terrapins appeared to be well ahead of schedule through their first two games. They thrashed Howard as expected in their opener, 79-0, but then they did something unexpected, upsetting No. 21 Syracuse, 63-20, in week two. Jackson, a graduate transfer from Virginia Tech, threw for 296 yards and three touchdowns, as Maryland bombarded the Orange with 42 first-half points.

That emphatic victory vaulted the Terps into the Associated Press poll at No. 21, but then came a visit to Temple in week three. Once again, the Terps surprised, and not in a good way. Jackson struggled against the Owls, hitting only 15 of 38 passes for 183 yards. The result was a 20-17 loss that knocked the Terps out of the Top 25 and set up a matchup against Penn State in which no one really knows what to expect. Was the Syracuse game a fluke, or was the loss to Temple the real outlier?

They’ll start getting their answers on Friday night, and so will Penn State. Although the Nittany Lions are unbeaten and ranked 12th in this week’s AP poll, they’ve got some questions of their own to answer, and the most pressing is whether their youthful roster is ready for a prime time road game against what may be the best opponent they’ve faced so far this season.

Franklin has been pumping noise into practice to get the Lions ready for the atmosphere they’ll be heading into on Friday.

“I typically try to make things worse in practice than they will be in the games so that we’re never going into a situation where we’re shocked by how loud it is,” he said. “The [recorded] crowd noise… is kind of screechy and you deal with that, and then we’ve got the fight song playing overtop of that on two different systems. We’re making it really, really difficult so that you’re ready for your silent cadence or for your clap cadence or whatever it may be. We started with that in [preseason] camp, probably not to this degree, but we’ve done it.”

The simulation is going to end soon enough. Come Friday night, no one is going to feel insulated from the buzz that’s been building.