Maryland in the Big Ten: From 'what are we doing?' to 'amazing decision' (2024)

In the mid-morning hours of Nov. 17, 2012, shortly before Maryland was set to host No. 10 Florida State, Maryland dean of engineering Darryll Pines walked into the football suite at Capital One Field and saw university officials huddled in a corner.

“I could tell that something had happened, but I didn’t know what had happened,” said Pines, now Maryland’s president. “I could see some intense conversations going on between the president and other people. ‘Why are they so intensely talking to one another? What could they be talking about?’ I had no clue.”

After the game, Pines returned to his office to a phone message referencing an ESPN alert that Maryland athletics was leaving the Atlantic Coast Conference for the Big Ten. Shocked, Pines called a presidential advisor who let him know it was true. Maryland, a founding ACC member in 1953, had turned its back on tradition to join a conference offering its athletic department a new start.

Terps alums received the news with bewilderment, anger and frustration. Maryland boasted some of college basketball’s best rivalries against Duke and North Carolina. Its all-sports border series with Virginia stretched for more than a century. Outside of Penn State, Maryland shared little history with the Big Ten’s collection of Midwestern universities.

“I can just remember thinking more as a fan, because I’m a young coordinator at the time,” said Maryland head coach Mike Locksley, then the Terps’ offensive coordinator. “I’m saying to myself, ‘What are we doing?’

“But having 10 years of hindsight and being in league now, I can tell you we are very fortunate of the decision that was made. It’s been one of the best decisions I would say during my brief time in the history of Maryland athletics.”

Maryland celebrated its 10th anniversary as a Big Ten member on Monday, and there’s more enthusiasm for the league around College Park than during its muted celebration in 2014. Maryland has become a successful broad-based athletics department with 49 league titles over that decade, ranking behind only Ohio State and Michigan. The university’s proximity to Capitol Hill provides Big Ten members with a nearby lobbying ally, and the shared academic benefits in research and foreign study among the membership are profound.

But in a world that views realignment success through the prism of football achievement, that program’s inconsistency and modest growth overshadows those storylines. That’s a point everyone associated with Maryland recognizes as it enters its second decade as a Big Ten university.

“We were weaker probably in football,” Pines said. “But we realized that we needed to upgrade in many different ways, and that has allowed us to be a bit more competitive. We’re not there yet; we’re still on that journey, on that trajectory. But that’s a long trajectory.”

Wallace Loh served as dean of the University of Washington’s law school and provost at the University of Iowa before Maryland hired him as president in summer 2010.

As he learned more about the university, he became aware of the athletic department’s financial woes. Fundraising had plummeted by 40 percent over a three-year period, starting with the 2008 economic meltdown. Revenues in both men’s basketball and football dropped by similar percentages.

“Calling it financial challenges is putting it diplomatically,” said Loh, who is retired and living in Seattle. “I was shocked, utterly shocked, when I discovered this. I was, to be perfectly honest, very upset. We’re not talking about some small amount.

“If I had known how deep the shortfall was in the athletic department, I’m not sure I would have taken the job.”

Projected annual deficits ($6.7 million) approached half of what Maryland ($15.8 million) received from the ACC in 2011-12. To get on track fiscally, Maryland laid off employees and cut eight sports. Loh said he wanted to meet each athlete from the affected sports, which he said was “one of the most painful experiences in my life.”

Loh saw a dire future for Maryland athletics without a significant change. He called his former boss, University of Iowa president Sally Mason, and discussed the challenges. Mason nudged Loh to think proactively.

“She said, ‘Wallace before you simply write this thing off, talk to the Big Ten and see if they want to move to the Northeast,’” Loh recalled. “I will personally recommend the admission of the University of Maryland into the Big Ten.’ She guided me every step of the way. She taught me everything.”

Loh reached out to Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, and their staffs worked toward an agreement. As talks progressed, Loh’s decision settled into a money vs. tradition debate.

For Loh, who never had lived in Maryland before taking the job, his advisors offered him a frank look at the region’s societal polarization.

“There was something called the Civil War here: Half the people in Maryland fought for the South, and half for the North,” Loh said. “The war has been over for 100 years, but there are still people at Maryland who think of themselves as Northerners or who think of themselves as Southerners. And here you are a Chinese-American, who arrives here, and you are siding with the North and you are trying to move the university into a northern conference. They said, ‘You have to be very, very careful about this.’”

Unlike previous Big Ten expansion arrangements, Delany offered Maryland between $20 million and $30 million as a travel stipend to join the Big Ten. Until it became a vested member, Maryland could borrow against future media rights earnings and repay it on a negotiated time frame. But the financial details were to remain quiet.

“It’s a negotiation like any negotiation,” Delany told The Athletic. “There were terms and conditions that we negotiated with Nebraska, with Maryland and with Rutgers. The 990s are about as much as I can say about it.”

Once Maryland’s exit became public, the backlash concerned university officials. Maryland’s police department commissioned two officers to accompany Loh around the clock and recommended his wife leave for Seattle. Police cars remained parked in front of his home at all times.

“I don’t know if I was in danger,” Loh said. “I can only assume that they wouldn’t be doing this unless they felt that there was a possibility of something happening.”

The heat intensified around Loh until the financial details of Maryland’s Big Ten deal were revealed. Loh says he didn’t leak the numbers; he believes Big Ten officials did so to diffuse the vitriol around the Terps’ ACC exit. To an extent, the anger dissipated.

“The alternative was then no more athletics at University of Maryland, because the amount that we were getting from the ACC was not enough,” Loh said. “Had it been enough, I would never have looked at going elsewhere. So the choice was to have or not to have intercollegiate athletics?

“You had to find a conference that’s willing to give you the money. The ACC doesn’t have that kind of money. There’s only one source; it is the Big Ten. Now, I never said that publicly. But people can draw their own conclusions.”

Gary Williams played men’s basketball at Maryland in the mid-1960s and returned to his reeling alma mater in 1989. Just three years before Williams’ arrival, Terps star Len Bias had died from cocaine-induced heart failure two days after the Boston Celtics drafted him No. 2 overall. In ’87 and ’88, the program committed multiple NCAA violations that would lead to a two-year postseason ban.

It took Williams time to rebuild, but by the mid-1990s, his Terps were a national powerhouse. They reached the Final Four in 2001 and won the program’s only national championship in 2002. Before retiring in 2011, Williams ranked third in ACC victories. The Xfinity Center’s basketball court is named for him.

“Once we got things going, the rivalries with Duke and North Carolina, especially with Duke, certainly became intense,” Williams said. “It was a national rivalry; it wasn’t just a league one where we became very good. And that’s out of respect to the programs that Duke and Carolina had.”

The night Williams’ Terps won the national title, Maryland hired Brenda Frese as its women’s basketball coach. Within four years, Frese won a national championship. From 2006 through 2014, the women’s team advanced to the Elite Eight five times, including a Final Four appearance in the school’s last ACC season. Then, it was off to the Big Ten, which Frese compared to leaving for another job.

“It was really hard, I’d say, that first three to six months,” Frese said. “The biggest shock was for the fans. But I’ll tell you what, I knew it was the right move after first game we played in-conference. We went to Nebraska, we were on BTN, and the amount of text messages I received across the country of people who viewed that game I likened to what I would receive during the NCAA Tournament. So I knew right then and there, the national scope that we were receiving from the Big Ten was second to none.”

Frese has enjoyed even more conference success in the Big Ten than she did in the ACC. Maryland finished either first or second in each of its first nine Big Ten seasons and has never missed the NCAA Tournament as a league member. The Terrapins helped force Big Ten women’s basketball to shift from a post-driven power league into one with better athletes and zone defenses.

Maryland’s arrival had the same effect in sports like women’s lacrosse, men’s lacrosse and men’s soccer — all of which have won national titles as a Big Ten member. The Terps’ 2018 NCAA soccer championship squad included Donovan Pines, son of the university president. Maryland’s presence enabled the Big Ten to sponsor lacrosse, and its women’s program became an instant rival with national powerhouse Northwestern.

In addition, Maryland field hockey has won six conference titles, while the baseball and men’s basketball teams have also claimed championships.

“We believe we brought high-quality sports and competition in lacrosse and field hockey to the Big Ten, which caused all the teams to upgrade their quality to compete with us,” Darryll Pines said. “We were probably one of the premier schools in those sports. Not that they were not good in those sports, but we had won many, many national championships. I think that has been good for the Big Ten.”

The rivalry dynamics are a slow build, but they’re brewing. Many of Maryland’s highest-attended men’s soccer matches come against fellow national power Indiana, Pines said. Maryland-Northwestern women’s lacrosse is a signature matchup. Every time Frese’s teams face Iowa, where she grew up, it becomes a must-see event. The men’s basketball and football teams may not yet have rivalries like they did with Duke, North Carolina or Virginia, but their series are growing organically.

“Everyone speaks about the lack of natural rivalries,” said Herman Veal, who played men’s basketball from 1980 to ’84. “I think the games that Michigan State and Maryland have played have been tremendous games. I think that if it’s given an opportunity to grow and to be nurtured by the fan bases, then it would be an outstanding rivalry.

“It’s just going to take time. We were one of the founding members of the ACC. And so to depart from the ACC, Tobacco Road, those are the games that the fan base is going to always aspire to have.”

From a suite overlooking the Target Center floor at the league’s men’s basketball tournament, athletics director Damon Evans touted his department’s Big Ten accomplishments. Maryland has established itself as an upper-level Big Ten program in every sport but one. Unfortunately, most people judge athletics success based on football prowess.

In its 10 Big Ten seasons, Maryland sits 53-65 overall and 27-57 in league play. In 2019, Locksley became the program’s fourth coach in its first six Big Ten seasons. Now entering his sixth season, Locksley has ushered in a surge of three consecutive winning seasons, all of which ended with a bowl win. But the coach and athletics director acknowledge Maryland has plenty more to do in football.

“We’ve got to create more memories in football,” Evans said. “The next step for us is we got to beat one of those teams, whether it’s an Ohio State or an Iowa or a Penn State or a Michigan. That’s what our fans are looking for, for us to beat one of those teams.

“Iowa was here on a Friday night, a sellout. It was great. And we laid an egg (a 51-14 loss). Penn State came in one year, we lay another egg (59-0) with a great crowd. When you’ve got this big high, and then this big letdown, that goes to people saying, same old Maryland. What I’m here to say is it’s not the same. But make no mistake about it, I understand that we need to win one of those games.”

During its first eight-win campaign since 2010, Maryland saw a nice bump in attendance in 2023, averaging 40,314 per game last year, its highest mark since 2015. But ticket revenue is where Maryland sits woefully behind its Big Ten brethren. In the 2023 fiscal year, Maryland generated just $5.52 million in football ticket sales, ranking last among the Big Ten’s public schools, according to an open-records request. Purdue was next-to-last at $10.2 million.

Over its first nine Big Ten years, Maryland totaled $53.86 million in football ticket sales. That was less than either Michigan ($57 million) or Ohio State ($64.3 million) generated in fiscal year 2023 alone.

“I think this is our biggest struggle, at least as an athletic department, is having our fan base, believe in that particular sport and having some level of consistency,” Pines said. “People have lots of choices, and if you’re not excellent, I guess they’ll go and do something else for that Saturday.”

Locksley understands the challenge and accepts it.

“The next step is to become a championship-caliber program,” he said, “and that is the toughest step to take.”

In a saturated sports market with seven major professional teams in both D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland will need years of football consistency to achieve a permanent foothold. But it’s trying. Financially, the department will complete its Big Ten payback in 2027. Maryland received $125 million in extra funding from the Big Ten before subtracting the travel stipend and debt forgiveness. Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti declined to confirm or reveal how much Maryland owes the league.

Daunting challenges remain, with athlete payments on the horizon and a deep 18-school conference opening play this fall. But a decade after leaving the ACC for the Big Ten, one question remains: Was moving to the Big Ten worth it?

“No question,” Pines said. “When we look back, it was an amazing decision.”

“Had I known all of this in advance,” Loh said, “I wouldn’t have spent so many countless hours of lack of sleep and worrying about it.”

(Photo: Greg Fiume / Getty Images)