While there were plenty of positives for Maryland football during a COVID-shortened 2020 season like the emergence of quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa and beating Penn State inside Beaver Stadium, one area where the Terps struggled mightily was with penalties.
Although Maryland played in just five games last season, the Terps were penalized 44 times for 398 yards. That comes out to an average of 79.60 penalty yards per game, which ranked the Terps 124th out of 127 total FBS teams, or fourth from last nationally.
While penalties are a part of the game, listening to head coach Mike Locksley it has been obvious that unforced penalties, or ‘self-inflicted wounds’ as he likes to call them, have been an emphasis for the Terps throughout fall camp.
“When it comes to penalties, it’s been the Achilles heel of this team,” Locksley said following the Terps’ first scrimmage of fall camp. “You keep preaching it, you keep coaching it. The good thing we have now is, if you are a guy who continues to make mistakes and have penalties, we’ve got guys that are playing behind these players that have the ability to come in and the talent level doesn’t drop off. So we’re not going to play a guy that’s going to continue to hurt the team with, what I like to call a self-inflicted wound. I can deal with a pass interference, but some of the pre-snap penalties, lining up in the neutral zone, holding or false starts or those things, those are the ones that really kind of get in my craw. And for us, we do after practice, we’ve started reminding them, they do some extra conditioning for guys when they have penalties and we’ll just continue to coach it up.”
Maturity and discipline are often seen as going hand-in-hand and the Terps head into the 2021 season with a roster that boasts 55 upperclassmen versus a 2020 team that had just 36 upperclassmen. A more mature team should hopefully lead to fewer self-inflicted penalties, as too should the measures Locksley has taken throughout fall camp to make sure players understand the importance of not making silly mistakes.
“I use the raising kids analogy a lot,” said Locksley. “You constantly are talking to your guys about doing things with the right kind of discipline. As we all know, if you’ve had an 18 to 22-year old, discipline isn’t something that you can’t just talk about. We do everything that we can. We have referees out here at practice to chart penalties. Each day we keep a tab of the self-inflicted wounds, like on offense we call it our margin of error. On defense, missed assignments, missed tackles. And then we show them on tape. So what we hope is by continuing to hold them accountable and making sure we’re showing them it on tape and talking about it. And sometimes, the physical reminders of, when we jump offsides, or get a holding call, we have some physical reminder things that we do. We’ll continue to do that. But as I’ve said before, that’s going to be really critical for us this season. Two main things for us is being a team that we play with discipline and then the second would be, how we respond when we face adversity.”
Locksley has dealt with this issue before. He inherited a team that averaged 79.7 penalty yards per game in 2018, finishing 129th out of 130 FBS teams in that category the season before he arrived. In 2019, Locksley’s first season at the helm, the Terps were able to improve on that number significantly, committing just 49.1 penalty yards per game, going from second-to-last nationally all the way up to No. 45 in that category.
While 2020 certainly wasn’t a season to remember as far as penalties go, it also saw a number of unusual challenges such as significant time away from the field in the middle of the season due to COVID. With an older team and an emphasis on penalties during fall camp, there’s no reason not to believe the Terps won’t see significant improvement in the penalty department once again.
