Terps' trouble starts at the top

The stands at Byrd Stadium early Saturday afternoon looked more like an 8 a.m. Friday lecture hall than an ACC-level football crowd. Whole sections of the upper deck were empty, and the lower bowl wasn't much better. The announced crowd of 39,102 for the Terrapins football team was an overstatement at best.

Of course, the Terps never really showed up Saturday, either.

They played with zero energy against the Owls. They were blown off the ball at the line of scrimmage, whiffed on half-hearted tackles and were fooled on play action regularly. They played like they had somewhere better to be Saturday.

Considering how their week of practice apparently went, the level of effort actually wasn't all that surprising. Coach Randy Edsall spoke after the game of lackadaisical workouts in the week leading up to this game, about what he saw was a lack of will to win.

Seriously? You're the coach of a team trying to prove to its fan base that it should care and that your program should be taken seriously. Your calling card is discipline and character. And then something like Saturday happens?

"I guess I didn't get my message across this week to the young men to let them know how physical it was going to be and what they were going to do," Edsall said. "So I obviously have to do a better job of letting them know exactly what they're going to get into."

It's Edsall's job to have the team ready. They weren't. Not emotionally, and not from a coaching standpoint, either.

The Terps looked similarly lethargic in the first half against West Virginia last week, but Edsall found the proper adjustments in that game. No such changes were evident after halftime Saturday. Temple dominated the Terps in every aspect in both halves.

Losses like this weren't supposed to happen under Edsall. He replaced Ralph Friedgen to take this program to the next level. But Saturday felt like the dog days of 2009, when Terps suffered through a program-worst 2-10 mark.

Temple's offensive attack isn't fancy. There are no bells and whistles, no tricks or gimmicks. The Owls run the ball, and run it hard. Even knowing that, the Terps couldn't stop running back Bernard Pierce from running for five touchdowns and nearly 150 yards.

Edsall and the Terps knew what was coming, and they still couldn't stop it.

"Once again, we didn't come out and play from the beginning. And they didn't do anything special, we knew they were going to run the ball," linebacker Kenny Tate said. "We didn't step up today."

It's not embarrassing to lose to Temple. The Owls are a quality team. What's embarrassing is getting blown out in your own stadium and offering almost no hope in the process.

The memories of the Terps' impressive win over Miami are fading quickly. It's been only three weeks since that victorious Labor Day night, but it feels much longer. No one on the team seems to be able to explain what has changed since that day, but they just don't look the same.

"I think some of our guys, even though we were 1-1, felt like maybe they were a little bit better than what they thought," Edsall said.

Defensive tackle Joe Vellano suggested Saturday that having a week to prepare for an opponent instead of an entire summer, as the Terps did for Miami, has been a problem. But that only begs another question: Was that Hurricanes victory a fluke? Maybe the Terps were just taking advantage of a whole summer to prepare for a team that was also ravaged by suspension.

Fluke or not, the Randy Edsall honeymoon is officially over. Shoot, he might be sleeping on the couch at this point. Sure, it would be ridiculous to call for his job now, but the beginning of his first season has been anything but reassuring.

Even if the Terps had won against Temple, this Saturday's game against Towson wasn't going to sell out. You could say it's a lack of dedication from the fan base, that fans should want to see their team regardless of the opponent.

But after how the Terps looked Saturday, can you really blame them for not wanting to?

schneider@umdbk.com