Aug. 21, 1999

Delbert Cowsette still remembers the roar descending from the capacity crowd of 48,055 at Maryland's Byrd Stadium as he stood on the sidelines as a redshirt freshman four years ago.

He had the best seat in the house as the Terrapins, fresh off a win over North Carolina, beat the Mountaineers 31-17 to improve to 3-0. A week later, after a win over Duke, Maryland climbed to 17th in the Associated Press poll.

"The first four weeks it was ridiculous," Cowsette recalled of the 1995 season. "We had everybody that West Virginia game. It was packed that year."

He thought things would be that way for the rest of his career.

"Thats what I was counting on," he said Saturday.

But when Scott Milanovich came back from a four-game NCAA suspension for gambling, Maryland had a quarterback controversy with he and Brian Cummings and crawled home to a 6-5 finish under Mark Duffner.

The next season still appeared promising to Cowsette when Johnny Hicks sacked Northern Illinois' quarterback in the season opener and the ball popped into Cowsette's hands. The young defensive tackle raced 54 yards for a touchdown in his first career start, a game the Terps won 30-6.

It was a great moment. Unfortunately for Cowsette, nothing has come along to replace it as his greatest athletic thrill at Maryland.

Three years later, in the third year of rebuilding under coach Ron Vanderlinden, Cowsette has yet to duplicate the winning season he watched during his redshirt year.

"I aim high with everything," Cowsette said Saturday. "I want to go to a bowl game, and I want to get one final win for the season."

The Terps haven't played in a bowl since 1990, but running back Lamont Jordan spoke of aiming for the Atlantic Coast Conference championship. He said he felt Maryland had proven it could play with every other team in the league, even though it won just one of eight league games last season and finished 3-8 overall.

"Florida State, we don't just want to play them well any more," Maryland tight end John Waerig said of the top-ranked team in the SportServer Top 25. "That's over."

The Seminoles beat Maryland 24-10 last fall, a big improvement for the Terps over the 50-7 whipping FSU adminstered to them a year before.

Winning five games over the past two seasons has the Terps starving for more success in the victory column after they made huge strides with their defense and rushing attack last season.

Their last game, a 35-21 home loss to N.C. State in front of 21,589, was still a long way from the thrills of that game against West Virginia three years before.

With memories of those days still in his head, Cowsette sweated through summer practices and never missed a voluntary session. Twenty-five of his teammates joined him, a great turnout for a team with 34 returning lettermen and one that had 13 players make every voluntary practice the previous summer.

Vanderlinden likes to tell his players that a man will do so much for a dollar but will do a lot more for another man and will give his life for a cause.

The players are buying in. And they're wearing red jerseys after two seasons in black. Vanderlinden felt comfortable making the switch back to a more traditional color for the school after two solid recruiting classes and two years of having players get experience in his system.

"I wanted to wait until we got over the hump, so to speak," Vanderlinden said, "before we broke out with the red."

The Terps finished dead last in the ACC preseason poll, but Vanderlinden still feels confident enough in his progress that he can chuckle about the difficulties of his first season in College Park. He feels removed enough now from those days.

Asked about recruiting needs, he had a flashback to his first class, looked down and laughed as he said, "We knew we needed some help in '97 in a lot of positions."

He compared his latest class, which includes a SuperPrep and PrepStar All-American quarterback in Latrez Harrison, to a bunch that he helped recruit as an assistant coach at Colorado in 1986. That 12-player class sent eight to the NFL.

The newest Terps should make an impact this season and may keep Maryland from signing many more players like Cowsette.

The Big Ten schools all figured that Cowsette was too short to play defensive line at 6-foot-1, even though he won all-state honors at Central Catholic High School in Cleveland. His college choice came down to Maryland or various Mid-American Conference schools.

"I really didnt know anything about Maryland," he said, "but I knew they were in the ACC."

Cowsette has proven himself as an ACC player with 20 tackles for losses in his career, including 10 as a sophomore and six last season. He made 96 tackles last fall, 62 of them unassisted, and had three sacks as Maryland started to plug some holes in its defense.

The Terrapins ranking for total defense rocketed from 87th in the country to 53rd last season, the 12th-largest jump in the nation. It helped when Maryland could hold onto the ball, because running back Lamont Jordan helped its running game improve from worst in the ACC to second-best heading into the season finale against Florida State.

The Terps rose from the 106th-best rushing offense in the country in 1997 to 50th last year (161.2 yards per game), the sixth-biggest improvement in Division I-A.

As a net result, Maryland trailed by an average of 4.1 points at the end of the third quarter last season. It was a world of difference from its usual 13.4 point gap from a year earlier.

Vanderlinden has been part of massive turnarounds as an assistant coach at Colorado and Northwestern, though he has backtracked from the impassioned talk of lofty goals that marked his first season in College Park.

But he has kept those goals for a school with fans that still remember Maryland winning three straight ACC titles from 1983-85. Cowsette is keeping his sights on an All-ACC season, but he has a bigger cause, too, when the Terps kick off their opener at Temple Sept. 2.

"It took a while to adjust (to Vanderlinden's system)," he said. "We realize it's time for us to win, and Vandy knows how to win."

This season is Cowsette's last chance at Maryland. He has seen two kinds of ridiculous between the stands of Byrd Stadium. If the Terrapins improve this season as much as he did the last, then maybe he'll get to do some of the laughing again.