Three of the past four seasons, Maryland has not been one of the top 16 teams in the country. During that span, the Terps are 2-2-2 (0-2) in the NCAA Tournament and only advanced once. Only once have they been eliminated away from home. Also, Maryland scored twice as many goals in its loss to Providence in last year's NCAA tournament than it did in its final six games this year.
Goff's summary ... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...und-pk-loss-to-albany/?utm_term=.d4e8f03f7ecf “As has been the case the last five games, our quality in finishing just dried up,” Coach Sasho Cirovski said. “I don’t have any explanation for it.” “There were just too many times in the final third [of the field] where we ran out of ideas,” Cirovski said. “It’s hard to understand why because that’s not the skill-set of our players.” Well, someone ran out of ideas ...
i haven't watched maryland since the iu game early in the season. is this a case of the players "downing tools" ala chelsea in mourinho's final months? or is sasho's quote above accurate, ie the're just not scoring for some reason?
We were still dominating possession and tempo most games. To me, it looked like the college version of that Nagbe field map meme. They looked great possessing the ball in the midfield and moving it around, but as they reached the penalty area, they looked clueless. Outside of Rozhansky, it seemed most of them didn't want to shoot unless it was the absolute perfect shot, so the ball just kept getting cycled across the top of the box and defenses just sat in.
I refereed a UAlbany game in the spring. They are a very good defensive team. Still surprised that Maryland was not able to put one in.
This jibes with what I saw. Maryland dominated this game but failed to really rest the Albany GK. And there were so many times where I was like "shoot!" and they'd either go for an extra touch or pass the ball and the shot never came or never came quickly enough. It was like they let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But two goals in six games is endemic of a bigger problem, as is losing your first NCAA Tournament game in 3 of the past 4 years. I'm not exactly sure what those problems are but there is definitely an underlying issue with this program that is seeing it consistently underachieve the past few years.
Sandon, when you say "they let the perfect be the enemy of the good", in a nutshell it sounds like a team that is afraid of making a mistake. They get to key games at the end of the year, do or die, and they freeze up. Three out of four years is long enough that it is more than one group; more than one cycle of players. I don't think this can be blamed on getting one group that didn't have the initiative, the edge, or whatever you want to call it. I do think a partial answer is that there are just more good teams out there than ever before. Were we talking about Albany, Providence, or VCU four years ago? For that matter, going a bit further back, were we talking about Georgetown? OK, but that still seems like only a partial answer to what is not happening in College Park.