Maybe Debbie Yow will get the last laugh after all. The longtime Maryland athletic director left her post last spring after unsuccessfully trying to run off both her football and basketball coaches in the waning days of her tenure. That’s a pretty tricky move considering Gary Williams had a national championship on his resume. Plus, before Ralph Friedgen came back to College Park in 2001, the Terps’ football program had “peaked” with a pair of six-win seasons and one measly bowl appearance in the previous 15 years.
So some fans — and certainly several coaches — were happy when Yow bolted for Tobacco Road and the athletic director job at N.C. State. One problem: One of her strengths was lobbying for a better bowl slot for her football program. With the Terps apparently now fighting the Wolfpack for the Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando, Fla. — the ACC’s third-best postseason berth behind the Orange Bowl and the Chick-fil-A Bowl — we have an added layer of intrigue as the process plays out this weekend.
Yes, Maryland beat N.C. State head-to-head last weekend. But that matters little to the bowl committees, whose job it is to ensure their host cities pack as many fans as possible into their stadiums for a few solid days of consuming. It can’t help the Terps that new athletic director Kevin Anderson didn’t deal much with the bowl process while holding that post at Army. Without that experience he’s outgunned by Yow and the other ACC administrators right now. And those bowl politics could leave Maryland slip sliding all the way down to the No. 8 spot — the Military Bowl at RFK Stadium on Dec. 29. That’s the last thing the players want: A local bowl involving no travel in a run-down stadium with a 2:30 p.m. start time on a weekday. Not much of a reward. You can almost hear Yow chuckling from Raleigh. Her team lost the battle yet somehow might just win the war.
