COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- It took just moments into the CBS Selection Sunday broadcast for Maryland to secure a No. 6 seed in the East Region of NCAA Tournament. The Terps will play their First Round game in Jacksonville, Fla., March 21 against the winner of No. 11 seeds Belmont and Temple, which square off in Dayton, Ohio, March 19.
The Terps got together as a team at Xfinity Center Sunday night to watch the selection show and learn their fate. Once they got their draw, a ‘new season’ began for Mark Turgeon’s squad.
“We’re really proud of what we accomplished this year to this point in a great league with a difficult schedule, and to see your name pop up on Selection Sunday was great,” Turgeon told reporters Sunday night. “If you guys could have been in the room with us, you would have seen pure joy and excitement on these guys’ faces. So we’re super excited. We get to stay on the East Coast, head down to Jacksonville. Hopefully the weather will be warm, and we’re looking forward to it. We’re playing Thursday, which is great. We had a great day of practice today and we started a new season today. We talked about it and we’re fired up to do well in this tournament. I can just tell from our team meeting today and our practice today that our guys truly believe that this is a new season and we’ve done some amazing things and the grind is over, now the fun begins, and it showed kind with how our guys handled today.”
After getting upset by Nebraska in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament, Maryland has now lost five straight postseason games dating back to 2016. Junior point guard Anthony Cowan Jr. is the only heavy contributor on the Terps’ roster that has even played in an NCAA Tournament game, and while he’s still looking for his postseason win he’s also sharing what he has learned from his past experiences as he leads the fourth-youngest team in the country.
“First, I’ll just tell them don’t take it for granted,” Cowan said when asked what advice he has for his younger teammates. “And then second, play with confidence.”
The 6-foot floor general who leads the Terps with 16.0 points per game added that he and his teammates are driven to end Maryland’s postseason drought as well as the personal motivation he draws from to get over that hump himself and cement his legacy as an upperclassmen in College Park.
“I would say we have more of a chip on our shoulder more than anything,” Cowan said. “Me personally, I haven’t won a postseason game so that has been my motivation for honestly over a year. Now that I’m there, I want to take advantage of the opportunity.”
Most teams in the field of 68 will have three or four day to prepare for a specific opponent. Not the Terps. Once Belmont and Temple conclude their play-in game Tuesday night, Maryland will have about a day to scout its next opponent.
But Turgeon said that is pretty typical for a regular season schedule, so he is expecting his team to be able to adjust fairly easily.
“I’m going to look at it as an advantage for us,” Turgeon said. “They have to play in Dayton and then fly to Jacksonville Tuesday night. So they’ll have experience under their belt and they’ll have confidence because they won a game, but either way we never work on a team until the day before, in front of these guys. I might be doing it behind the scenes type deal. They don’t know it, so it will feel like a regular season game for us the way we’ll prepare and get ready for it. So I’m going to look at it as an advantage because we’ll be down there Tuesday night sleeping in our hotel while they’re in Dayton playing a game that night.”
Regardless of who Maryland plays in its first game, it should be an interesting matchup that the Terps will be favored in.
Belmont is a dangerous team from the Ohio Valley with an NBA-caliber senior forward in Dylan Windler, but the Bruins have played a very soft schedule (230th out of 353 according to KenPom) and their best win is against conference mate Murray State, which is also in the tournament and has also played a very weak schedule.
Temple is coached by college basketball legend Fran Dunphy, but the Owls were a very fringe tournament team that was bounced from its conference tournament early by a Wichita State team that wasn’t even on the postseason radar. Temple is somewhat battle-tested with the 75th hardest schedule according to KenPom, but the Owls struggle to score from outside which is usually where teams are able to take advantage of the Terps, so it’s not a bad matchup for Maryland.
If Maryland wins its first game, it would play the winner of No. 3 LSU or No. 14 Yale. Winning that game would put the Terps in the Sweet 16 for a virtual home game in Washington, DC. But Turgeon isn’t letting his team look that far down the road yet with ending a postseason losing streak on the line.
“We have to win a postseason game,” Turgeon said. “It’s either Belmont or Temple. When we met, we said it doesn’t matter where the other 65 teams pop up, we just have to concentrate on the two in that part of the bracket. So we’ll be locked into that. We’re battle-tested. We play in an unbelievable league. We played an unbelievably tough schedule, especially on the road. So we’ll be prepared for whoever comes our way.”
