Kyle Goon: It will be hard for the Terps to find the next Curt Cignetti. But they have to try.

Maryland football’s first coaching change of the week demonstrated the Terps’ biggest problem: For years, they have been thinking way too small.

With the program languishing at 2-5 with a 12-game losing streak against conference opponents, firing defensive coordinator Ted Monachino on Sunday was never going to be enough. It has been apparent for some time that the Michael Locksley era needed to end if anything about Maryland football was ever going to change in a big way.

Now, with Locksley out of the job, the Terps have sent the world a mission statement. We want more than this out of football. We want a winning conference record. We want to have a chance against ranked opponents.

We want to be better.

Anyone who has watched the Terps over the last two decades knows this is a risk. But, for athletic director Jim Smith, now is the time to take it.

Smith comes from worlds of big, bold thinking: from Ohio State, from the WWE, from the Atlanta Braves. He came in with a mandate to broaden Maryland’s athletic budget, and in one year he set fundraising records. When I watched Smith at a donor event last year, he struck the image of a politician, fizzing with energy and optimism.

Although Smith supported Locksley for much of the last year and a half, the Terps never matched the sales pitch Smith was making. It should always be remembered that Locksley came in to save a program reeling from crisis after Jordan McNair died in 2018, and he did indeed uplift Maryland when the university needed it. But, after respectable campaigns from 2021 to 2023 on teams starring Taulia Tagovailoa, Locksley oversaw a decline into the name, image and likeness era.

Maryland’s war chest was dwarfed by its Big Ten competition, but Locksley’s later teams never left the impression of scrappy, disciplined underdogs. They routinely struggled to run, struggled to tackle and drew tons of flags (in four conference games this season, they’ve been penalized 29 times for 274 yards). The most memorable quality of the last two seasons was that the Terps could not hold leads, allowing Rutgers — one of their fellow Big Ten cellar dwellers — to come from behind to win in back-to-back seasons.

If Smith and the Terps play their cards right, opening their job now could give them a leg up in their search before the market gets crowded. Although candidates who are already coaching are unlikely to leave until the regular season wraps up, the Terps can vet their candidates now.

We already know what they should be looking for: the next Curt Cignetti.

This is not to set the bar at a national championship but to create the profile of an archetype. The Terps need a detail-oriented obsessive hell-bent on winning. If that includes recruiting ties to the DMV and Baltimore areas, all the better, but such ties seem increasingly trivial in the modern, cash-driven era.

Locksley did a decent job keeping high-profile locals, including Malik Washington and Zion Elee, in recent years, but it never translated to wins.

The next Terps coach needs to find the competitive edges that don’t cost. Smith can throw as many fundraisers as he wants, but Maryland will always distantly trail Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State. It was common to hear Locksley grumble about the program’s disadvantages in resources: “Finding how to consistently win is not just a Coach Locks problem,” he said at one of his last news conferences, “it’s a problem that any coach that’s worked here [has had].”

The Terps need to find a coach who uses this as a challenge rather than a limitation.

But it’s worth pointing out that Indiana was in a similar limbo to Maryland with Tom Allen, who had reached a ceiling and tailed off. With even less of a stirring football history than the Terps, the Hoosiers decided then that mediocrity was not good enough, hiring Cignetti for his track record at James Madison. While Cignetti’s championship team was fueled by the transfer portal (hello, Roman Hemby), his first team had 13 players transfer from JMU, which had been an FCS program only two years before.

Believe me, I understand there are profound differences between the state of Terps football now and Indiana in 2023 when it hired Cignetti. With a massive and deep-pocketed donor base, the Hoosiers now have the budget to go toe to toe with college football’s bluest bloods.

Coaching salaries have quadrupled for Cignetti and his staff since they came aboard, and the roster budget has ballooned to an estimated $34 million — Maryland’s donor base, as things are now, cannot touch these numbers.

But for the Terps the coaching hire domino has to fall first. That’s just how it is.

Locksley’s appeal to recruits was to stay home and have a coach with a player-friendly reputation. Cignetti is about as warm to players as he is to anyone else — as inviting as a frosted-over windowpane — but the appeal of playing for him is having a professional, ruthlessly efficient approach with winning results (Google him). He doesn’t offer heart-to-hearts, but if you do your best for Cignetti as a player, he’ll do his best for you.

That feels like a cultural shift the Terps need. Whoever is next at Maryland won’t be immediately showered with resources, but he has the chance to earn them. Smith has shown enough aptitude at energizing a notoriously stiff donor base that a flicker of early success on the field could be a good pairing with Smith’s skill set.

Maryland isn’t looking for the guy who can succeed at the highest level — it is looking for the guy who can get the program to a higher baseline of success and inspire the donors to keep the momentum going.

It is a risk to aim higher for a program that’s been stuck in purgatory for about 15 years. Many schools have gone looking for the next Cignetti only to flame out. But the way Maryland football has declined means the Terps are risking less by asking for more.

There’s no better time than right now to risk it. Aside from a few million dollars, what else have they got to lose?