For Maryland Football, Quarterback Quandary Has Long History

This year, the Maryland football team’s quarterback situation pales in comparison to the questions surrounding the program regarding the death of sophomore offensive lineman Jordan McNair and the football staff’s treatment of players. ESPN reported Aug. 10 McNair “showed signs of extreme exhaustion” during his final workout May 29. He died June 13. ESPN also detailed a “toxic coaching culture under head coach DJ Durkin” in a separate report Aug. 10.

Maryland placed Durkin on administrative leave and named offensive coordinator Matt Canada the interim head coach. The university has also commissioned external reviews regarding McNair’s death and the culture of the football program.

The Terps will the open the season against Texas Sept. 1 with a dark cloud hanging over the program. Either redshirt sophomore Tyrrell Pigrome or redshirt freshman Kasim Hill will be under center. The program’s question mark at quarterback spans nearly two decades.


Maryland’s follow-up act to the 2001 season, during which the Terps earned a trip to the Orange Bowl, didn’t begin particularly well. Maryland was blown out by Notre Dame and Florida State during the first three weeks of the 2002 season. Quarterback Scott McBrien, in his first year as Maryland’s starter, was looking for his first big win under center for the Terps. That opportunity would come at West Virginia Oct. 5, 2002.

The Terps held a walk-through just before their bus ride to Morgantown, W.V., but what McBrien didn’t know is his preparations for the game were just beginning. McBrien and second-year head coach Ralph Friedgen sat together during the bus ride to West Virginia to master the game plan. McBrien remembered it as a three-hour study session, while Friedgen recalled it as five. Both men pinpointed the bus ride as a turning point for McBrien’s season and college career.

Similar success stories, however, have largely been missing in recent years, when the program was felled by season-ending injuries, bad luck and recruiting misses. The Terps have struggled to find a consistent passer since Friedgen was fired in 2010 and haven’t developed an NFL quarterback since Shaun Hill, who played at Maryland from 2000-2001 and went on to have a 15-year career in the league. Steady passers like McBrien have been hard to come by, too, throughout the last several years.

McBrien’s development can be traced in part to his bus ride with Friedgen. McBrien threw for 5,169 yards and 34 touchdowns as the Terps’ starting quarterback from 2002-2003.

“I remember turning around, looking at my teammates and guys are on headsets, guys are listening to music, guys are taking naps and I’m in class for three hours on the front row of the bus all the way up to Morgantown,” McBrien said. “[Friedgen] quizzed me on every single package, every single formation, every single play, every single check at the line of scrimmage, what I expected out of their defense, what defense they were going to be in. You name it, he asked me.”

Friedgen explained he used flash cards full of defensive formations to help get his point across to McBrien.

“I’d call a play and I’d flash the card and put it down and I’d say, ‘OK, Where are we going? What’s the coverage? What [are] your options?’ Call it a check-with-me at the line. Are we checking out of this play? What are we checking to?” Friedgen said.

Added McBrien: “I hated him in that moment for doing that because I just wanted to chill and hang out and sleep and rest and kind of zone out and not think about football.”

“But guess what? We beat the hell out of West Virginia that day, too,” Friedgen said. “Then he took off. Then he started to get it. A lot of guys don’t want to spend the time to do that.”

The Terps beat West Virginia, 48-17. McBrien was 8-of-18 for 162 yards and a touchdown to complement a defense that secured three takeaways and a running game that rushed for 215 yards and four touchdowns. The Terps won 10 of the final 11 games of that season, capping their 2002 season with a victory against Tennessee in the Peach Bowl. Both that year and the next, McBrien provided the production and stability at quarterback that has been mostly missing for nearly 15 years at Maryland.

The Recent Past

Ten quarterbacks have started games since Friedgen’s ouster: Danny O’Brien, C.J. Brown, Perry Hills, Caleb Rowe, Shawn Petty, Shane Cockerille, Max Bortenschlager, Ryan Brand, Pigrome and Hill. That group includes moderately recruited quarterbacks (Brown, Hills, Rowe and Bortenschlager), linebackers (Petty and Cockerille) and a walk-on (Brand).

Expectations for O’Brien, however, were high entering Randy Edsall’s first year as head coach in 2011. The previous season, O’Brien had been named the Atlantic Coast Conference Rookie of the Year after throwing for 2,438 yards, 22 touchdowns and just eight interceptions. O’Brien, a pro-style passer who ran a West Coast offense under Friedgen and offensive coordinator James Franklin in 2010, said the 2011 season brought about “just a dramatic scheme change, which, that’s not to say it was right or wrong — there’s just a lot of ways to skin a cat.” Edsall and offensive coordinator Gary Crowton shifted to an up-tempo, spread offense designed to simplify a quarterback’s reads, according to O’Brien.

O’Brien struggled in 2011 before his season ended due to a broken arm suffered during the 10th game of the season against Notre Dame. Although Brown finished the season as the starter, O’Brien said he was told by the Terps’ coaching staff that he was “the guy of the future and they wanted to build around it.”

But O’Brien decided to transfer and landed at Wisconsin, where he played in 2012 before finishing his college career at Division II Catawba College (N.C.). He’s now playing for the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League.

O’Brien was one of two dozen Terps who transferred from Maryland during Edsall’s first 14 months as head coach.

“I think in hindsight, if I could do it again, I would’ve stuck it out, honestly, just because of how much I loved going to school at Maryland and trying to finish out what we were starting to build there,” O’Brien said. “But going back to 21-year-old Danny, I would say the reasons I left were primarily just having so many other guys that I was close to that had already transferred and looked to go out. It just kind of felt like everything was kind of crumbling apart.”

It was a prelude to 2012, when four season-ending injuries forced the Terps to use Shawn Petty, a linebacker, at quarterback.

C.J. Brown was set to be the starter, but he tore an ACL during practice two weeks before the season opener. Perry Hills won the job, but tore an ACL during the seventh game of the season. Devin Burns suffered a season-ending foot injury after relieving Hills. The next man up was Caleb Rowe, who tore an ACL during the eighth game of the season.

“Whenever guys are getting injured left and right,” Hills said, “that’s kind of like a jab to the ribs every single time.”

The position fell to Petty, who was a triple-option quarterback and operated out of the Wing-T formation at Eleanor Roosevelt High School (Greenbelt, Md.) before playing linebacker at Maryland. He became the team’s backup quarterback after Hills and Burns went down. Petty had two weeks of practice — one with the second team, another with the first team — before starting at quarterback against Georgia Tech, which marked the first game of his college career.

“Most teams, honestly, if you make it to your fifth or sixth quarterback … at that point, most teams would give up and fold,” Petty said. “But one thing about us that year, I would say we went into every week thinking that we were going to win the game. We prepared that way. There was no quit.”

Maryland had a similar fate in 2017. Tyrrell Pigrome won the starting job out of training camp, but he tore his ACL during the Terps’ season-opening win at Texas in September. Kasim Hill tore his ACL two games later against Central Florida. Max Bortenschlager was banged up throughout the season. Ryan Brand, a walk-on, started against Michigan in November.

Myriad Reasons For Struggles

The only regular starter the Terps have had since Friedgen departed is C.J. Brown, who was the primary starter from 2013-2014. But Maryland’s quarterback position wasn’t always in a state of flux. In fact, Friedgen developed a long line of solid-if-unspectacular quarterbacks who won games.

Shaun Hill was the starting quarterback of the 2001 team that won 10 games. Scott McBrien won 21 games as the starter from 2002-2003. Sam Hollenbach was the primary starter from 2005-2006 and won nine games during the latter season. Chris Turner started from 2007-2009 and won eight games in 2008. Danny O’Brien appeared poised to join the list of solid longtime starters. However, none developed into NFL passers other than Hill.

“I think what hurt Scotty was his size. He had a strong enough arm [for the NFL],” Friedgen said of McBrien, who was listed at 6-foot-1 and 182 pounds. “What probably helped Shaun was his size [6-foot-3, 230 pounds] and he was the smart guy. He didn’t have the arm that Scotty had. But he was good enough for us to be good.

“Hollenbach had the size [6-foot-4, 214 pounds]. He didn’t have a great release, and I’m sure that hurt him. And he wasn’t the most mobile guy. Danny, I thought, was definitely on track. He’s playing in Canada right now, so he is playing professional football.”

After Friedgen was fired following the 2010 season, the program struggled to recruit the quarterback position. Edsall brought in Perry Hills and Caleb Rowe as part of his 2012 recruiting class; Shane Cockerille in 2013; Will Ulmer in 2014, and Gage Shaffer in 2015. The Terps also brought in Daxx Garman, a transfer from Oklahoma State, ahead of the 2015 season.

Edsall got little out of this group. Hills and Rowe struggled with injuries; Cockerille moved to fullback and eventually linebacker; Ulmer and Shaffer never played a down for Maryland, and Garman completed six passes as a Terp.

“They did kind of want the running quarterback that maybe doesn’t have the arm strength but he can just get it out, he can pick up the quick first downs and kind of move the ball downfield,” said Ahmed Ghafir, recruiting analyst for Inside Maryland Sports. “They looked more on the athleticism side rather than his arm strength, his accuracy, whether he can break down the defense. I think they kind of looked past that or maybe they didn’t evaluate that the best that they could.”

However, Edsall did pick up a commitment from highly regarded Bullis School (Md.) quarterback Dwayne Haskins during the spring of 2015, but Haskins flipped to Ohio State in January 2016 after Edsall was let go. Edsall, now the head coach at the University of Connecticut, declined comment to PressBox for this story.

Quarterback Quandary

Maryland is hardly alone in the struggle to find steady quarterbacks who win games. Recruiting the right quarterbacks is among the most difficult tasks in college football. Multiple coaches detailed the characteristics they look for beyond physical traits when identifying quarterbacks who can perform at the college level, including but not limited to:

Vision. “I think that’s the most important quality, myself,” Friedgen said. “You like a guy who’s mobile, you like a guy who has a good arm, you like a guy with a quick release, but if he can’t see, all that stuff doesn’t matter. You’ve got to throw it to the right guy.”

Calm under pressure. “The bodies are flying around you. Can you handle it and still process, not focus on the potential hit that you might take and be able to separate that and still keep your eyes down the field and make the right decision?” Our Lady of Good Counsel (Md.) High School head coach Andy Stefanelli said.

A sharp football IQ. “The game’s really changed as far as the [run-pass options], and a lot of quarterbacks are making decisions at the line of scrimmage, even at the high school level, which was very rare,” St. Frances (Md.) Academy co-head coach Henry Russell said. “And in order to do that, you need to have a quarterback that can mentally handle it and then physically have the gifts to do it.”

Handling criticism. “You’re going to get criticized not only by your coach and your quarterback coach, your offensive coordinator,” Stefanelli said. “But you’re going to be criticized by most of the people in the stands — the fans, the other team’s fans — [and] the students in the school, much more so than any other position, because everybody watches the quarterback.”

Leadership. “Some kids develop as a leader as they get older, get more confident,” Russell said. “Some kids are leaders from an earlier age. But I think what you do look for is somebody that is almost an extension of his coaches, somebody that you know on the field when he speaks, the kids listen to him. When he’s calling the plays, people are believing in the plays he’s calling.”

Maryland is hoping it already has a quarterback with those qualities in the program.

Is Pigrome Or Hill The Guy?

The Terps will begin the 2018 season against Texas Sept. 1 with Tyrrell Pigrome or Kasim Hill at quarterback. Both played against the Longhorns Sept. 2, 2017, when the Terps pulled off the biggest win in recent program history, a 51-41 victory in Austin, Tex.

It was a window into the development of Pigrome, whose calmness and accuracy improved tenfold from a year prior.

Pigrome, who won the starting job out of camp, showed how well he fit into former Terps offensive coordinator Walt Bell’s up-tempo system that included plenty of zone reads to take advantage of Pigrome’s running ability. Pigrome’s first pass of the game was an interception returned for a touchdown, but he recovered to complete 9-of-12 passes for 175 yards and two touchdowns and ran for 64 yards.

“That’s part of the reason why you play Pig, because he’s going to find a way,” said Bell, now the offensive coordinator at Florida State. “He can have a mistake and come back and be [9-of-12] passing and if he doesn’t get hurt, he probably runs for 100. That’s the kind of kid he is. He’s been that way since he was a high school kid. That was the one thing that was so attractive about recruiting Pig was just the things that people in that community and on that coaching staff at [Clay-Chalkville (Ala.) High School] would say about him, because that’s what you want that kid to be.”

Pigrome tore the ACL in his right knee during the last play of the third quarter against Texas. Hill replaced him and completed the only three passes he threw. Hill’s 40-yard pass to receiver DJ Moore to convert a third-and-19 during the fourth quarter helped stave off a Texas rally and proved to be the biggest throw of the game.

Hill displayed his aptitude in handling Bell’s run-pass option during Maryland’s 63-17 win against Towson the following week. Bell credited the coaching Hill received at Gilman School (Md.) and St. John’s College High (Washington, D.C.) as well as his intelligence, even-keeled nature and arm talent for contributing to his polish. Bell also praised Max Bortenschlager, who made eight starts last year after Pigrome and Hill went down.

Maryland’s quarterbacks will operate this year under Matt Canada, who was named the Terps’ interim head coach when Durkin was placed on leave. Canada was the offensive coordinator at North Carolina State from 2012-2015, Pittsburgh in 2016 and Louisiana State in 2017. Bell said Maryland’s quarterback position is “absolutely” in a good place with Pigrome, Hill and Bortenschlager.

However, as Maryland approaches opening day against Texas, the quarterback question is taking a backseat to the larger issues surrounding the program.

“The safety and well-being of our student-athletes is our highest priority,” athletic director Damon Evans said in a letter to the university community Aug. 11. “These alleged behaviors are not consistent with the values I expect all of our staff to adhere to and we must do better. You will be hearing from me as our work continues to rebuild the culture of respect in our football program.”

Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox

Issue 246: August 2018

Luke Jackson

See all posts by Luke Jackson. Follow Luke Jackson on Twitter at @luke_jackson10