‘He played us like a drum’: Inside Kevin Willard’s turbulent Maryland departure

In a first year that ended in a 71-53 NCAA Tournament Round of 32 loss to Alabama in 2023, new Maryland coach Kevin Willard had complaints. Plenty of them.

He was quick to tell anyone who would listen how much better things were in the Big East, the league he had just left after 12 seasons at Seton Hall. The scheduling, the travel, the emphasis on college basketball above all else. 

Willard had issues with the Big Ten’s schedule and travel situations, which would only get worse when USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington officially joined the conference, but it didn’t raise alarms early on the way maybe it should have. Many Maryland boosters and athletic department staffers were already used to dealing with similar complaints from Mark Turgeon, Willard’s predecessor, who frequently complained about the school’s decision to leave the basketball-fabled Atlantic Coast Conference for the Big Ten in 2014. 

The hope was that Willard would settle in at the Big Ten school and get it back on track to the heights of the Gary Williams era that resulted in a 2002 national championship. 

In hindsight, though, Willard’s comparisons to the Big East should have been a sign. Over the next two years, there were consistent whispers that Willard wasn’t particularly happy at Maryland and was frustrated that the perceived “basketball school” didn’t devote more resources to his program. It all came to a head in an ugly, more than week-long public saga that finally ended late Saturday night when Willard marked his return to his beloved Big East as Villanova’s new head coach. 

Maryland is now without an athletic director and men’s basketball coach on March 30 with the transfer portal in full swing. The “Crab Five” that made it to a Sweet 16 could all be gone from next year’s roster, with guards Ja’Kobi Gillespie and Rodney Rice expected to receive considerable outside interest. 

How did we get here? It is a story of money, internal friction over where resources were devoted and a man who could never seem to be satiated. 

Almost as soon as Villanova fired Kyle Neptune after three seasons, Willard’s name popped up as a realistic candidate for the position. Coaching carousel season can be full of smokescreens and fake interest to build leverage, but from the beginning sources within college basketball circles believed there was something real brewing between the two parties. 

Willard was asked about the possibility in a media availability before Maryland’s first-round game against Grand Canyon and used the opportunity to publicly embarrass his current employer. 

“I need to make fundamental changes to the program. That’s what I’m focused on right now. That’s why probably a deal hasn’t got done because I want to see — I need to see fundamental changes done. I want this program to be great. I want it to be the best in the country, I want to win a national championship, but there’s things that need to change.

When you’re at a place for three years and you put your heart and soul into it, you kind of sit there and say okay, wait a second for us to be really successful X, Y and Z needs to change, first and foremost,” Willard said. “I need to make sure that we are where we are with NIL and rev share is not where we’ve been with NIL over the past two years. We’ve been one of the worst, if not lowest, in NIL in the last two years. So that’s first and foremost. 

“I also have to make a fundamental change where I can do the things that I want to do with my program. I wanted to spend an extra night in New York this year to celebrate Christmas with my team and I was told that we can’t do that because it’s too expensive. So I don’t know how we can be a top-tier program and I can’t spend one extra night in New York because it’s too expensive.”

The Christmas anecdote was especially petty, the result of a simmering feud with then-deputy AD Colleen Sorem, who has since taken over as interim AD in a move that especially rankled Willard. Sorem, who ran the day-to-day operations of the department under Evans, once told me, “There’s just not enough money in the pie. I worry about revenue. I worry about staff. I worry about keeping our staff and being able to fill slots when they open.” Sorem’s job was to balance the budget, evoking ire from Willard when she turned down his requests including an extra night in New York. 

Willard’s comments that day proved to be a Rorschach test for Maryland fans. Some were deeply upset that Willard aired the school’s laundry in public, pouring kerosene on an already tense situation within the athletic department. Others, including some prominent basketball boosters, championed Willard’s fight for more resources, believing that outgoing AD Damon Evans, who has since left for SMU, didn’t do enough to help Willard. 

Evans, a former Georgia football player, knew how important men’s basketball was to Maryland and its fanbase but also believed football success was critical to its long-term standing — despite admitting privately to at least one prominent booster he knew Maryland would never win a national championship in football, though could win one in basketball. 

Surveying a changing college sports ecosystem, Evans believed the football program had to be viable if Maryland were to be included in any long-rumored breakaway into a super conference. He wanted basketball to be successful, needed it to be so, but if Maryland was really going to overcome its long-standing financial problems, football was the path. 

“Football generates 80 to 90 percent of TV revenue,” Evans told me in a previous interview. “So that big billion-dollar contract from our multimedia rights partners, a lot of that’s attributed to football. That doesn’t mean that basketball is not significant because it’s super significant here; basketball makes a lot of money here. But we need to understand what drives what. 

“What drives conference realignment? TV partners, football and marketplace. That drives college realignment.” 

Willard had valid NIL complaints even if his claim that Maryland had the lowest NIL in the conference was wildly inaccurate. Maryland spent in the neighborhood of $3 million in NIL for this year’s roster which would put it “in the lower part of the top half of the Big Ten,” according to Harry Geller, the founder of Maryland basketball collective Turtle NIL. Geller said Evans not being more heavily involved in trying to help Maryland basketball’s NIL situation deeply frustrated Willard, who was upset at the administration’s inaction.

“It was kind of crazy that the whole NIL for the basketball program fell on me and (former Nautica chairman) Harvey Sanders and a few others, all unpaid retired guys,” Geller told CBS Sports. “When Brian Ullmann became involved things got better, but we were way behind at that point.” 

Willard wanted a bigger piece of the $20.5 million revenue share, highlighting a fight that is brewing on college campuses across the country as an April settlement of House v. NCAA looms. With football programs expected to get the bulk of the revenue share, it has left basketball coaches like Willard frustrated at their share of the pie. 

Maryland, however, was willing to give Willard $4.5 million in revenue share even before he publicly demanded more, according to sources, which would be the second-highest number for a Big Ten men’s basketball program behind only Indiana. The expectation is that the majority of the Power Four men’s basketball programs will be in the $2 million-$4 million range in revenue sharing, putting Maryland above all but a handful of programs. Of course Villanova, without a FBS football program, can and will use more of its revenue share on basketball, with the expectation it could spend upwards of $6 million. 

There was optimism within Maryland in the days leading up to Friday’s Sweet 16 game against Florida that Willard would stay after the school offered him a contract that would make him one of the top 10 highest-paid coaches in college basketball, according to multiple sources. When pressed on the Kevin Sheehan Show on Tuesday, Willard said “As of right now, I’m staying.” There was obvious instability within the school without a permanent AD but with Ullmann, the right-hand man of school president Darryll Pines, directly dealing with Willard, Maryland believed it had met all of its basketball coach’s demands. 

That optimism, however, soon turned to frustration that Willard was not negotiating in good faith and would be leaving for Villanova regardless. That all the public complaints were simply an attempt to build a case for a decision he had already privately made. 

“He played us like a drum,” Maryland booster Barry Gossett, whose name adorns the forthcoming $52 million, 44,000-square foot basketball performance center, told CBS Sports. 

Gossett’s influence is everywhere at Maryland, from the Barry P. Gossett Director of Athletics position to the Barry and Mary Gossett Center for Academic and Personal Excellence, which he donated $21.5 million to fund in 2018. The former University of Maryland system regent, who has donated upwards of $50 million to his alma mater’s athletic department, said he was “as extremely disappointed as one could be” over how Willard handled his departure and the tough situation it left the school in searching for a new basketball coach without an athletic director. 

“As far as I’m concerned with Kevin leaving, I think it’s good,” Gossett said. “It was just chaos. 

“Willard caused more chaos. It wasn’t good for the rest of the department.” 

After an 87-71 loss to Florida to end Maryland’s season, Willard was pummeled with questions about whether he’d be taking the Villanova job. He told reporters, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” 

“I haven’t talked to my agent, I haven’t talked to my wife,” Willard said. “I made a promise to this team that I was gonna just focus on this team and that’s all I’ve done. I have an agent, I’m sure he’s talking to people because that’s what agents do, but I don’t know.”

However, later that night, Willard told at least one person close to him “I’m out of here.” He met with Villanova on Saturday and officially informed Maryland around midnight that he was leaving, ending a weeklong standoff. It was a result weeks in the making despite Willard’s public comments saying otherwise. 

“We took a very proactive and aggressive approach to retain Coach Willard, offering a significant contract extension and salary increase, new staff, and one of the highest revenue-share budgets in the B1G Conference,” Maryland said in a statement about Willard’s departure. “We had long and thoughtful conversations about the program and shared the same vision for Maryland Basketball. In the end, he made the choice that he felt was best for him and his family. On behalf of all of Terrapin Nation, we thank Coach Willard and his family for their service and wish them well.”

🏀 Willard’s coaching résumé

Willard’s exit marked a disappointing conclusion to a season that reinvigorated the Maryland fanbase which fell in love with star freshman Derik Queen and the rest of the “Crab Five.” Queen delivered perhaps the biggest moment of this NCAA Tournament on a buzzer-beater shot that knocked out Colorado State to send the Terrapins to their first Sweet 16 in nearly a decade. It should have been a time of tremendous joy for the Maryland fanbase but Willard’s increasingly obvious dalliance with Villanova overshadowed it all to a point he was booed by fans ahead of the Florida game. 

Willard tried to play the victim at the end, complaining of a situation of his own making, “I understand fans are going to be pissed because I’m in limbo and this and that. I get it. Like, I’m kind of pissed, to be honest with you, because i didn’t expect to be in this situation.” 

When asked whether he would change anything about how he handled a situation that evoked justified vitriol from Terps fans at the end, Willard was defiant. 

“Nope,” the outgoing Maryland coach said. “Not at all.”

The timing of Willard’s departure puts Maryland in a precarious position. Without a permanent AD and a roster ripe for poaching, time is of the essence for the Terrapins to find a solution. The school is ready to commit significant resources — from revenue sharing to coaching salaries — to find the right person to lead the program. It was — and still is — one of the top basketball jobs in the country, the kind of place where you can win a national championship and have one of the best home-court environments anywhere inside the Xfinity Center. Maryland has a 65.8 win percentage since the 2014-15 season, its first in the Big Ten, which ranks 36th nationally and sixth in the conference in that span. 

In what has been the ugliest week for Maryland hoops in recent memory, with the upcoming days critical for the future of the program, there are some who still see a silver lining to Willard’s childish antics. 

“I think this got the attention of the top administration about what we really need to do to run a top basketball program,” Geller said, “so in the end, that is good.”