Maryland Basketball: A Fitting End to the 2011 Season

With 13:11 left in the second half Friday, the Maryland Terrapins trailed the Duke Blue Devils 50-51. Once again, the Terps were right there with a top-10 team.

Once again, the Terps failed to finish the game, eventually wilting and falling 87-71.

With the loss, Maryland's NCAA tournament hopes are officially dead, although they've been unofficially done for quite sometime.

Every time Maryland had a chance to step up and clip a good team to solidify its standing as a tournament-caliber squad, they faltered.

They played only two good games this season: at Penn State during the ACC/Big Ten challenge, and at Virginia in late January. And, really, in those games the Terps only played one good half of basketball each.

The team never played a complete game all season. There never was a time when Maryland fans thought, "This team is firing on all cylinders."

If Jordan Williams and Cliff Tucker were having a good game, Sean Mosley and the freshmen were not; if Terrell Stoglin was filling it up, Jordan Williams and Dino Gregory were struggling inside.

Basically, if two or three of Maryland's key guys were playing well, the rest were not.

That's how it played out all year, and that's how it played out against Duke in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals.

Jordan Williams dominated inside with 16 points and 16 rebounds, Cliff Tucker finally played a decent game (12 points, 5 rebounds, 3 assists) and Pe'Shon Howard rebounded from a steak of poor play with a solid output, but Stoglin, Mosley and Adrian Bowie combined for just 16 points.

Really, the only two players who have been consistent all season have been Gregory and Williams, which should not have been the case when you consider that the starting lineup at the beginning of the season included four upperclassmen.

Throughout the months leading up to the season, all we heard from the three seniors was, "It's our time now, we're finally out of the shadow cast by Greivis Vasquez, Eric Hayes and Landon Milbourne."

Only Gregory actually lived up to those words.

Cliff Tucker and Adrian Bowie were not horrible—they actually had the best seasons of their careers—but Gary Williams needed them to take a step forward. By the end of the year, they had regressed to what they'd been in their first three: role players.

Instead of taking command of the team both on and off the court, they ended up ceding power to Williams and Stoglin.

That would have been fine if not for the fact that Williams is a sophomore and Stoglin is a freshman. Since Maryland's two go-to players were so young, they struggled in crunch time when seniors and juniors usually take over.

Maryland counted on its upperclassmen to take over down the stretch, and, over and over, they did not.