2011 PREVIEW | Meet the new boss

Before his Terrapins football team could ever take the steps forward Randy Edsall believes will start to come Monday night, the Terps first had to harken back.

Back to an era where "student-athlete" wasn't a misnomer. Back to a culture in which respect for authority was paramount. Back to a belief that hard work and responsibility could trump any other asset on the playing field.

Indeed, the new era of Terps football is very much an old one under Edsall. In a sporting society that values glitz and glamour over sweat and simplicity, the former Connecticut coach's throwback reign in College Park has piqued curiosity and invited criticism.

What it hasn't done is win any games. That could change quickly, with the Terps' Monday-night showdown with Miami just days away.

And for Edsall, that first kickoff should come as a welcome respite from the questions and comments about his overhauled program. After hearing and talking so much about what's right and wrong with his system, he's ready to focus on his team.

"I know the kids are very excited to be playing," Edsall said Thursday, "and I am as well."

Lawman

Ironically, the barbs and criticism lodged at Edsall from Internet message boards and the Twitterverse over something as big and abstract as a program's culture stemmed from something as small and insubstantial as stud earrings.

On Edsall's new stomping grounds, they fall under the do-not-wear list. Baseball caps and do-rags, too. Want to grow a beard? Better have it trimmed neatly. Dreadlocks? Make sure they're shampooed regularly.

Couple that rigid philosophy with a distinctly old-school approach to uniforms — no nameplates on the back of jerseys, the team elevated above the individual — and you have a Terps fan base at times stumped by its seeming anachronism of a coach.

"Coach Edsall is a no-gray-area man," defensive coordinator Todd Bradford said. "There's the right way and the wrong way, and there's no varying off of that as an assistant coach, as a player, as someone in our program."

Those unlucky enough to run afoul of Edsall's edicts often have to, well, run some more. The punishment for a missed meeting, quarterback Danny O'Brien said this summer, is 300 flights of stairs. After defensive tackle A.J. Francis arrived late to one spring meeting, he was doing bear crawls across the Byrd Stadium field the next morning, a total-body workout that Francis assured reporters was as torturous as it sounds.

"That was an eye-opener," he said.

Behind every pushup or lap, though, is a lesson. Edsall has carried with him the same grind-it-out values he learned to embrace in his hometown of Glen Rock, Pa., a small agricultural and manufacturing town just north of the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, wherever he's gone.

First, it was to Syracuse, where he played quarterback under Tom Coughlin, the archetypal tough-love coach. Successful assistant gigs with the Jacksonville Jaguars under Coughlin and at Georgia Tech helped him land his first head coaching job at Connecticut, which he led to its first-ever BCS bowl appearance last year.

When the remainder of former Terps coach Ralph Friedgen's contract was bought out last December, Edsall didn't hesitate in accepting what he proclaimed was his "dream job."

His credo of responsibility and hard work had gotten him this far, Edsall often explained in the months that followed. Why suddenly change it in College Park?

"To me, if it's wrong to tell somebody to make sure they don't have their hat on in the building, I guess I was raised the wrong way," Edsall said. "I guess if trying to be polite to people and treat people the way that you wanted to be treated, if that's a big issue now in 2011, I'm glad I grew up when I did because it got me to a point where I think it's allowed me to be pretty successful."

Said wide receiver Kevin Dorsey, who, as a former commandant at Forestville Military Academy, seems cut from Edsall's unique cloth: "What sticks about it is that it works. It works. People don't really understand the simple things of just taking a hat off when you come in a building. … You don't want to come into a job interview with huge, diamond-studded earrings in your ear or your hat on sideways or something crazy."