Kyle Goon: Bigger budget. Same ugly losses. The Terps won’t change without firing Mike Locksley.

COLLEGE PARK — If you are one of the donors who helped raise a record-setting $43.7 million for the University of Maryland athletic department, here is what your money gets you on the football field:

Another loss to James Franklin.

You might generously call Maryland’s 35-26 home loss to Virginia Tech on Saturday night “tightly contested.” However, I would not. For much of the game, the Hokies carried a two-score margin. Even when the Terps pulled to within six points, based on everything I’ve seen in the Mike Locksley era, my mind didn’t leap to “they might actually do it.”

I was fixated on “how will they mess this up?”

And the Terps did mess it up, because that’s what the Terps do. Their budget is higher. They’ve held on to much of their homegrown talent. Yet still we see the same old bad habits from Maryland in big games — a perennial DMV humiliation ritual.

From the time the Hokies scored on their opening drive, it felt as if the Terps would struggle. But it wasn’t entirely clear just how outmatched they were until Virginia Tech took the field at its own 25-yard line with 2:11 left in the first half.

In less than two minutes, the Hokies knocked out a clinical march — including a drive-extending Maryland pass-interference penalty on third-and-8. A 16-yard run by Jeffrey Overton Jr. demonstrated just how ineffective the Terps’ arm-tackling looked against a power conference team.

“There were no indications for me that we would play defense the way we played, in terms of not being able to get off the field or stop the run,” said Locksley, whose teams always look this disappointing in big games.

Less than an hour later, many Maryland fans in the announced sellout crowd reached their own breaking point. After the Terps turned it over on downs with 4:25 left in the third quarter, there was a steady stream to the exits, just after 10 p.m. Many of them weren’t even there to see the Terps flub two head-scratching 2-point conversions that kept them from getting within one score — a galactic brain blunder of game management.

The early departures, at least, made sense. We’ve all seen how these games end.

“Our fans have shown up, continued to show up,” Locksley said. “We got to do our part.”

Eight years in, we’re still waiting to see the Terps deliver in one of these high-stakes games.

Franklin torturing the school where he was once head coach in waiting is nothing new. He’s 10-2 against the Terps, with an average scoring margin of plus-24.5 points. But, now that he has moved from one of Maryland’s Big Ten bullies at Penn State to an Atlantic Coast Conference school in Virginia Tech, there should be accounting for slightly more even footing, at least when it comes to the size of the name, image and likeness budget.

But clearly the spreadsheets aren’t as important as what happens on the field. The Terps don’t measure up to a Franklin-led program, even in the first year of his tenure in Blacksburg. What the Hokies did to change things after going 3-9 last year should speak volumes. They fired their coach and hired Franklin.

It would be surprising if Maryland athletic director Jim Smith isn’t at least considering using his rising budget toward a new coach’s salary after what everyone saw Saturday night.

We’re in Year 8 of the Locksley tenure, and familiar problems keep arising. The Terps can’t tackle consistently. They can’t cover. They struggle to run the ball. They draw way too many penalties.

Every season, Locksley says the team needs to improve in those areas. But they remain constants. And so does he.

It’s not as if no one has caught on to this pattern — really, the opposite is true. After six straight losses during the 2025 season, Locksley’s seat was hot enough that Smith had to put out a statement of support affirming the embattled coach would return in 2026 with more funding. Smith still managed to coax more financial support from Terps donors, and as a result Maryland returned with 71% of its roster from last season, including star QB Malik Washington.

But, even though Washington’s arm has the strength of a bazooka, it can’t launch Maryland to a higher competitive tier on its own. The Terps have highly touted stars such as Washington and defensive lineman Sidney Stewart but clear flaws in other areas of the roster. The coaching has rarely managed to cover those holes, driven in part by Locksley’s own whims (he has had five offensive coordinators across eight seasons).

Wishing for internal improvement for a coach in his eighth season is unrealistic, to say the least. Locksley enjoyed modest successes with Maryland, especially with Taulia Tagovailoa, but it could not be clearer the program has reached its ceiling with his leadership.

When asked about going for a 2-point conversion down 15, a decision that caused the Terps to trail by two scores instead of one in the fourth quarter, Locksley said analytics pointed to trying to get the team within 13 and eventually play to win the game.

“Obviously, I’m not going to step in and say ‘it’s just analytics,’ because I also make the decision,” he said. “We were playing to win. ... I felt really good about our 2-point plan that we had all week long, and we didn’t get it executed.”

That’s Maryland football in a nutshell. When the Terps are trailing by two touchdowns, they’re imagining the world in which they’re winning the game — and still not getting any closer to a meaningful victory.

Congrats to Smith and Maryland Athletics for shaking all the loose change out of their donors last year and piling it up to record-breaking highs. But the only way they’ll break the bank next year for their football program is by calling around to collect for Locksley’s buyout — that alone should generate more buzz than this program has had in years.

Terps fans couldn’t have made themselves clearer by leaving the game early. They’re tired of seeing the same show.

This column has been updated.