The Wisconsin Badgers have been taking some heat lately thanks to their easy schedule and unconvincing wins. Good thing none of that will change on Saturday morning when the nation’s No. 5-ranked college football team gets a visit from the Maryland Terrapins.
The Terps made some noise with a 51-41 season-opening win over Tom Herman’s Texas Longhorns, proving the old adage: “Everything is bigger in Texas, including the upsets.” Things have been far from peachy since then, however, as they’re now on their third quarterback of the season after not one but two ACL tears.
It’s homecoming for Wisconsin, but there will surely be some visiting Maryland fans on Regent Street. Here are a few talking points if you find yourself in conversation.
Maryland in the Big Ten
The University of Maryland, College Park has been a member of the Big Ten since 2014, but it still doesn’t feel quite right. In the B1G cafeteria, Maryland and Rutgers sit on the side, near the bathrooms, while Michigan, Ohio State and Wisconsin yuck it up at the cool kids table. Maryland left the Athletic Coast Conference for a divorce fee totaling a cool $31 million in the pursuit of larger payouts in the Big Ten. The grass is always greener. Now in their fourth year in a 14-member Big Ten, the Terps football team has accumulated a forgettable conference record of 9-18 (and 19-24 overall).
The Byrd is NOT the word
A key figure in the University of Maryland history is Curley Byrd, who between 1905 and 1954 rose from student to coach to athletic director all the way to university president and political candidate. The Maryland football stadium was named for him in 1950 but his lasting legacy at the school was giving it its turtle-centric nickname. That’s because the stadium was renamed in 2015 due to Byrd being a horrible racist who actively sought to keep Maryland’s universities segregated. For now it’s dubbed simply Maryland Stadium, but there’s some other grads they could choose to honor…
Pretty… pretty… pretty good alumni
Seinfeld co-creator and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David is a UMD graduate, as was the man behind the Muppets, the late Jim Henson. Other alumni include Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Watergate investigative journalist Carl Bernstein.
The Great Fire of 1912
Although the school’s inception was in 1856, you won’t find too many remnants from the 19th century. A huge fire wiped out most of campus on Thanksgiving Day 1912, leaving just a single academic building unscathed. Somehow nobody was hurt and almost all the students returned to campus for instruction to continue. It’s referred to today as “the Great Fire” evidently to differentiate it from the terrible fires.
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