Maryland Can't Stop with Just Hiring Mike Leach: Bud Foster Should Be Next

I am not going to pretend that what happened to Ralph Friedgen over the weekend was kosher or really even acceptable for a man who was just named ACC Coach of the Year and was +6 in wins from this year to last. Was it the right thing to do though?

Of course it was.

Ralph Friedgen wasn’t going to be the coach after 2011 anyway. His contract was going to up and AD Ken Anderson wasn’t going to extend him. It was not a well-kept secret, they were going to give the head coaching spot to James Franklin. Franklin decided to take an SEC coaching job at Vanderbilt and seems poised to take most of the coaching staff with him to Nashville.

For recruiting purposes the move had to be made.

Maryland couldn’t afford to have a lame duck coach and be out on the recruiting trail. They needed to make a change and they had to do it immediately. It had already cost them stud linebacker, Travis Hughes, who decided to sign with North Carolina.

Still waiting to find out how much North Carolina paid him. Too soon?

The move had to be done, there was no time to wait. Franklin leaving was the perfect time to basically blow up the coaching staff and start fresh. Start with a big name coach, start with a guy who is going to run an offense that most ACC teams are going to have an incredibly tough time stopping.

Mike Leach is allegedly the next coach and with Danny O’Brien at quarterback and the athletic receivers Maryland already has and two amazing freshman receivers coming in, O’Brien and Maryland are going to put up a lot of yards and a lot of points to go with it.

Leach isn’t a solid recruiter, though. He needs to find a couple of coordinators who recruit the east coast well, especially the DC, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Carolina regions.

It really doesn’t matter who the offensive coordinator is, Leach is going to call his own plays.

The defensive coordinator needs to be a big name though, especially if the Terrapins do not retain current defensive coordinator, Don Brown. It needs to be a guy with a good recruiting history and a guy who likes to bring a banged up lunch pail to work every day.

Maryland is already throwing a lot of money at Mike Leach, but Under Armor is dumping a lot and I do mean a lot of money into the athletic department at Maryland, so Maryland needs to throw a lot of money at current Virginia Tech defensive coordinator Bud Foster.

There is no point in scoring a lot of points if you’re going to give up just as many or more.

Bud Foster is familiar with every offense in the ACC, recruits the ACC pipeline extremely well, consistently pulls in big name recruits and the two and three star recruits he brings in, well they are playing at a five star level before they leave Virginia Tech.

Foster is also going to be a head coach one day in college football and he’s going to be a really good head coach too. So why not have him on your staff for the day that Mike Leach will probably leave and take a presumed better job in a bigger conference.

With Bud Foster on staff the Terrapins wouldn’t have to go on a big name coaching search. They’d have a guy ready to take over and just have to hire a new offensive coordinator when it’s time.

With Leach and Foster  on the same staff the ACC Championship will be a given every year, Maryland will move into a position of ACC dominance that most will not be able to match. The real goal will be something Maryland hasn’t done since 1953 and that is a National Championship.

***Check out this article and many others at my personal blog KDN4.com and be sure to check out the now infamous podcast I did with Danny O'Brien***