Maryland’s special teams enter the season with a familiar edge at the top and a lot of uncertainty everywhere else.
Sean O’Haire and Bryce McFerson are back as the Terps’ unquestioned kicker and punter, and both arrive with real hardware after 2025. O’Haire was a first-team All-Big Ten selection, while McFerson earned second-team All-Big Ten honors. That kind of stability gives Mike Locksley a little more freedom when the game gets tight and fourth down starts to matter.
The rest of the unit is where the questions begin.
Maryland has to replace Ethan Gough, the long snapper who walked on in 2021 and handled the job in 52 games across a five-year career. He finished with an honorable mention All-Big Ten nod in 2025, and now the Terps are looking at a snapper who has not taken a collegiate snap yet in 2026.
Redshirt freshman Luke O’Hare looks like the leading candidate. He spent last season as Gough’s backup and already had a year to settle in with the kicker and punter.
Kohl’s Kicking rated the DeMatha product a five-star recruit and the No. 13 overall long snapping recruit in the class of 2025. If he wins the job, the jokes about O’Hare snapping to O’Haire will probably come fast and often.
Maryland’s other option is freshman Rory Knipp, a consensus five-star recruit in high school and the 2025 Special Teams Player of the Year. The Pittsburgh native passed on offers from Bowling Green, Buffalo and Temple to come to College Park.
The Terps also need a better answer on kickoffs. Last season, Maryland produced touchbacks on only 17.7% of its kickoffs, a number that sat far behind the rest of the Big Ten. The next-lowest touchback rate in the conference was 43.5%.
This was not a case of Maryland trying to keep the ball short on purpose. Locksley said during the season that the Terps were using their strongest leg, backup punter Philip Noyes, and his kickoffs were landing around the 6- or 7-yard line on average.
Now Maryland has two freshmen in the mix who could change that. Eli Fulcher posted an 84.4% touchback rate during his high school career at Oak Grove in North Carolina, and he also drilled a 52-yard field goal in high school.
Daniel Leahy, a 6-foot-6 kicker from Dublin’s Blackrock College, is another possibility. Maryland went back to Ireland after O’Haire’s success, and Leahy brings an unusual background: he only started playing football in March of 2025 after growing up as a rugby player and the son of a former rugby player.
There isn’t much film to go on, but the leg is there.
The return game is another area Maryland has to sort out.
The Terps were light on opportunities last season, returning just 18 punts and 17 kicks. The results were rough: Maryland tied for 89th in the FBS in punt return yards per return and ranked 126th in kick return yards per return.
Only three current Terps returned punts last season, and one of them was linebacker Daniel Wingate, who is not likely to be the answer this year. Safety Messiah Delhomme also logged two returns, though his bigger special teams calling card was blocking kicks. He was one of 11 players in the country to block two kicks last season.
Iverson Howard led Maryland’s kickoff return work a year ago. The running back brought back seven kicks for 108 yards, and all of those returns came in a four-game stretch in the middle of Big Ten play.
Ricardo Cooper Jr. was Maryland’s Special Teams Player of the Year at the team’s year-end banquet. He made his biggest mark on coverage units, but he also handled two punt returns and four kick returns, averaging four yards per punt return and 18 yards per kick return.
There are a few new names who could help. Graduate running back Terrez Worthy averaged 20.5 yards on 23 kick return attempts for Temple in 2024, which makes him a real candidate to handle that role.
Wide receiver Justin DeVaughn is another intriguing option. He redshirted last year, but he also competed nationally in the 110m hurdles for Maryland’s track and field team.
At 5-foot-9 and 166 pounds, durability will matter, but the speed is obvious.
Maryland could also take a conservative route and simply choose not to return many kickoffs at all. The newer rules have made fair catches a much bigger part of the game, and roughly 20% of FBS teams returned one or fewer kickoffs per game. That group included undefeated national champion Indiana and 0-12 UMass.
For a Maryland team trying to sharpen every margin, Locksley has plenty of choices to sort through. The top of the unit is proven. The rest is still being written.
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The most intriguing one comes in Week 3, when Virginia Tech visits as part of a stretch that could help define Marylands bowl chances and its standing at home and in the Big Ten race. Michael Hershey has already pointed to that game as a key test, and with Maryland trying to improve on recent home and conference results, the early season figures to carry a little more weight than usual. [Read more 🡒]