The good news about Gary Crowton coming to be Maryland's new offensive coordinator is that the Terps hired him away from a football hotbed like LSU. The bad news about Gary Crowton coming to be Maryland's new offensive coordinator? He's been pretty bad at, you know, actually putting together good offenses.
Over the past couple years, Crowton's offenses have been among the worst in Division I college football, at least according to yards per game. The Tigers finished 86th this year and 112th (out of 120) in 2009, both horrendous results for a top-level team like the Tigers. Now, Crowton is supposed to be the magic bullet that improves Maryland's offense?
It's a question many are chuckling at.
Among those laughing? Let's start with SBNation.com's Holly Anderson:
A hefty chunk of the semantics cudgel used to bludgeon Ralph Friedgen out of Maryland concerned the national perception of a clean, winning football team as low-scoring and milquetoast. To address the latter problem not at all, the Terps athletic department hired Randy Edsall. To address the former even less, they've pulled Gary Crowton from LSU to run the offense. Known for his slapdash playcalling, marked inability to utilize the little-known position of "running back" in schemes, and turning Jordan Jefferson into Reggie Ball, this is perhaps a splash hire in the technical term, but splashes happen lots of places they're not wanted.
ESPN's Pat Forde was less poetic, but made up for it in directness.
Multiple media reports say that LSU OC Gary Crowton is gone to Maryland. I believe LSU's 2011 national title chances just got better.
SB Nation's Every Day Should Be Saturday, from back in October:
Perhaps Crowton doesn't belong in this category to begin with -- he's really more of a processor than a coordinator. Running game taking up too much space in your refrigerator? Here, he'll cut that thing down to size! Watch in amazement as he transforms Jordan Jefferson into Reggie Ball! While Crowton may be a fun, kitschy accessory to keep around for parties, though, we can't imagine keeping him around for serious household duties. Only experts with plenty of time to kill need to bother with this one; if you're not in the habit of working miracles or prying victory from the jaws of defeat, Crowton will only give you years of frustration and cardiac incidents.
And of course, SB Nation's LSU blog And The Valley Shook seems thrilled. Finally, there were those who predicted that Crowton would fail at LSU from the minute he was hired there. But other than that, he seems great!