Terps vs. Virginia: A Rivalry Renewed

Ralph Friedgen remembers the energy building in College Park ahead of a Thursday night showdown against the Virginia Cavaliers in November of 2003. The Terps had started slow that year, dropping their first two games of the season, but had won six of their next seven and were still in contention for the ACC title leading into the rivalry game.

To provide an extra jolt of inspiration to his group, Friedgen orchestrated the creation of an internal motivational video to show the team. When he was shown the finished product, set to the score of “Gladiator”, Friedgen was nearly in tears over how powerful it was and he was convinced it would resonate just as much with his team.

Of course, when the players watched the video for the first time, it was crickets. That is until Thursday evening just before Terp Walk when a bunch of players rushed to him with intense looks in their eyes, begging to see the video.

Friedgen knew then that his team was set for the rivalry matchup.

“I’ve never had a team that emotionally ready to play a game in my life,” he recalled.

That emotion was further showcased in pregame when Virginia head coach Al Groh infamously elected to kick off to begin both the first and second half. In pure jubilation over the mistake, the entire Maryland team rushed the field in celebration—earning an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty in the process, but, more importantly, firing up the team and the fans even more. 

“I was talking to Curome Cox (a standout defensive back from 1999 to 2003) about it later,” Friedgen said. “He told me, ‘Hey, you know Coach, we told you we were going to go out and do it and you told us not to do it. But we said to hell with you, we’re going to do it anyway.’”

“It must’ve worked because we drove 80 yards into the wind on our first drive and scored,” Friedgen added with a laugh. 

The Terps built a 24-7 first-half lead and went on to win 27-17. 

“That first half we were playing like we were incensed,” Friedgen said. “That was probably the most emotional game I’ve ever been involved in, period.”

The high emotional stakes of the Maryland-Virginia rivalry has been missing for the past decade as the series, which has spanned over a century, has been on hiatus since the Terps moved to the Big Ten in 2014. 

But that all changes tonight in College Park when the two teams meet for the first time since 2013 as the first part of a home-and-home agreement between the two schools over the 2023 and 2024 seasons. 

“When I looked at the home schedule and saw we were playing UVA, it brought this big smile to my face because Maryland and Virginia is a huge rivalry for our history,” said former star running back LaMont Jordan, who will be the sideline reporter tonight for the Maryland Sports Radio Network. 

For head coach Michael Locksley, who was part of the rivalry firsthand in 1997 as the Terps’ running back coach and from 2012-13 as the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, the opportunity to renew the historic game is one he celebrates. 

“Obviously Virginia is a familiar foe, a former-ACC rival,” he said. “Having been here at Maryland for over 15 seasons and having been a part of some of those games, they’re important games for us,” Locksley said. “Being in the Big Ten is a tough enough conference, but we do have some historical rivalries that are always great for our fans to have the opportunity to compete against. Virginia is one of those and I know our fans are pretty passionate about that rivalry.”

The teams met for the first time in 1919, a 13-0 Maryland win, and have played 78 total times overall en route to a 44-32-2 advantage for the Terps. The two sides met annually from 1957 through 2013 and there’s no school Maryland has played more than the Cavaliers. 

The Terps won 16 straight games from 1972 to 1987, the longest winning streak of the series for either side.

Perhaps no one has more experience with the local rivalry than Friedgen, who played the Cavaliers every year from 1966-1968 as a player, from 1969-1971 as a graduate assistant, from 1982-86 as the Terps’ offensive coordinator and from 2001-10 as the program’s head coach. And some of his best Maryland memories come from being part of the rivalry. 

“Anytime you have a border state it’s going to be a rivalry,” Friedgen said. “You’re recruiting against them all the time so it becomes a rivalry. Virginia never thought we could get in there academically and then Al Groh was a Virginia graduate and I was a Maryland graduate and that definitely added to it.”

“The hatred that Ralph Friedgen had for UVA was real,” Locksley explained. “I haven’t talked to him this week yet but I’m sure he still gets pretty pumped up for them. For me as a coach, hearing Ralph talk about it showed me just how important of a game it has been. So when I had a chance to put them on the schedule, it was something I thought would be good for this area and for this program.”

The academic component between two stellar public institutions continued to play out over the years. Friedgen recalls one year in Charlottesville where the halftime entertainment from the stands consisted of the question, “How many Maryland students does it take to turn on a lightbulb?”

“We felt like they always looked down on us,” Friedgen said. “They thought they were better-educated, more sophisticated and that we were these low-lifes at Maryland… At least that’s how I sold it to our guys anyway.”

It was all Terps from 1972 to 1987, with only two of the 16 Maryland wins decided by single digits. 

Friedgen fondly recalls the rivalry game in 1984, the same year the Terps topped the Tennessee Volunteers in the Sun Bowl. Head coach Bobby Ross asked him to remind the players to not run through Virginia’s warm up drills, but to go around them. Friedgen did and, of course, the players did the exact opposite. 

“The guys didn’t really listen to me when it came to Virginia,” Friedgen laughed. “They just didn’t like Virginia at all.”

When Friedgen returned to College Park in 2001, the Terps had lost nine in a row to the Cavaliers.

“I couldn’t understand that,” Friedgen said. “We should’ve been beating them.”

Jordan, one of the best running backs in program history and a potential Heisman candidate in 2000, played through the end of that stretch, going through four tough games against the Cavaliers. 

“The one thing about those games is they’re always physical,” Jordan recalled. “I remember when I was a freshman the upperclassmen told me that no matter what the score is, no matter what the records are, these games are always physical. I was told that as a freshman and I experienced it as a player.

“As a competitor, you just really don’t want to lose to Virginia,” Jordan added. “You get major bragging rights and there’s such a great history to the rivalry. This game is a big deal to those of us who experienced the ACC.”

Jordan’s name will forever be notched in the rivalry record books for his work in 1999, a game that Locksley experienced as the Terps’ running backs coach, where Jordan put forth 306 yards on the ground in a Herculean effort to lead the Terps back from a 17-0 deficit before Virginia claimed the win in heartbreaking fashion with 26 seconds remaining. The 306 rushing yards is still a program record for rushing yards in a single game. At the time, it was also the third-best rushing game in ACC history. 

“If I take myself out of the equation and I look at myself as a fan, I would definitely put that up there as one of the best games in college football,” Jordan said. “Just the competition, the border state rivalry, you had myself and Thomas Jones as the top backs in the ACC. It was just a great game with a great crowd.”

Friedgen quickly stopped the Terps’ skid against the Cavaliers and got his first taste of the rivalry as a head coach in 2001 by way of a dominant 41-21 victory for the 25th-ranked Terps in College Park. 

The Terps dominated the Cavaliers at home, only losing once in College Park during Friedgen’s reign. However, four of Friedgen’s five trips to Charlottesville resulted in Maryland losses. 

Friedgen had one thought as to why.

"We played lousy everytime we went down to Charlottesville. We also stayed at the DoubleTree every year and they served you these good chocolate chip cookies. I was convinced that they had drugged those things or something because we never played well after eating them.”

In 2010, Friedgen’s last season at Maryland, he decided he was done taking chances so the team stayed in Richmond and drove an hour into Charlottesville for the game—where they’d be far away from the DoubleTree and its chocolate chip cookies.  

Of course, the Terps ran away with a dominant 42-23 victory that year.

“Maybe there was actually something to it, something to those cookies. I don’t know,” Friedgen said with a laugh.

The two sides last met a decade ago in 2013 in another thriller in College Park that saw the Terps come out on top. Caleb Rowe threw for 332 yards and hit tight end Dave Stinebaugh for the go-ahead score with 5:14 left as Maryland beat Virginia, 27-26. 

Since that thrilling Maryland victory 10 years ago, there have been no meetings between the two programs—until now.

And though the stakes are a little different this time, with the teams being in separate conferences and the current players having little memory of what the ACC rivalry used to be, the energy around it remains the same. 

“We are going to try to do our best to make sure our players understand that number one, this is our next opponent, but also that this one is something that’s special to a lot of people,” Locksley said. 

“Much like playing West Virginia, who is a long-time rival of the University of Maryland, UVA is one of those rivalry games as well,” Locksley added. “I know our fans get excited, especially when they’re our old ACC foes, to have an opportunity to compete against them. I know we do it in some of our other sports here so the ability to have this game on our schedule is something I wanted.”

Jordan is one of those people who the game is immensely special to. And it’s going to be equally as special for him to see the renewal of the rivalry up close tonight. 

“It’s going to be great. To have it on a Friday night with a Blackout, oh man, I can’t wait. When the stadium went dark on Saturday against Charlotte last week and everyone took their phones out with the flashlights, I was just thinking, ‘Man, this is gonna be so cool against UVA.’ I really hope the fans show out for this game, it’s going to be worth it.”