Jim Smith leaned back in his seat in a box high above the playing field at the Rose Bowl, looking increasingly frustrated. The first-year\u00a0Maryland athletic director leaned back in his chair after failed plays, looking discouraged.<\/p>\n
It’s hard to blame him. Maryland football’s season, on the verge of becoming special a few weeks ago the final quarter started against Washington, has done a 180. Those familiar October blues have arrived for Mike Locksley, whose team has fallen apart late in three straight games after a cushy opening-month schedule. The familiar pattern of the season, building up hope before a fall crash, has fans up in arms. So does the nature of the losses; Maryland led in the fourth quarter of all three games, including a 20-3 fourth-quarter lead over Washington, along with advantages over Nebraska with 68 seconds left and UCLA with less than five minutes left.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jim Smith leaned back in his seat in a box high above the playing field at the Rose…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-237655","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-football","11":"tag-ncaafootball","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}