Somebody Tell Me If Terps Football Is Good

The Maryland Terrapins football team looked good against Navy. And by "looked good," I mean they got a win, which has only happened three times in the past calendar year. Much like my brief and ill-advised foray into amateur heart surgery, nothing good can come of me trying to become a football analyst.

Luckily, other people don't have such reservations.

The (Annapolis) Capital's Bill Wagner:

Maryland's football team backed up head coach Ralph Friedgen's statement that it is vastly improved from a year ago. Navy and quarterback Ricky Dobbs were unable to live up to all the preseason hype. [...]

Dobbs, a Heisman Trophy candidate who received a ton of preseason attention, put forth perhaps the poorest performance of his career. The senior captain lost two fumbles at the 1-yard line and committed a mental mistake that cost Navy a field goal.

I don't know all that much about football, but the barstool analysts at Cornerstone yesterday didn't really put too much behind Navy's hype in the first place. When we won, most that I talked to essentially said "yeah it's great I guess, but it's just Navy." They wanted "real" tests, which one fan said basically meant waiting to see how badly Virginia Tech would beat the Terps.

ESPN's Heather Dinich sides with the Cstone brain trust — now that all 12 ACC teams have played one game, she put together the first set of power rankings — and Maryland is nestled in at number nine because, though the win was "an important step in turning around last year's 2-10 season," it was a "sloppy game for both teams."

A parting thought — before the game, SB Nation's Scott Jackson said a Maryland win "sets the tone for the redemption tour." Do you think that's actually the case? Was the win convincing enough, and against a good enough team, to kick up feelings of a turnaround year?