as his football coach.
If Edsall, a Pennsylvania guy with a wholesome reputation and no real Penn State connections, would have stayed at UConn another year, he would have been high on the list to replace Joe Paterno . Despite that nonsense about Maryland being Edsall's "dream job" when he bolted UConn last January, no one would more love to go to Unhappy Valley to begin the job of rebuilding Penn State morally, spiritually with one scoop of vanilla offense and two self-serving scoops of self-righteousness.
Of course, after going 2-10 in his first season and alienating half the people in the state of Maryland, there's no way that's happening.
None of these "ifs" give Maryland football fans any comfort today, of course, but we will toss one more in the direction of College Park anyway: If anybody should have recognized a turtle, it's the people at Maryland.
Didn't they do their homework? Didn't they know what they were getting?
After the Terrapins suffered a hideous collapse in their season finale Saturday, allowing 42 unanswered points over 21 minutes in a 56-41 loss to North Carolina State , John Feinstein, the respected columnist for The Washington Post , sharpened one edge of his sword, sharpened the other edge of his sword and …
"Randy Edsall," Feinstein wrote, "should be fired — today."
There is no shortage of Maryland fans who agree with him. Going from nine wins last year under Ralph Friedgen to two is the second biggest free fall by a first-year coach among power football conferences in the past 50 years. Randy did it with a flourish, too, dropping the last seven in a row by double digits. None of them were his fault. Never are.
"He doesn't get it," Feinstein wrote. "He didn't get it a year ago, when he didn't have the class to tell his Connecticut players in person that he was leaving. He didn't get it when he started spouting off about rules as if he had invented the idea of discipline."
Here's the funny thing. Paul Pasqualoni doesn't allow earrings to be worn at the UConn facility or football functions, either. No ball caps or do rags. All beards must be shaved close. These were all Edsall's rules. In fact, Pasqualoni added another. Players must wear suits and ties traveling to games.
When asked about the biggest difference between playing for Edsall and Pasqualoni, UConn captain Blidi Wreh-Wilson didn't hesitate.
"We're expected to be more of men and be able to take care of ourselves without having a lot of people in our face all the time," he said.
How's that for honest?
Asked the same question, junior linebacker Jory Johnson said: "Edsall is more concerned with the way the process is done. Pasqualoni is more about getting the job done."
How's that for being precise?
Hidden in those two answers is the reason why Edsall slit his own throat in Year 1 at Maryland. He forgot that he started his UConn career 11-30 and was never in real danger of his losing his job. He forgot the school's commitment to building a major college program was bigger than one season's record. He forgot early on that the bar was set pretty low. He forgot that the $150 million poured into his program and Dan Orlovsky's decision to stay home and play in Connecticut were as big as reasons of the rising success in 2003 and 2004 as he was.
Somewhere along the way in the final three or four years at UConn, Edsall began to believe that the program was all about him. Here's the rub: He got others to believe it, too.
"He knew how he wanted to be viewed as the leader," Wreh-Wilson said. "He had the respect that when he came around, it was like, 'Mind your P's and Q's.'"
"He just got [to Maryland]. If he wants to implement that kind of program it's going to take a while. I don't know how Friedgen ran his, but there's a change and obviously change takes time."
Some people employ John Wooden 's success pyramid. Randy Edsall builds pyramids. Football geniuses can do it in a year or two. Edsall, the turtle, isn't a football genius. As a coach, Edsall is an aircraft carrier. He is a program builder. He is a CEO. He is organized, systematic. He needs his kind of players and is able to coach them "up" after they arrive. All that takes time. I give Edsall credit. Although his discipline could be selective, he got his players to graduate. He handled the Jasper Howard tragedy with great care.
As a man, he is a chief petty officer of that aircraft carrier and when you try to go all military on another coach's 85 recruits, well, you're begging for trouble. Let's face it. The guy was 1-16 against Top 25 teams at UConn and never beat a team that finished the season ranked in The Associated Press poll. The guy never won an outright Big East championship. You come in all military dictatorship and it's not like the Maryland players said, "We better listen. This is Vince Lombardi ."
"Coach Pasqualoni has his rules, too," Wreh-Wilson said, "but it's not like we feel it's something out to get us."
"We can walk around the complex and around campus with a little more off our shoulders now," Johnson said.
Reading Edsall's responses this fall was like watching an old sitcom for the 20th time. I swear the guy rehearses his answers in the mirror. At one point, he threw Friedgen under the bus. When things go wrong, it's always somebody else's fault.
Speaking directly to Feinstein's points, yes, Edsall exposed himself last January to be like any other ambitious, glory-seeking coach. He made all his talk about family and brotherhood ring hollow. Yet that didn't stop him from taking all his rules and all his talk about discipline to Maryland. Nothing was more ironic than Edsall's enforcing his "no-name" rule on the back of jerseys while wearing the most ridiculous "look-at-us" uniforms in college football history.
Do I think Edsall will be fired after one season? No. He has $10 million over the next five years coming to him and that's an enormous gulp. Maryland athletics already is in deep financial trouble, with plans to eliminate eight varsity sports in the coming year.
Does the prospect of thousands of empty seats and dwindling donations scare the hell out of athletic director Kevin Anderson ? Of course it does, just as the prospects of widespread defections by players and recruiting disappointments should. Maybe the whispers that Anderson was told he couldn't hire Mike Leach are true. Yet, if Anderson, who got the job when Hathaway didn't, fired Edsall today, he might as well fire himself, too.
When Edsall, who had a frosty relationship with Hathaway, left for Maryland, my biggest question was: Can he be more than a program builder? Can he recruit top players and be creative enough to take a run at the national championship?
Now my question is, can he stop being an anal-retentive control freak long enough to save his job?
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