Chansky's Notebook: Who's In Charge?

Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse at Maryland, it did.

After reading accounts of Maryland reinstating head football coach D.J. Durkin, you had to wonder what was going on at the former ACC school. A player, Jordan McNair, died under Durkin’s watch, and conditioning coach Rick Court, who was Durkin’s first hire, was widely blamed for McNair’s mistreatment and is long gone from College Park.

Terrapin players, who upset Texas in their opening game under acting head coach Matt Canada and are 5-3, one more win away from a bowl bid, have called Durkin and Court “the same person.” And they were going to let this guy back as head of the program?

Even if Durkin’s nature was more inclined to run a petting zoo than a college football team, there was no way he deserved to be reinstated. In any college athletic program, in major corporations, the buck stops at the top. Butch Davis was fired at UNC for one reason: he hired John Blake, who committed NCAA violations. No one died here.

Besides the absurdity of the reinstatement, there were practical reasons why it made no sense. Durkin was known as a disciplinarian coach who verbally abused players in a poor excuse for running a tight ship. So, let’s say Durkin spent the last two months in anger management courses for personality disorder or lived in a hyperbaric chamber for 60 days, and came out the other end as a completely difference person; now what kind of a football coach would he be?

I am all about giving someone a second chance, but not at a school where a player died and the fan base and students were already protesting his return. The stories said the Maryland Board of Regents, who recommended Durkin’s reinstatement, doesn’t have the power to hire or fire a coach. That fell under president Wallace Loh, the outspoken nut bag who had already announced his retirement in June of 2019.

Meanwhile, athletic director Damon Evans, who was fired as AD at Georgia after police found a woman’s panties in the married man’s rental car, still had his job.

Oh, this just in: Maryland has now fired Durkin after one day back in the football office.