Six years after he left UConn and about 15 months after Maryland fired him, Randy Edsall’s going back to Storrs for a second stint as the Huskies’ head coach. This sequel won’t be that interesting, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work.
Randy Edsall failed at Maryland, but he’s a perfectly decent fit at UConn
Edsall’s five Maryland seasons were disastrous. He won’t bring UConn to national glory. But he might be a smart hire anyway.
Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
Edsall’s five seasons at Maryland weren’t all bad, but they were mostly bad. He took over a nine-win team after 2010, lost a bunch of players, and went 2-10. In his second year, a spate of quarterback injuries resulted in Maryland starting a linebacker under center for a third of the season. His third and fourth years each finished 7-6 with bad bowl losses. The fifth included a midseason canning.
For the majority of his time at Maryland, Edsall was a double-whammy of bad. He signed worse and worse recruiting classes, and his teams couldn’t even perform up to the declining levels of talent. Edsall signed one of the best recruits in Maryland history, five-star receiver Stefon Diggs in 2012, but never recruited a quarterback who could reliably get Diggs the ball.
Edsall started a Movement — capital M his, not mine — to get local prospects to commit in droves to Maryland, but it didn’t work especially well. Edsall’s successor, DJ Durkin, has Maryland recruiting better in his first year than Edsall ever came close to doing.
Edsall was not a world-beater during his first tenure leading the Huskies, going 70-63 in 11 years. He never finished a season ranked, and he’s never had a signature win, unless you count USF’s second loss in 2007. He is a combined 1-28 against ranked opposition.
That doesn’t sound like an endorsement. But this could work.
Edsall did get UConn to eight or nine wins every year from 2007 to 2010, culminating with a Fiesta Bowl auto-bid for winning a bad Big East in his last year. Since UConn jumped to what’s now the FBS in 2000, Edsall’s coached the team for 11 of its 17 seasons. He bowled in five of those years. His successors bowled once in the last six, and UConn has now seen fit to fire Bob Diaco after three years on the job.
At Maryland, Edsall’s failures were rooted in recruiting. His classes were worse after Maryland announced late in 2012 it would move from the ACC to the Big Ten, which is the opposite of what was supposed to happen. But at UConn, Edsall’s not going to be swimming in an Ohio State-, Michigan-, and Penn State-infested shark tank.
UConn’s still at a disadvantage. The American is a good league. The state of Connecticut doesn’t produce elite recruits. Edsall’s competition sits in metro areas like Houston, Dallas, Tampa, and Orlando, and in states like Louisiana and Ohio.
There’s a chance Edsall never wins a conference championship in this run at UConn. The Huskies didn’t recruit well under Diaco. They have rarely ever have, and Edsall likely won’t change that.
But what, exactly, should UConn’s goals be?
After three years of UConn finishing dead last, 121st, and 125th in the country in scoring and going 11-26 under Diaco, Edsall should inject some respectability. While his Maryland teams were usually bad, the only one that was outright awful was his first one, which was racked by attrition.
He’s the opposite of an exciting hire, but he’s also won at least seven games on six different occasions since 2007. Edsall’s an easy coach to deride, because he can’t properly recite Forrest Gump lines and called Maryland his “dream job” after leaving UConn coach-less six years ago, then failing at Maryland. (I went to Maryland. Calling Maryland your “dream job” comes off a bit disingenuously.)
But Edsall’s not in the Big Ten anymore. He’s in the best league outside the Power 5, but he’s still outside the Power 5. His competition is better than the team he’s taking over, but Houston and USF aren’t as insurmountable as Michigan and Ohio State. To whatever extent anyone can recruit well at UConn, at least Edsall’s got a Rolodex.
If Connecticut’s merely trying to be respectable again, it could do way worse than someone who averaged six wins per year there when the Huskies played in a power conference. It’s boring, but if that’s their thought process, they’re doing just about the most self-aware thing they could have done.
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