Terps Do It Gary's Way

If Maryland coach Gary Williams earned a nickel for every time he's been left for dead, he'd be able to solve this economic mess with the walk-around change in his left pocket and pay the legal defense fund of the Dallas Cowboys with the money in his right. Pay the man by check, and you'd burn through enough paper that the rain forests would be more aptly known as the rain bushes.

In the seven years since he won Maryland's only national basketball championship, Williams has been fitted for more pine boxes than suits, and yet he's still come back more times than a has-been boxer.

But after a crippling defeat to Morgan State in the middle of the season, a multi-part series on the decline of his program in The Washington Post, and a knock-the-breath-out-of-you-loss to Virginia, even Lazarus thought the old man was looking far beyond sickly.

Yet after two straight wins in the ACC tournament, including the kind of victory over Wake Forest that'll grab the selection committee by the shirt collar, Gary Williams is back.

Moral of the story? You just can't get rid of Williams. And you'd be hard-pressed to out-coach him, too.

On a day where everything shook at the ACC Tournament, and even Duke and North Carolina ran to stand in a doorjamb, the only win by more than three points in Atlanta came from Maryland. In an upset.

The Terps outrebounded a Wake Forest team that's so tall it could paint ceilings on the side and never need a ladder. Greivis Vasquez barely let another triple-double wriggle off the line. And Gary Williams coached his team into the NCAA tournament.

"We ran the plays Coach Williams played," senior Dave Neal said. "When you execute a play that Coach Williams calls, you're pretty much guaranteed a point."

And you're guaranteed to prove one too -- just how good the Terps' bench boss is.

Williams will never get many compliments for his composure. His red-faced tirades are the stuff that might make Bob Knight scramble for his grandkid's ears and those red-faced rants blow air through the Georgia Dome like it hasn't seen since a tornado ripped through last year. He sweats it out with his players. He's probably put more than one drycleaner's kids through college.

But he's beaten more No. 1 teams than any coach in the nation. He won a national title without a single McDonald's All-American. He knows how to pull the strings on his players in a way that's sometime marionette and sometime's jam-your-hand-in-their puppet.

And he knows the way to Bracketville better than your GPS system.

It runs through a payback upset of Wake Forest.

Just one week after Demon Deacons stuck Maryland in the mud with a second-half zone defense and those Wake Forest bigs cast shadows over the Terps, Williams flat-out took it to the Deacons.

Wake Forest still had James Johnson and Al-Farouq Aminu, two players destined for the NBA. Maryland still had Neal, a player destined for NBA Ticket. Neal is listed at 6-foot-8, but the only way he measures up to that height is if he's standing on a Bible and not swearing on one.

Yet Williams got the body-by-beer-pong Neal and Landon Milbourne, who didn't pull down a single defensive in the Terps' opening round win over N.C. State, to keep Wake Forest's forest of a frontcourt in check. Milbourne yanked down 11 rebounds. Neal added six.

"I really felt like if we made the effort, then we could [rebound with Wake Forest] today," Williams said. "Everyone just bough tinto the fact of how hard we had to go to be able to rebound with a team like Wake."

And then he tossed a 94-foot blanket over the Wake Forest offense that ran away from the Terps in College Park, Md. a week ago. Williams' gameplan ripped out the Jeff Teague drives and the easy entry passes to the paint, where Johnson, Chas McFarland and Aminu could've twirled and dropped the ball in the basket as effortlessly as if you were posting up your floor lamp.

Instead, he dared the Deacons to shoot over top of the zone, and they might as well have been trying to fit a bowling ball in a golf cup. Wake, which shoots a smaller percentage of 3-pointers than all but two other teams in the nation, hit just 2-of-13 from long range.

He didn't lose his team in coach-speak either. Before the tournament, Williams told them they had to win two games in Atlanta and joked that he'd get t-shirts printed up.

"I just wanted our players to understand if we won two, we would be in pretty good shape," he said. "Now if we don't win tomorrow, it's not because we came with the 'Win 2' T-shirts."

And he turned a disaster of a season into arguably his greatest coaching job of all time.

Beat Duke, and even those with shovels in hand graveside might stop to admire his work.

What better symbolic victory could their be than one over their Jerry Springer-styled rivals? In the first game this season, the Blue Devils stomped the Terps by 41 in Durham. One month later, the Blue Devils won in College Park again.

And those Blue Devils will be snorting' mad by tipoff, still upset over the pick Neal set on Duke point guard Nolan Smith.


That pick left Smith sprawled in pain with a concussion from which he just returned Friday night. On the next play, Duke's Gerald Henderson drove to the hoop and threw down a hammer of a dunk that might've left a few cracks in the Comcast Center's foundations. When he landed, he glared at Neal like he was a bull and the Terp was in a red bodysuit.

But win or lose, Williams will have done what he does every season, put his team in the conversation for the NCAA tournament. Maybe it isn't cutting down the nets with Juan Dixon, but that kind of consistency isn't easy in the ACC.

Next time you think Williams needs to take up golf full time, take a look at Georgia Tech. Yellow Jacket coach Paul Hewitt has recruited laps around Williams and went to the Final Four in 2004, but the last two seasons he's had to ask nicely just to get a copy of the bracket, let alone play his way in. When Selection Sunday rolls around and Maryland's wins over North Carolina, Michigan State and Wake Forest put them in the bracket again, Williams will have just as many NCAA bids as the spring-break bound Yellow Jackets.

But that's what Williams does. Win. Develop. Advance.

At least, when he's not busy being declared dead.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this story.