Mike Locksley admits he wasn't prepared for NIL, struggled to retain best staffers during Maryland tenure
· Yahoo Sports
Mike Locksley's firing wasn't a surprise, not even to Locksley himself. The now-former Maryland head coach told ESPN's Heather Dinich on Thursday, one day removed from his eight-season tenure ending, that he "kind of knew" the change was coming.
"Just didn't know when," he said, per ESPN. "I'm not mad about leaving. I'm not. I'm at peace with it because I know it's better than what it was when I got here. A player died right before I got here, and this place was burnt to the ground. Stabilized it, went to three bowls, NIL kicks in and wasn't prepared for it."
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Locksley, 56, was referring to the tragic death of offensive lineman Jordan McNair, who died from complications of heatstroke he suffered during a Maryland football workout in 2018, when D.J. Durkin was still head coach.
During the 2018 season, Durkin was eventually removed, and the Terrapins went 5-7 under interim head coach Matt Canada.
Three seasons later, after a program rebuild, Locksley's Terps secured the first of their three consecutive winning campaigns, a stretch that saw quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa rewrite several school passing records and Maryland log back-to-back 8-5 seasons.
But then came the nosedive: The Terps finished 4-8 in 2024 after starting 3-1 and then clocked out 4-8 again after beginning last season 4-0.
Factor in the eight-game losing streak they closed the 2025 campaign on and four straight Big Ten defeats at the onset of conference competition this time around, and Maryland has now dropped 12 league games in a row.
Mike Locksley posted a 39-54 record as head coach at Maryland, a mark that includes his six-game run as interim head coach in 2015. Icon Sportswire via Getty Images"The hardest thing I dealt with here was not recruiting players — it's being able to get the right coaches and assistants with me," Locksley said in his interview with ESPN.
" ... For whatever reason, I struggled to keep the really good coaches I had because we win, we were having success, and people come hire them. I was not able to keep consistency with the staff. And then NIL hit."
NIL as we know it — in other words, student-athletes being able to make money by selling their name, image and likeness rights — came into play in 2021. But its effect on college sports, and especially college football, has escalated in recent years.
Locksley admitted at Big Ten media days last year that he lost the Terps locker room during the 2024 season — the first of those 4-8 campaigns — due to NIL payments.
"It wasn't because I wasn't a good coach. It wasn't because they weren't good players, because we were better than a four-win team. But ... we had haves and have-nots for the first time in our locker room. And the landscape of college football taught me a valuable lesson. And that valuable lesson is it's important for me, even in the midst of this change, to continue to educate our players on the importance of what playing for something bigger than yourself is all about."
He later added: "For the first time those really strong relationships were questioned because I had to decide whether to pay a freshman coming in or take care of a veteran player that helped me go to three bowl games and have success and do something that hadn't been done in 130 years in the history of Maryland football. And it was hard to do both.
"And, so, what I've decided now is if you come to Maryland and you look outside of our locker room, there's a sign. And that sign reads, 'You can leave your Louis belts, your car keys and your financial statements outside of this locker room because when you enter those doors, we'll all pay the same price for success or failure.' And that's really important for me."
Unfortunately for Locksley, his teams' results in the expanded Big Ten didn't improve.
Locksley, a Washington, D.C., native who's had three separate coaching stints at Maryland, wrapped his time as head coach with a 39-54 record. That mark includes his six-game run as interim head coach in 2015.
"It's actually not hard to win at Maryland; it's hard to win consistently at Maryland," Locksley told ESPN.
He also said in that interview that he's "done with the heavy laboring of building" and "taking a job that's going to wear me out."
Locksley doesn't anticipate another college head-coaching opportunity. Rather, he's reportedly open to working in the NFL or serving as a coordinator for a championship-caliber college program.