COLLEGE PARK - — COLLEGE PARK - -As the Maryland football team's charter flight crept home from a 52-13 embarrassment at California early Sunday morning, most of the players slept - some in the aisles, some sprawled across three seats.
The position coaches enjoyed no such luxury. They graded their players' performances on video until their laptop batteries gave out. Then they were handed fresh batteries from a video assistant and started anew.
The grading procedure - each Terp is scored from "0" to "2" on each play in which they participate, with "1.5" as a passing grade - is part of the meticulous research that Maryland conducts on itself and its opponents before games. Maryland's preparation leads to a document that, with its tiny type and yellow and red highlights, looks like something a mad genius would create: the game plan.
As Maryland (0-1, 0-0 Atlantic Coast Conference) practiced for its home opener tonight against James Madison, the school agreed to share with The Baltimore Sun - at least in general terms - what a game plan looks like and the work that goes into it.
The game plan is essentially a crib sheet to help the Terrapins solve puzzles that appear before them as games unfold. At its best, the plan deciphers the other team's language.
The plan can only carry a team so far. Players must not only buy in to the strategies but perform their assignments as assuredly in games as they do in practice. What a young Maryland team painfully learned against Cal - and this especially applies to the offensive line - was just how raw they are. "Basically, it comes down to inexperience," offensive coordinator James Franklin said.
Maryland's offensive game plan for California appeared on an 8-by-11-inch sheet. Running horizontally across the page were six typed columns filled with yellow and red-pink highlights.
If the printed sheet had been publicly released - which wouldn't happen before a game - it would have been nearly indecipherable to those not connected with the team.
"Even if you had that game plan, you couldn't understand the verbiage," said Franklin, one of the plan's principal architects. Franklin, 37, married with two young children, typically arrives at his office in the Gossett Football Team House about 6 a.m., and gets home late in the evening.
Like James Madison this week, California's first game of the season was against the Terps. That meant Maryland had no fresh video to review on either team. So coaches studied the last four games of the schools' 2008 schedules and drew conclusions as best they could.
