The University of Maryland honored all the basketball team’s departing seniors on Sunday before facing Illinois. Diggy Coit, Collin Metcalf, Elijah Saunders, and Solomon Washington walked onto the court with family and assorted loved ones, and got framed jerseys and drawings of themselves to commemorate the end of their run in College Park.
Their Maryland careers are over, yet it seemed like they'd all just gotten here. Well, OK, they all did just get here. Every honoree in this year's senior crop was a first-year Terp. You gotta combine all their days in College Park together to amount to what only yesterday passed for a standard college stay.
“Yeah, it was not the typical mood for a senior day,” says Maryland booster Jack Cullen, who says he can “count on two hands” how many Terps home games he’s missed since his days as an undergrad in the late 1970s.
Cullen says he’s always made a point of showing up early on Senior Day to say his final goodbyes to another class of young guys whose names and faces became familiar through their years in the program. He stuck to his routine on Sunday. But this year’s event didn’t hit him in the feels as hard as past ceremonies.
“I mean, it was nice, them walking out,” he says. “And I like these guys, I’m grateful that they came here. But the crowd wasn’t large, or loud. It was subdued. I was wondering how they felt about [the ceremony]. Like, ‘Hey, I’m being honored! But, I’ve only been here one year.’”
What went on at Maryland this weekend hurts folks of a certain age (mine), but isn’t all that extreme. The transfer portal opened up for D1 basketball in the fall of 2018. And, like when Ireland banned smoking in pubs, change came quickly and utterly. CBS Sports college basketball writer Isaac Trotter reported last week that there were only 22 scholarship players in so-called “high-major” NCAA programs (meaning ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, or Big East) this season who had played all four years at the same school. And Mississippi State's Shawn Jones Jr. is the sole SEC senior to use up all his eligibility at one school.
Senior day is an unforeseen casualty of the new normal.
“I liked when they were around long enough for you to get to know them, for them to hook up with the fans, have a relationship with teammates,” says Johnny Holliday, the Terps play-by-play man and a D.C. institution, who by my count worked his 47th Senior Day game. “These four guys who ‘graduated’ yesterday never played with anybody else.”
Holliday’s a Maryland senior of another sort. He’s been calling Terps football and basketball games since 1979. Plus, as simply has to be pointed out: Holliday has seen things. He roomed with Larry Brown and Rick Barry in a D.C. high-rise apartment building in 1969, back when the ABA’s Washington Caps played here. He did a Washington Senators pre-game show with Ted Williams during the 1970 and 1971 season. Hell, he emceed the Beatles last show, in San Francisco in August 1966. He was inducted into the Radio Television Broadcasters Hall Of Fame … in 2003. He says that even though he’s old school, he’s fine with performers getting paid. And he sees the veritable free agency players now enjoy as an equal and opposite reaction to the insane rules NCAA used to have in place to keep all the money out of the hands of those who were actually generating all the commerce.
He recalled in appalled tones that time he asked former Terps great and now American University head coach Duane Simpkins during his Maryland days to talk to the students at a local parochial school. Maryland gave Simpkins permission, but with lots of NCAA strings. “Duane could do it only if he drove himself. I couldn’t drive him to the school,” Holliday says. “And I couldn’t take him out to eat afterward. With all the restrictions, he still came out and just mesmerized the kids. But it was all ridiculous. And I remember when Maryland got nailed because somebody drove Rudy Archer to class!”
But he admitted being already wistful for last year’s Senior Day. That’s when Julian “JuJu” Reese, a guy whose college basketball options were unlimited but stayed put at Maryland, walked out on the floor to finish a four-year run. Reese stuck around even when Mark Turgeon, the coach that recruited him to Maryland, had fled College Park. And the fans rewarded him with a raucous sendoff.
“It turned out alright for JuJu didn’t it?” says Holliday. “He could have gone anywhere. But he didn’t, and now he’s in the league! But I fear we’ll never see another like him.” (Reese made his NBA debut last week, and days later put up an 18-point, 20-rebound double-double against Utah.)
Reese played 134 games in a Maryland uniform; that's 20 more appearances than all four members of 2026 Senior Day class combined.
Cullen understands the melancholia inside the home arena on Senior Day wasn’t all due to the crowd’s relative unfamiliarity with the departing players. There hasn’t been much for Terps fans to celebrate all season. Sunday’s 78-72 loss to the Fighting Illini left their record at 11-20, the fewest wins among all Big 10 squads. Barring a miracle in the conference tournament, which for them begins today in Chicago with a game against Oregon, there will be no March Madness appearance.
But Cullen’s hardly abandoning the team he's loved longest and most. He’s already looking forward to next year, and knows what needs to be done to get right. Even if it means diminishing some other school’s Senior Day.
“We really gotta do some work in the portal,” he says.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Kevin Willard as the Maryland coach who originally recruited JuJu Reese then fled. It was Mark Turgeon.
