Maryland football OC Walt Bell says New Cole Field House will be ‘the best facility in all of athletics’

Walt Bell, the youthful first-year offensive coordinator for the Maryland football team, is a good salesman. And he did a good sales job in an interview with Caleb Pressey of Barstool Sports, published on Wednesday. (Hat tip to Jeff Ermann for finding it.)

Bell said a lot of interesting things here. One of the most interesting items is Bell’s description of the New Cole Field House, Maryland’s future football home:

"You're gonna have a world-class indoor facility that's basically carved out of where the old Cole Field House used to be. All glass ceilings, so it's gonna be incredibly efficient in terms of energy. Team meeting rooms, a 26,000-square-foot weight room, you're gonna have three turf practice fields ... It's gonna be three or four stories tall. There's gonna be a tunnel that actually leaves our locker room under a street and opens up into the stadium.

"All you do in a facility is, you sweat and you work. It's not like you're gonna get better because you're in some magical facility. But I think what it shows is, the tangible, physical proof of how invested in our football program -- and more importantly, how invested we are in the athletes, to making them the best they can be.

"By the end of 2017 we're gonna have the best facility in all of athletics."

Sounds not bad. And Bell on recruiting the DMV, and specifically about locking down local talent that might be inclined to leave the area:

"You know, it's a very transient area. It's a lot like Atlanta. People go everywhere. When Penn State has great players, a lot of them in the past have come from the DMV. Ohio State has come in there. Michigan, you know. Every school in the world has come in there because it's so transient. But we've gotta do a great job recruiting, we've gotta make the guys, the players and the coaches in the area understand how special it is to do something at home where your moms and your dads can see you play every home game. Just building something special.

"Everyone talks about how they want to put on for where they're from. And where they're from never changes. Now all the sudden you've got a chance to go do something really special where you're from and kind of change the culture there, not just as a football program and not just as a university, but as a city and a community. And that's what we're selling right now, along with the facilities and the Under Armour and the gear and the changes on offense and defense."

It’s a good interview with an important part of Maryland’s present and future. I’d urge you to check it out in its entirety.

In other news

This was a pretty quiet day for Maryland-related news, so here we go:

Maryland signee Kevin Huerter is playing for Team USA.

A Profile in Terpage on linebacker Brett Zanotto, who is from outside Pittsburgh and therefore a staff favorite here at Testudo Times.

Steven Godfrey of SB Nation wrote something really good about how a Brad Paisley song became the half-baked soundtrack of college football.

College football’s got some new rules, and they’re worth reading up on.