At Big Ten media day, Maryland and Kevin Willard feel right at home

MINNEAPOLIS — It’s 8:52 a.m., and Maryland’s men’s basketball coach is on stage at an arena in Minnesota, at a Big Ten conference media day. This might be a little weird pretty much always, at least for people who are more than a decade old. To those who think 60 years spent in another, more intensely geographical league meant a lot. But here’s Kevin Willard on Tuesday, credulously arguing that his second Maryland team actually looks like a Big Ten team instead of just fighting to seem that way, and a thought dawns.

It’s not weird, because everything is weird now. Which means nothing is weird anymore. Which means the last 17 months suggest Maryland is precisely where it wants to be, in about every way, if it has ambitions of being extremely good at basketball. “It’s probably the greatest move for Maryland athletics that ever happened,” Willard said, having moved from the big stage to a solo mini-podium, his first trade-down in a while.

The chaos of college athletics has buried tradition as the driving precept for any decision. All that matters is how big you can get and how good you can be. Maryland, then, wound up in the ideal spot to chase down the highest levels of good.

Its coach did things in his first season — 20-plus wins, a national ranking, an NCAA Tournament win — that none of the school’s previous coaches did in their first seasons. Willard subsequently upgraded the size of the roster for 2023-24 and signed the best freshman class he says he’s ever coached. Now he says he can’t run practices for more than 90 minutes because they’re too competitive and he’s worried he’ll grind his team into dust particles by March if he doesn’t exercise self-control. “You’ve got a lot of guys chirping at each other, just talking a lot of smack,” junior forward Julian Reese said. “Sometimes you have to tone it down a little bit because we get away from the task at hand. I feel like that’s great for a team. Teams need that grit, especially in a conference like this.”

A first-world problem, yes, but only if you in fact inhabit the first world.

Decisions made a long time before Williard arrived wound up putting the place ahead of a curve no one saw coming, as it turns out. The expanded Big Ten will have outrageous sums of media rights money to spend while the somewhat more hidebound ACC added schools from Texas and the Bay Area to try to play catch-up. Meanwhile, in a year and a half, the new basketball coach in College Park created a level of promise that meets the opportunity. The Terrapins were a No. 8 seed last March but finished 23rd in KenPom’s final ratings, suggesting more than met the eye.

They might not be a national championship favorite in 2023-24. They’re not even the Big Ten favorite. But the trend lines are what you want when you’re 20 years removed from the Final Four and expect to be there more often than that — and particularly when you’re in a league that will be…