Blog Article
Maryland Fires Mike Locksley After 13 Straight Power 4 Losses, and It’s Paying $9.94 Million to Do It
Eight years, one ceiling, and a 54-3 home loss to UCLA. Here’s why it ended, what it costs, who’s next, and who the Terps can’t afford to lose.
Maryland fired Mike Locksley on Wednesday.
It took eight seasons and a 54-3 home loss to UCLA to get here. Locksley leaves at 38-49 overall and 16-47 in Big Ten play. He lost his last 13 games against Power 4 opponents, which is the kind of streak that writes the press release for you.
The surprise is that he got an eighth season.
Here are the 4 things that matter now:
- Why it ended
- What it costs
- Who’s next
- Who has to stay
1. Why it ended: the same season, every season
Locksley could recruit.
Maryland produced five NFL draft picks in 2023 and six more in 2025. He kept Zion Elee, ESPN’s No. 2 overall recruit and a Baltimore kid, home in College Park. He grew up in D.C. and filled the roster with players most Maryland coaches only see on film.
He just couldn’t turn them into Big Ten wins.
Every year followed the same script. Maryland won its nonconference games in September, then the Big Ten schedule started. After back-to-back eight-win seasons in 2022 and 2023, Maryland has lost 20 of its last 22 conference games: 1-8 in 2024, 1-8 in 2025, and 0-4 this year.
Two years of that is a pattern, and patterns get coaches fired.
How do you survive 87 games at .437?
A UCLA fan on Reddit asked the question everybody else was thinking.
How does a coach last eight seasons while losing more than he wins? Part of the answer is where Locksley started: he took over after Maryland fired DJ Durkin in 2018, and the program needed a rebuild before it could worry about wins. Then came three straight winning seasons and three bowl wins from 2021 to 2023, and that bought him years.
The rest of the answer is recruiting.
Another commenter put it bluntly: Locksley got a long leash because he could land talent, even when he couldn’t win with it. Every time a blue-chip DMV kid signed, Maryland had a reason to believe next year would be different. His 2025 class alone had seven SC Next 300 prospects.
Eventually the losses come due, and on Wednesday they did.
2026 was the last chance, and everybody knew it
Last November, Maryland had the chance to move on and passed.
Athletic director Jim Smith brought Locksley back and promised more money for the roster. The Terps returned quarterback Malik Washington after a record-setting freshman season and kept veterans like linebacker Daniel Wingate. They opened 2-0 against Hampton and UConn, which is a sentence that should never make a Big Ten fan feel safe.
Then James Franklin brought Virginia Tech to College Park, picked up where he left off at Penn State, and Maryland hasn’t won since.
The losses kept coming: UCLA, Nebraska, Ohio State, and Rutgers.
The UCLA game ended 54-3, at home, a score usually reserved for September teams that get paid to show up. Earlier this week, Locksley acknowledged the frustration and said, “It won’t get fixed here at the podium.” He was right.
It got fixed in the AD’s office on Wednesday.
2. What it costs: $9.94 million for a coach who isn’t coaching
Maryland owes Locksley $9.94 million, about 65% of his remaining compensation.
Here’s the breakdown:
- Lump sum: $4.97 million, due within 60 days
- The rest: equal installments through 2028
- Offset or mitigation: none
No mitigation means that if Locksley takes a coordinator job next year, Maryland still pays every dollar. The contract runs through 2028 because his 2022 extension added a year automatically every time he won seven games, and he did it in 2022 and 2023. The reward for those eight-win seasons turned out to be paying for the years that followed.
One more number: the buyout would have dropped to $8.9 million after this season.
Maryland just spent roughly $1 million for a head start on the search. Smith decided waiting until December would cost more than that. He’s probably right.
3. Who’s next: 5 names to know
This is Smith’s first major coaching search at Maryland, and his background is pro sports business, including time with the Atlanta Braves.
He has two jobs. He has to find a coach who can win in the Big Ten, and then give that coach the money to keep doing it. Maryland has never posted a winning record in Big Ten play and has finished with one or two league wins six times since joining in 2014.
Here’s who should be on his list:
- Jake Dickert, Wake Forest: He’s won at Washington State and Wake Forest, two jobs that come with built-in disadvantages. Wake is 6-1 and ranked No. 17. The question is whether he sees Maryland as a step up or a step sideways.
- Charles Huff, Memphis: He’s from Denton, Maryland, interned with the Terps in 2009, and worked under Franklin and Nick Saban. He’s 44-27 at Marshall, Southern Miss, and Memphis, with a league title at Marshall in 2024. The question is whether a fourth job in four years looks like ambition or a moving company.
- Lance Taylor, Western Michigan: He won the MAC in 2025 and is 15-6 since the start of last season. He’s an offensive coach with deep NFL experience whose 2025 team still had the nation’s No. 9 scoring defense.
- Dan Mullen, UNLV: He’s 117-68 in FBS with three 10-win seasons in the SEC and a strong quarterback track record. The 4-3 start at UNLV doesn’t help. Neither does the way Florida ended, especially on the recruiting trail.
- Brian Hartline, South Florida: He’s 39, 5-2 in his first season as a head coach, and built the best receiver pipeline in the country at Ohio State. Smith and senior deputy AD Diana Sabau both spent time in Columbus. One season of head coaching is thin, but nobody would question his recruiting.
The name the internet wants: Brian Kelly
Reddit has already hired Brian Kelly, at least in spirit.
Within minutes, the jokes were up: Kelly studying how to eat a crab, Kelly watching The Wire for accent lessons, Kelly practicing Baltimore vowels in the mirror. This is the man who showed up in Baton Rouge and found a Southern accent somewhere between the airport and the podium. Nobody’s betting he couldn’t find a Baltimore one by signing day.
The funny part is that he’s available.
LSU fired Kelly midway through the 2025 season after a 5-3 start, and agreed to pay his full $54 million buyout as long as he made good-faith efforts to find work in coaching or media. He’s spending this season as a CBS Sports analyst and co-hosting a weekly SiriusXM show. He’s 64, and he’s said he hasn’t closed any doors on coaching, adding that his next job wouldn’t necessarily have to be with a national title contender.
Maryland is not a national title contender, so that box is checked.
At least one Maryland fan on Reddit said he’d take Kelly in a heartbeat if the school could afford him, arguing that a coach who could take the Terps bowling every year would be a massive upgrade. Kelly holds a 297-109-2 career record and won 113 games at Notre Dame. Maryland has won more than seven games three times since 2010.
The catch is motivation.
Kelly already has $54 million coming from LSU, and his buyout is built so that new earnings offset what LSU owes him. Money alone won’t move him, and neither will Maryland’s Big Ten history. He’d have to want the job, and Maryland would have to convince him it wants to win as badly as he does.
That’s the same problem Jim Smith has with every name on this list.
4. Who has to stay: the first recruiting class is already on campus
The new coach’s most important signing class is the one wearing Maryland jerseys right now.
Tampering season is coming, and a lot of these players grew up in Maryland. They’ll have to decide if they want to buy in to another staff and another rebuild. If they leave, the next coach starts over.
Here’s who matters most:
- QB Malik Washington: He set the school freshman record with 2,963 passing yards last year. This season he has 1,615 yards and nine touchdowns, but also six interceptions, three of them returned for scores.
- Edge Zion Elee: He’s the highest-rated recruit in program history and leads the team with 4.5 tackles for loss, despite playing only about 25 to 30 snaps a game. He also has 3.5 sacks and three forced fumbles.
- Edge Sidney Stewart: He was a Freshman All-American last season with seven sacks, and he stayed when he could have left.
- LB Daniel Wingate: He leads the team with 45 tackles, returned an interception 52 yards for a score against Ohio State, and has an extra year of eligibility if he wants it.
- WR Chris Durr Jr.: The Wyoming transfer has 52 catches, tied with Ohio State’s Jeremiah Smith for the Big Ten lead.
- Edge Zahir Mathis: He had six sacks as a freshman before a season-ending injury in fall camp.
The 2027 class matters too: receiver Myles McAfee, safety Kenaz Sullivan, and defensive end Dallas Pauldo are all committed, and all of them will be getting phone calls this week.
The bottom line
Maryland has gone 2-20 in the Big Ten since 2024, and on Wednesday it finally acted on it.
Locksley proved you can recruit the DMV. He never proved you can win the Big Ten with it, and neither has anyone else at Maryland. Now Smith has to find a coach who believes it’s possible and convince the people writing checks to believe it too.
Otherwise, the Terps just paid $9.94 million to start the same season over.
