WALSH: A bad loss, any way you cut it

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – The excuses were all there Saturday. The Terrapins men's basketball team would be playing after a quick turnaround, tipping off at 1 p.m., roughly 38 hours after the final buzzer sounded against Boston College on Thursday. The team was still reeling from the loss of guard Pe'Shon Howard. It was on the road against one of the ACC's best squads.

But none of those can be pointed to as the root of the team's atrocious second half on Saturday at No. 22 Virginia. Maybe if the Terps had been held hostage at halftime, and a high school team played in their place, you could look at that as a plausible excuse. Or maybe if the team had been forced to play the second half barefoot.

None of that happened Saturday, though, and the 27-point loss the Terps left John Paul Jones Arena with with after an even first half has left everyone puzzled, especially coach Mark Turgeon. He decided he'd finally seen enough late in the second half, when he waved the white flag and played six walk-ons to close out the 71-44 debacle.

"I'd just had enough," Turgeon said. "Selfishness, not boxing out, not defending."

To their credit, the Terps took the high road after the game. Turgeon and guard Sean Mosley, the only player made available to the media afterward, both made it clear there was no excuse for the team's 13-point second-half performance.

That doesn't do much to ease the sting of the Terps' biggest loss since 2009, though, and a season no one expected much from is starting to live down to those expectations.

It wasn't the first time we'd seen the Terps that we saw for the final 20 minutes of Saturday's game. The troubling part is that the last time we saw them was in a November trip to Puerto Rico.

Pe'Shon or no Pe'Shon, that team was supposed to be in the past. The Terps had made plenty of progress since that sloppy excursion.

But all the problems that shone through early in the season and all the underlying concerns with this team came full circle on Saturday.

The Terps' maligned frontcourt of James Padgett, Ashton Pankey, Berend Weijs and Alex Len combined for 10 points. In a combined 27 minutes, Weijs and Len had zero points and zero rebounds. Yes, you read that correctly.

Those depth concerns you've had? We saw those, too. Much like the Terps' loss to Alabama in Puerto Rico — the only game this season in which the Terps scored fewer points than they did Saturday — an aggressive, athletic defense exposed the Terps.

The Cavaliers shut down Terrell Stoglin after he hit a few circus shots en route to 14 first-half points. He didn't score in the second half and finished the game 4-for-17 from the floor.

Guard Nick Faust picked up some of the slack and finished with 13 points. But others, like Mosley (two points in 30 minutes) and guard Mychal Parker (three points in 24 minutes), simply couldn't get anything going offensively to pick up the slack.

Last but not least, we saw the turnovers come back — 15 of them, compared to three assists, to be exact. The Terps made errant passes, traveled regularly and even dribbled the ball out of bounds a couple times.

About the only positive thing to take from that game is that the Terps took responsibility for the performance. There were no excuses.

But good public relations does nothing to change an embarrassing performance. And with four games left, Turgeon had better hope that Saturday was an anomaly, because any more like that would be, well, inexcusable.

cwalsh@umdbk.com