Maryland Terrapins: Five Things They Must Improve Upon Before West Virginia

While the whole nation was able to see the Maryland Terrapins come through in the fourth quarter with a victory over the University of Miami Monday night, those that tuned in also saw the Terps have a few big weaknesses that need to be fixed.

There is a big difference between taking down a suspension-plagued Miami, and beating Top 25 team West Virginia, the Terps' next opponent.

There were five specific areas of the game that the Terps seemed to struggle with that should be the focus at practice over the next two weeks.

While Maryland fans should be excited about their team, it will not be until these issues are solved that they will move up in the college football world.

Red Zone Scoring

The most talked about thing in the Maryland news media Tuesday morning—besides the team's uniforms—was their lack of ability to punch the ball in.

The Terps moved up and down the field with ease, especially early on, but came away with only one offensive touchdown.

That night the Terps had seven drives inside the Hurricanes 20-yard line. Of those seven, they converted only the first one into a touchdown. They also came away with four field goals, a missed field goal, and an interception.

It seems that after Danny O'Brien threw the interception from the 3-yard line on the Terps' second drive that they became afraid to take any risks and settled for field goals instead. This may have worked out this game, but the Terps could have made much more of a statement if they had scored two more touchdowns and won by 16 instead of eight.

Defense

This is obviously a broad category, and it is tough to tear apart a unit that scored two touchdowns (more than the offense did), but when you give up 367 yards you shouldn't normally win.

After all the hype of Kenny Tate moving to the STAR position, he was largely invisible from what I saw, as was the defensive line.

I think the Terps are really going to struggle against teams with athletic quarterbacks, as the pass rush was mediocre at best, and oftentimes it seemed as though Stephen Morris could have just taken off and run for the first down.

Miami is a talented team with some good running backs, but this won't be the best offense the Terps will face all year. The West Virginia offense could put up more yards without turning the ball over four times, which would mean bad things for Maryland.

Kickoffs/Kick Returns

The reason the Maryland offense was able to put up 499 yards was because, for the most part, they started deep in their own zone.

Miami did a great job of putting the kickoffs inside the 5-yard line and to one sideline, creating a natural extra defender. Justus Pickett, a freshman, returned all five of the Terps' kickoffs for a pretty bad average of 15.6 yards.

On the other side of the ball, Maryland really struggled to land the ball even close to inside the 10. This, added to the fact that Miami averaged 21.3 yards (this includes one kick return for 0 yards), gave Miami a much better starting position than Maryland.

The Terps are going to need to work on running in lanes down the field, and hopefully on getting the ball to land a bit deeper. They also may need to have someone else try at kick returner, because the absence of Torrey Smith is being felt most in that position.

Field Goals

Getting a bit nitpicky here, but two things irked me during the game about Maryland's field goals.

First was the obvious fact that missing from 23 yards out is not even acceptable in high school football, let alone in a game with two BCS schools playing each other. I understand that in college the hashes are far out, making for a tough angle, but you don't use that as an excuse for a kick that most assumed was a gimme.

The second thing that bothered me was the fact that the Terps had to go for it on fourth down twice, because they were too far out of kicker Nick Ferrara's range. The first one would have been 53 yards in the rain, which is difficult, but the second one was only 45 yards, something that should be makeable. In hindsight the Terps converted both fourth downs anyway, but I hope Ferrara has more range than 32 yards (his longest kick of the game).

Play-Calling Diversity

The Terps kept a lot of their offseason under wraps, and not much was known about what the Terps offense was going to look like against Miami.

They came out in a no-huddle, West Coast-like offense that included a lot of shotgun and quick screens.

This seemed to work great for the first quarter of the game, but when Miami started to heat up, the Terps had trouble finding something else to work with. I liked the fact that they moved O'Brien out of the pocket on most of his throws, but now that teams have tape on them, they need to come up with a more complex game plan than screening down the whole field.

Tough to argue with 500 yards of total offense, but once teams figure it out, things will not come as easy.