C'mon, Randy. I'm so tired of the negativity - it's becoming a serious drain on my chi, bro - that I'm just looking, begging for an excuse to pull for you right now. (Just land Stefon Diggs already, man.) But I can't find one, because you constantly say things like this:
"I've been through this before," Edsall said. "I know how to handle it. I know what to do. There is no panic. It was like this the first year when we put the team together in Jacksonville. ... It's Connecticut all over again, 13 years ago. Jacksonville Jaguars all over again. It's going to Boston College when we were there. I've been through all of this. This isn't earth-shattering. It doesn't have me discouraged. I have a vision of what we're going to do and I know we're doing things the right way."
Yes, it would appear that Randy Edsall compared his situation at Maryland to the situation he had 13 years ago ... when UConn was trying to make the leap from the FCS to the FBS.
Which, of course, is patently ridiculous, given that Maryland won nine games in the ACC last year and had the reigning Rookie of the Year at quarterback. Connecticut, comparatively, had a 16,00 seat stadium and was in the same conference as Dayton and Duquesne. A lot of people say that Maryland fans had too high of expectations this year, or that the program needed to built up thanks to a lack of football tradition, which is a viewpoint I disagree with but can respect. I don't quite think, though, that they were in that bad of shape.
And, as Patrick Stevens points out in the same link, he also compared it to the Jaguars - which was an expansion franchise that literally had no team before he got there - and Boston College decades ago, which had suffered four straight losing seasons.
I'll even admit the possibility that he could be talking about the current - not overarching - situation, meaning he's talking about having dealt with not making a bowl before instead of talking about needing to build a program. Although if that was the point, I'm not sure why he didn't simply leave it at "I've been in situations like this before" instead of comparing it to specific situations. It was clumsily said - at best - if that was the case, and he would've done well to emphasize in it his answer, which he has to know can and will be interpreted any number of reasons.
Of course, I'm not sure that I buy interpreting it that way, since that would require giving Edsall the benefit of the doubt in the press room, which I think he's lost by now. After all, it's the same guy who took a swipe at Ralph Friedgen after his team lost 38-7 to Temple; who notoriously said that he didn't minimize expectations enough for Danny O'Brien, who publicly called his team too slow to compete with Florida State and Clemson, and who is notoriously tight-lipped about ... well, everything.
This is just the latest in a series of Edsall media blunders. Any one of those on their own might be considered merely skeptical, but throw them all together and it's a rather damning portrayal of Edsall's incompetence at handling media pressures. And now we know why our Connecticuter friends referred to him as "a public relations disaster."
In fairness, public relations is one of the less important qualities in a football coach. Besides, when you're 2-7, I'm sure everything sounds like a public relations disaster.
But it's the only viewpoint we get from the program these days, and it's not an encouraging one. Randy is really in need of a friend right now, and (apparently) comparing Maryland to an FBS program isn't a good way to gain any allies.