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Don't fear the Turtle With star TB Perry out, Maryland in for long seasonPosted: Thursday August 22, 2002 6:16 PM
Attention, Sports Illustrated readers. Please turn to page 108 of your Aug. 12 issue, the College Football Preview. Grab the sheet of paper with the photograph of Maryland tailback Bruce Perry and tear it out of your magazine. Please reinsert it somewhere around page 126. Or, if you like, fold it into a paper airplane and sail it out the nearest window. The problem with making preseason predictions is that teams start practicing and screw them up. Sometimes, the teams screw up predictions without practicing. In the case of Maryland, all Perry was trying to do Tuesday night was warm up. A lineman landed on Perry's foot. When Perry tried to wrench it out, he tore his left groin muscle so severely that he may miss as many as eight weeks. With his loss, the Terrapins, ranked 16th by SI, suffered a withering blow. Perry, the leading rusher in the Atlantic Coast Conference a year ago with 1,242 yards and 10 touchdowns, underwent X-rays and an MRI Wednesday. Though the school didn't announce his status until late Thursday afternoon, the prognosis began to seep through the football offices on Wednesday morning. There's similar news out of Tennessee, where coach Phil Fulmer just lost a senior starter at the Vols' thinnest position. Defensive end Constantin Ritzmann blew out an ACL in a scrimmage Tuesday and is lost for the season. His absence focuses more attention on the biggest question mark in the Tennessee lineup: the defensive front, where only linebacker Eddie Moore started every game last season. Ritzmann's loss is not enough to make me renounce Tennessee as the best team in the Southeastern Conference. However, we were already out on a limb with Maryland, which no one else, to my knowledge, ranked in its top 20. SI placed Maryland so high largely because of the returning presences of All-American linebacker E.J. Henderson and Perry on the field, and coach Ralph Friedgen off it. Now one of the three legs on this stool needs to be repaired. The Terps have a quarterback, Chris Kelley , who's recovering from an ACL tear and a tailback who can't play. Not good. No one on the depth chart behind Perry combines his speed and his ability to elude tacklers. (Although, if you think about it, Perry couldn't even elude one of his own linemen.) In his stead are senior Chris Downs and redshirt freshman Mario Merrills . Downs doesn't have Perry's speed. Merrills, who performed well last spring, is faster straight ahead than Perry. But who runs straight ahead? You have to make people miss. With the season Maryland had a year ago, when it went 10-2 and became the first ACC team to topple Florida State from its nine-year reign atop the league, the Terrapins were going to have a difficult time sneaking up on opponents this fall. Now they must do it without Perry. That is not good, either. It is worth noting that Friedgen hasn't had a losing record in 15 years as a coach. If anyone can meld this amount of inexperience and recuperation into a Top 25 team, it is the Fridge. That said, I'm going to look for some tape. My College Football Preview issue suddenly is in pieces. Sports Illustrated senior writer Ivan Maisel covers college football for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send a question to his Mailbag, which makes its debut on Aug. 29.
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