MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Neal Brown actually likes that his West Virginia University football team is jumping into the deep end of the pool to kick off the 2021 season.
 
No, his Mountaineers won't be dipping their toes into the water this season when they face Maryland on Saturday in College Park despite the Terps not having a winning season since 2014, which was the last time one quarterback started every game for them.
 
COVID-19 limited Maryland to only five games last year, coach Mike Locksley's second since his return to Maryland. Locksley coached five games as the Terps' interim coach in 2015, winning once, and he shows five victories in his brief 17-game tenure at Maryland following a successful three-year stint as Alabama's offensive coordinator.
 
Locklsey also coached three seasons at New Mexico from 2009-11 when he compiled a 2-26 mark to give him an overall coaching record of 8-43. He's already cycled through a whole set of coordinators since his return to College Park, and he's now going with Dan Enos to run his offense, Brian Stewart to oversee his defense and longtime coach Ron Zook to operate the Terrapin special teams.
 
That in itself is a lot for Brown and his staff to sort through, but when they turn on the tape to watch Maryland's five games last year what they see are athletes galore.
 
Locksley signed the nation's 32^nd-ranked recruiting class two years ago and improved that number by 14 last December. Not surprisingly, many of those guys now show up on Maryland's two-deep roster released Monday morning.
 
By my count, 17 players from those last two recruiting classes are now in the Terps' two-deep, not to mention Maryland welcoming back eight starters on offense and nine on defense. Seven of them – safety Nick Cross, defensive tackle Mosiah Nasili-Kite, cornerback Tarheeb Still, quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa, left tackle Laelyn Duncan and wide receivers Dontay Demus Jr. and Rakim Jarrett – earned some type of All-Big Ten recognition last year.
 
Tagovailoa, the younger brother of Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, earned four-star status while playing at Thompson High in Alabaster, Alabama, during the 2019 recruiting cycle. He began his college career at Alabama before transferring to Maryland prior to the 2019 season.
 
It was in Alabama where Neal Brown first watched Tagovailoa play while he was still Troy's head coach.
 
"He's a winner," Brown said. "He can run the football, and he throws the intermediate and deep balls with a nice touch."
 
Last year, Tagovailoa passed for 282 yards and three touchdowns in Maryland's 35-19 upset win over Penn State, and he also passed for 394 yards and one touchdown in a 45-44 overtime victory over Minnesota. He completed 61.5% of his 122 pass attempts for 1,011 yards with seven touchdowns and seven interceptions in 2020.
Tagovailoa is throwing to possibly the best receiver corps West Virginia is going to face this year, including Oklahoma. Sophomore Rakim Jarrett was a five-star prospect two years ago out of Landover, Maryland, and he lived up to the hype during his first season in College Park in 2020.
 
Jarrett took a pair of Tagovailoa passes to the house against Penn State and finished the afternoon with five catches for 144 yards. The 6-foot, 200 pounder is also a big-time threat as a kick and punt returner.
 
"He's super-talented, and I expect him to be more comfortable than he was last year," Brown said.
 
Dontay Demus Jr., a 6-foot-3, 217-pound senior receiver from Washington, D.C., is the most experienced player on Maryland's roster with 18 career starts, and he shows 78 catches for 1,268 yards and 10 touchdowns during his career.
 
Two years ago, Demus Jr. caught 41 passes for 625 yards and six touchdowns in a full season of work.
 
Senior tight end Chigoziem Okonkwo snared 19 passes last year and is on the Reese's Senior Bowl watch list as one of the top prospects for this year's NFL Draft. Brown believes all three are one day capable of playing on Sundays.
 
"Receiver-wise, they may be as talented as anybody we play this year," Brown admitted. "They probably have four-to-six quality guys at the receiver position, and it starts with Demus and Jarrett. I think those guys are NFL players."
 
Duncan, a 6-foot-6, 315-pound junior, was once a four-star prospect out of St. Frances Academy in New Carrollton, Maryland, and teams with 6-foot-5, 330-pound junior Spencer Anderson to give the Terps a pair of experienced tackles.
 
Peny Boone, a four-star running back out of Detroit, is reportedly out for Saturday's game while in concussion protocol, but the Terps have another four-star runner on the roster in sophomore Isaiah Jacobs from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who is expected to share time with seniors Tayon Fleet-Davis and Challen Faamatau, a pair of 220-plus-pounders.
 
Defensively, West Virginia is familiar with Tarheeb Still, a Freshman All-American performer last season who prepped at Timber Creek Regional High in Sicklerville, New Jersey. Nick Cross, middle linebacker Ruben Hyppolite II, backup middle linebacker Branden Jennings, backup defensive end Tyler Baylor and nickel back Isaiah Hazel were also once considered four-star players during their prep careers.
 


"Defensively, I thought they played extremely well toward the end of the year," Brown said. "They're big up front. (Nasili-Kite) led the Big Ten in sacks last year and (Durrell Nchami) plays the edge and he had a huge game against Rutgers at the end of the season when he came back from injury."
 
Brown is also impressed with a Maryland secondary that returns three seniors and a junior.
 
"They are very good in the back end," he said. "They challenged people the last three games last year. Now what they are going to do with a new coordinator is yet to be determined, but they're very talented back there."
 
Youngsters Terrence Lewis and Dameioun Robinson are not listed on this week's two-deep, but they are perhaps the two most highly touted players on Maryland's roster. Lewis was the crown jewel of Locksley's 2021 signing class as a five-star performer out of Miami Central High, but he missed spring ball with an injured foot and is still recovering.
 
Robinson, from nearby Gaithersburg, was the No. 1-rated player in Maryland last year, and he spurned offers from Ohio State, Penn State, Alabama and Clemson to play for the hometown Terps. He is expected to see plenty of action Saturday as well.
 
In all, Maryland has about a dozen or so four- and five-star players among its top 44, which demonstrates the type of talent Locksley is assembling there.
 
The Terps are not overly experienced with just three players on offense and two on defense having more than 10 career starts, and they haven't enjoyed a lot of success, going 44-78 over the last 10 years, but there is plenty of optimism in College Park that this group of players can trigger a turnaround.
 
Neal Brown just hopes the turnaround begins the following Saturday when Maryland faces Howard.
 
This weekend's game is 53^rd in an on-again, off-again series that was played annually from 1980 until 2007 when Maryland was a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Back then, the Maryland tilt was always considered a barometer game for West Virginia – if the Mountaineers defeated the Terrapins it usually meant a bowl berth and if they lost it often prefaced a losing campaign.
 
This will be the fourth time West Virginia has opened its season at Maryland and the first since 1973 when flanker Danny Buggs returned a punt 65 yards for a touchdown with just eight seconds on the clock to give the Mountaineers a 20-13 upset victory over the Terps.
 
West Virginia's other two season-opening games in College Park in 1959-60 were blowout defeats.
 
"Coming out of camp, we have to figure out what were we best at and who do we want to feature?" Brown explained. "We take the concepts and the schemes we are best at coming out of camp and the players we want to highlight and that's what we focus on because we're guessing at best what they're going to do."
 
Saturday's game will kick off at 3:30 p.m. and will be televised nationally on ESPN. The Mountaineer Sports Network radio coverage begins at noon on affiliates throughout West Virginia and online via the WVU Gameday app and WVUsports.com.