VIDEO: BADGER BREAKDOWN - NORTHERN IOWA
don't have to do anything differently. I was fortu- nate to get a win and I didn't turn the ball over, so that felt good. I remember it like it was yesterday.'' Robinson never got his job back. O'Brien got on
a roll — he threw 96 passes before finally getting one intercepted — and guided Maryland to seven victories as a starter, including a 51-20 rout of East Carolina in the Military Bowl at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. After throwing for 2,438 yards and 22 touchdowns, O'Brien was tabbed as the ACC's Rookie of the Year. But he really couldn't celebrate. Before the bowl game, the Terrapins fired the 63-year-old Friedgen, a Maryland alum, who had compiled a 74-50 record over his 10 seasons and had one year left on his contract. His dismissal, effective following the bowl, was linked in part to Franklin's departure from the staff. Franklin, who in 2009 had been named the eventual successor to Friedgen, took the head coaching job at Vanderbilt. "It was rough,'' O'Brien said. "Our whole team
was tight with that coaching staff. Coach Frank- lin had recruited a lot of those guys to Maryland. That was a tough pill to swallow. But it's a tough
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business. Coaches are gone (fired) every year ev- erywhere. It's the nature of the business, unfortu- nately.''
Maryland hired Connecticut's Randy Edsall to
replace Friedgen and Edsall turned over the of- fense to Crowton, who installed his own system and went away from everything that had been es- tablished by Franklin. In the 2010 opener, O'Brien completed 31-of-44 passes for 348 yards and led the Terps to an impressive 32-24 win over the Mi- ami Hurricanes and their first-year coach Al Gold- en.
"I went into the season with very high expec- tations, not only for myself, but for the team; I thought we had a lot of talent,'' O'Brien said. "It started out well. Unfortunately that first game was the highlight of the season. You learn from it. There were a lot of good things, and a lot of bad things.'' The bad far outweighed the good. Four games into the season, O'Brien got benched — losing his job to C.J. Brown, who was more adept at running Crowton's offense. O'Brien returned as the starter in mid-October (Game 10) only to break his arm against Notre Dame. Maryland lost eight straight
