Maryland’s letting go of DJ Durkin after all

A day after reinstating Durkin, Maryland’s reversed course.

A day after Maryland reinstated DJ Durkin, it’s parted ways with the head coach.

University of Maryland President Wallace Loh, in a release, said:

Yesterday, the University System of Maryland Board of Regents announced numerous recommendations, including employment decisions about specific personnel on our campus. I accepted the Board’s recommendations. At the same time, I announced my retirement as president in June 2019.

Since returning to campus after yesterday?s press conference, I have met with the leadership of the Student Government Association speaking on behalf of numerous student organizations; the Senate Executive Committee; Deans; department chairs; and campus leadership. The overwhelming majority of stakeholders expressed serious concerns about Coach DJ Durkin returning to the campus.

The chair of the Board of Regents has publicly acknowledged that I had previously raised serious concerns about Coach Durkin?s return. This is not at all a reflection of my opinion of Coach Durkin as a person. However, a departure is in the best interest of the University, and this afternoon Coach Durkin was informed that the University will part ways.

This is a difficult decision, but it is the right one for our entire University. I will devote the remaining months of my presidency to advancing the needed reforms in our Athletic Department that prioritize the safety and well-being of our student-athletes.

This came after Maryland’s governor released a statement as well calling on Loh and Maryland’s board to reverse course.

Durkin had been suspended from fall camp through the first eight games of the season.

He was scheduled to return for Week 10 against Michigan State, 247Sports reported ahead of a planned press conference at 3:30 p.m. ET Tuesday. But that’s no longer. He was reportedly informed of his termination by athletic director Damon Evans.

Loh did announce his plans to retire in June 2019 at that press conference, first reported by the Washington Post, and Evans is reportedly keeping his post:

Maryland redshirt freshman offensive lineman Jordan McNair fell ill at a team workout on May 29 and died June 13. His family said the cause was heatstroke.

Maryland put Durkin on administrative leave on Aug. 11, a day after an ESPN report into his program’s “toxic” culture and about two months after McNair’s death.

Offensive coordinator Matt Canada has been serving as the interim head coach. With Durkin sitting out, Maryland’s started the season 5-3 and 2-2 in the Big Ten.

A big Maryland investigation into Durkin’s program found a culture “where problems festered because too many players feared speaking out.”

The report described real mess of a program, though it found many of Maryland’s issues predated Durkin’s arrival and involved other members of the administration. It also didn’t confirm some of the worst details ESPN reported about the program.

But the investigative report includes loads of troubling details, like this one:

Multiple players anonymously complain that the coaching staff would subject teams during meal time to disturbing videos. According to Gus Little, this included videos of serial killers, drills entering eyeballs, and bloody scenes with animals eating animals. Another player says that there were 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.

It suggests Durkin was closely in line with strength coach Rick Court, whose various alleged abuses of players included homophobic taunts and trying to choke a player with a lat pulldown bar during a workout. The report says of Court:

There were many occasions when Mr. Court engaged in abusive conduct during his tenure at Maryland, as we document. While some interviewees dismissed this as a motivational tactic, there is a clear line Mr. Court regularly crossed, when his words became “attacking” in nature.

Court resigned after ESPN’s report. Multiple players told the Maryland commission that “there was little benefit in approaching Mr. Durkin with frustrations, particularly about Mr. Court, because they viewed Coaches Court and Durkin as ‘the same person.’”

It was shocking that Durkin returned, given both the report about his program and how the report described relationship with the administration.

One takeaway I had after reading the report:

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 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 at other schools,” and suggests he wasn’t given a chance to tell “his side of the story” when Maryland suspended him following ESPN’s reporting in August.

It has always seemed farfetched that Durkin would ever return to the Maryland sideline. His buyout is about $5 million, and barring a Maryland attempt to fire him for cause, the university will have to pay him that to walk away, or try for a settlement.

McNair’s family had called for Durkin’s firing.

Jordan’s father, Marty McNair, said Durkin should “absolutely” be fired.

“He shouldn’t be able to work with anybody else’s kid,” he told Michael Strahan on Good Morning America. “Michael, you send your kid away to college for them to be developed into young people.

“And that’s physically, emotionally, spiritually, and just teach our young kids that you work so hard to get there, to, ‘hey, I’ve given my child to you. Keep him safe.’ And they did anything but that. So of course he should be fired.”

Durkin spoke at a press conference June 14, the day after Jordan McNair died.

“My heart is broken for the reason that we’re all even sitting here having this press conference,” Durkin said then. “You look for reasons. It’s not reasonable that a 19-year-old should pass away. It’s not reasonable that a family, his parents Marty and Tonya, should ever have to go through this.”

Durkin, 40, took over as Maryland’s coach for the 2016 season.

A former defensive coordinator at Michigan and Florida, Durkin was an understudy of both Jim Harbaugh and Urban Meyer. He improved Maryland’s recruiting considerably and made a bowl game in his first season before injuries and a hard schedule dropped the Terps to 4-8 in 2017. His final record in College Park was 10-15.