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The Maryland football program has been a mess for years.
That's the simplest takeaway from the 192-page investigative report that a school-appointed commission released Thursday. DJ Durkin's program, following the death of Jordan McNair and a subsequent ESPN report that is a "toxic" culture.
The report reaches an odd conclusion, which it tries to use the dictionary to support – more on that later. It states that "the Maryland football team did not have a toxic culture," but it was a culture where it was difficult to talk about it. "
The investigators do not think about their own safety as "extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful." While the report's most eye-popping conclusions, it also offers a detailed look at the program. run.
The report does not confirm some of the worst charges against the program, but it still paints a picture of the program Durkin has led, and Rick Court, who resigned after ESPN's report came out.
You can read the full report here. Below, we've picked up critical information from it.
1. The investigation of various instances of unconventional motivational tactics and punishments, by both Court and Durkin.
Such as:
- Graphic videos shown to players while they were eating:
Multiple players anonymously complain that the coaching staff would be challenged. According to Gus Little, this video of serial killers, drills entering eyeballs, and bloody scenes with animals eating animals. Another player says that there are videos of rams and bucks running at each other at full speed. Mr. Durkin maintains that horror movies were sometimes shown at breakfast to motivate and entertain players.
The report goes on to mention sometimes "motivational clips" like Fast and Furious movie highlights were shown at players at breakfast.
- A player was removed from a meeting for smiling.
The report states there was a "preexisting rift" between the player and Durkin, who thought the player was not paying attention
- As a form of punishment. The investigation's medical expert is "an appropriate technical exercise."
- It is also a question of a player who is not sure when he was told
Mr. Court subsequently sneaked the box out of the player 's hand, tossed it against the wall, and addressed the entire group on the importance of punctuality, saying "I was trying to set the tone for what day was going to be. say Mr. Court knocked the food out of the player's hand on the ground.
Court stated that the players were told to eat before the meeting.
- Multiple players told investigators that Court gave overweight players candy bars or snacks while others were working out:
Accounts vary as to whether or not the courts of the balloon are playing the ball, the ball is in the ball the team worked out. Mr. Court says he has a bag of candy at the player's feet. One player recalls that Mr. Court called the player "fat."
- ESPN's 2018 reported demand has been forced to eat until he vomited. A coach confirmed a player who has been thrown to a meal, but it was unclear whether the player was forced to eat, or if he was simply eating and vomiting.
- Purpose, speaking of vomit:
During the workout session, the player in question had gotten sick and vomited into the trash can. Some sources, including training players Michal ("Gus") Little and EJ Donahue, alleged that Mr. Court then shoved the player against a refrigerator in the gym and forced him to clean up from the trash can, which Mr. Court had thrown across the weight room. Others state that Mr. Court just threw the can against the wall, without touching the player, and the spilled vomit was then cleaned by a staff member.
- Court also crosses the line of abusive speech towards the players, whether he believes he did or not.
This is a challenging game of homophobic slurs (which Mr. Court denies but was recounted by many). In addition, Mr. Court would attempt to humiliate players in front of their teammates by throwing food, weights, and on one occasion to trash can full of vomit, all behavior unacceptable by any reasonable standard. These actions failed the student-athletes he claimed to serve.
2. The whole Maryland athletic department has been deeply dysfunctional.
The report describes palace intrigue between current athletic director Damon Evans and his predecessor, Kevin Anderson. Anderson thinks Evans tried to overthrow him and take his job. Athletic department employees did not have a clear reporting structure, including staff who worked for the program itself, and specifically Court.
There were inconsistent org charts with administrators, Court, and Durkin disagreeing about who reported court to.
Mr. Court reported is a striking illustration of the Athletics Department's disarray.
Maryland undeniably fired Anderson under odd circumstances. (More on that shortly.) Evans was the interim AD after that, when McNair collapsed at a workout and died. University president Wallace Loh has since promoted Evans to permanent AD.
The report for the dysfunction in the athletic department.
3. Durkin's relationship with Maryland's leadership is so bad that it seems highly unlikely he could ever coach there again.
The report contains Many examples of Durkin wanting things the athletic department would not give him and having poor relations with its leaders. That includes an attempt to get a football team-only psychologist for players and to transform the school's policy on players and marijuana to be less "punitive" and more "therapeutic."
The commission said that Durkin, in an interview, "expressed frustration with the level of support, and the lack of communication, he received from Athletics." It also said Durkin "found the Maryland bureaucracy to be more challenging than what he had experienced Other schools, "and suggests he was not given a chance to tell" his side of the story "when Maryland suspended him following ESPN's reporting in August.
It was always felt that Durkin would ever return to Maryland sideline. His buyout is about $ 5 million, and barring a Maryland attempt to fire him for cause, the university will have to pay for it, or try for a settlement.
4. When SB Nation asked for Maryland's strength coaching performance in August, the school would curiously not release them. It turns out that's because the strength coach was barely supervised at all.
An August Freedom Of Information Act filed by SB Nation sought.
The school released the contract info, but declined the second and third parts of the request citing an act that prohibited them from releasing such records.
But they did not exist for the report (emphasis bear).
… Rick Court was effectively accountable to no one, and the training staff was relatively unprepared for extended periods of time, in part, to a rift between the Athletics Director ("AD") and his deputy, which permeated the entire department. There was no formal mechanism to assess coaching performance. There was a single performance review for Mr. Court during his tenure at Maryland.
5. We now know for sure why Anderson, Maryland's AD train, went on a sabbatical just after the start of the 2017 football season. And it's bad.
In the fall of 2017, reports emerged that Maryland was firing Anderson, the athletic director who'd hired Durkin. The timing was surprising, with the football team having a decent start to win a season-opening win at Texas.
Anderson, it turns out, had gone outside university protocol and used the athletic department. Their accuser was another Maryland student.
Dr. Loh found it disturbing that Mr. Anderson provided financial resources to the accused, while the complainant, who was also a student affiliated with the Athletics Department, was not provided with any assistance.
That's a fireable offense, so why did not Maryland just fire Anderson then? The school has six-month sabbatical, for two reasons:
- Powerful Maryland people worried that they would be disciplined by Anderson. Then they would have had to speculate that Maryland's had won the fight in the FBI's investigation into college basketball corruption. That story had just broken into the national spotlight at the time. (Of course, Maryland HAS gotten caught up in that federal investigation anyway.)
- The "grace period" helped Anderson get another job.
All of the above, which is likely to be much better for the well-being of anyone who worked or played in it.
6. The lack of consensus leads to the report of the "toxic culture" allegation.
The report stops short of calling Maryland's football culture They did so by using a definition – specifically, Merriam – Webster 's – that allowed them some wiggle room.
Toxic means "extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful." By definition, Maryland's football culture was not toxic.
"Extremely" is a subjective subjective word in the middle of an already subjective definition. By using the definition they did, they raised the bar of what defines "toxic" above how others might define it. For example, Dictionary.com defines "toxic" as "unpleasant feelings; harmful or malicious. "The New Oxford American Dictionary is a very bad, unpleasant, or harmful."
The report uses the lack of consensus about some of the allegations to back itself up.
There was no uniform rejection of Maryland's coaching staff, and no uniform rejection of the treatment of players, by any of the groups of stakeholders. The lone, clear consistency was that Mr. Court's level of profanity was often excessive and personal in nature. In light of our conclusion that Maryland's football culture was not "toxic," we did not find that the culture caused the tragic death of Jordan McNair.
The ball is now back in Maryland.
They have the report with the findings, and they have the head coach of their program still on the payroll but not the sideline.
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