Maryland won each of its first three games. On a surface level, the season was off to a good start. But the Terrapins had only covered in one of those contests and consistently slipped at KenPom — from 18th in the preseason to 26th following a 68-57 win over Vermont last week.
That suggested the Terrapins weren’t performing to expectations.
On Wednesday, it caught up to them.
Final score: George Mason 71, Maryland 66.
The Patriots were 12-of-24 from 3 while shooting 44.8% from the field. D’Shawn Schwartz finished with a game-high 24 points, nine rebounds and three steals.
“We think we’re supposed to beat everybody; it’s not that way,” said Maryland coach Mark Turgeon. “It’s too hard. We didn’t vote ourselves 20th [in this week’s AP poll]. And so you take everybody’s best shot. We don’t know how to handle it yet.”
For the purposes of the CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings, Maryland — which has been removed from Thursday morning’s updated Top 25 And 1 — is the story. But what happened Wednesday night was more about George Mason.
It’s such a cool deal.
George Mason has not been to the NCAA Tournament since 2011 and never finished better than fifth in the Atlantic 10 in six seasons under Dave Paulsen. So the school fired Paulsen last March and replaced him with 33-year-old Tennessee assistant Kim English, a former standout at Missouri who subsequently played in the NBA. English was raised in Baltimore and went to high school 60 miles away from George Mason’s campus, only 40 miles away from Maryland’s. And in just his fourth game as a head coach, this Maryland native led George Mason to its first ever win over Maryland’s program, and he did it on Maryland’s campus.
“That’s what he came here to do — to build this program up and win games like this,” said Schwartz, a transfer who played the past four seasons at Colorado, where English was an assistant from 2017 to 2019. “In the locker room, we talked about doing nothing different from our first three games. Our standard is our standard, and that’s what we play to.”
