Maryland’s football problems go well beyond one coaching change, and Gerry DiNardo says the fix starts higher up the ladder than most people want to admit.
The Terps are sitting at 0-5 in Big Ten play and 2-7 overall, and the school has already moved on from head coach Michael Locksley, turning the program over to defensive backs coach Aazaar Abdul-Rahim on an interim basis. But the bigger question in College Park is the one hanging over every struggling program: what does it actually take to become a real Big Ten contender?
DiNardo, the former college head coach and current Big Ten Network analyst, joined Glenn Clark Radio on Nov. 3 to talk through that exact issue. He pointed to Indiana as the clearest example of what a full commitment can look like.
The Hoosiers, who won the national championship last season, raised their football budget from $24 million in 2021 to about $62 million by 2024, giving Curt Cignetti the kind of infrastructure that makes a turnaround possible. Maryland, by comparison, spent about $36 million on football in 2025.
DiNardo said the first step is figuring out whether the university is truly set up to support the kind of coach it wants.
“If there are institutional issues that have to be solved before getting the right coach who would turn it around, I don’t know,” DiNardo said. “But that’s where I would start.”
He also pushed back on the idea that Maryland would be an easy sell to a top candidate. In his view, coaches are always chasing the next move up the ladder, and that shapes who would even take a look at the job.
“The coaching pool are coaches, like everything else in the world, that are upward mobile,” DiNardo said. “When you say what list of candidates it could be, it’s going to be someone that doesn’t have a Big Ten job or is an assistant coach or is a head coach at a non-Big Ten school.”
That kind of hire, DiNardo said, comes with risk if the school’s promises don’t hold up.
“Because if they don’t follow through with their commitments and you left the job that wasn’t as good as Maryland, but you were having success, then you had the one opportunity to move upward,” DiNardo said.
He also noted how much the transfer portal has changed the way rebuilds work. In his view, a coach no longer has to spend years digging out of a roster hole if the money is there.
“Given the right money, you can turn a roster around a lot faster,” DiNardo said.
That money piece matters even more now, with player compensation baked into the modern game. Maryland reportedly spent about $20 million on this year’s roster, which ranks 10th among the 18 Big Ten teams. DiNardo said the spending level has to line up with the standard the school is trying to reach.
“If they bumped [the payroll] to the lower range of the Big Ten, then why fire a coach that is coaching at the lower range of the Big Ten?” DiNardo asked.
For DiNardo, Maryland’s situation is not some isolated disaster. He framed it as part of a much bigger reality across the sport, where plenty of programs are fighting the same battles with wins, money and fan support.
“I think the Maryland program in the discussion of college football is right where you and I are talking,” DiNardo said. “More than half the teams are in Maryland’s situation. If you’re in the Big Ten and there are 18 schools, someone is 10 to 18.”
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