Maryland athletics needs an image makeover

It’s been another bang-up week of bad pub in College Park.

Maryland football coach Randy Edsall, a $2 million-a-year hall monitor, finally let his transferring players go where they wanted — albeit after he was pilloried nationally for holding quarterback Danny O’Brien and other players hostage from choosing the school they wanted.

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The Post Sports Live crew debates whether the decision that was made by University of Maryland Athletic Director Kevin Anderson not to play Georgetown in any sport until the impasse between the men's basketball teams ends will result in an annual matchup.

Kevin Anderson, the athletic director who hired Edsall, made his own headlines by drawing a line in the sand with Georgetown: Until the Terps and Hoyas schedule a men’s basketball game for the first time since 1993, Anderson, with unanimous support from the sports programs Maryland has yet to cut for budgetary reasons, decreed no other team would schedule Georgetown.

This infuriated and angered everyone on the Hilltop, where two immediate reactions were audible:

“Hahahahahahahaha. He’s joking, right?”

And: “Wait. Hold up. Who’s Kevin Anderson?”

Rather than pile on the two most maligned men in Maryland athletics for their apparent inabilities to understand even the most rudimentary elements of their working environments, I placed a call to Anderson to try to understand the logic behind the seemingly nonsensical.

Knowing the simmering animosities that have prevented this seemingly natural rivalry from being scheduled the past 18 years, why would Anderson think public threats were the way to make it work? That makes about as much sense as trying to block the desires of 20-year-old players who don’t want to play for you.

“All I would like to do is to sit down and have a conversation and be told why this is a bad idea for anyone,” Anderson said by telephone Wednesday. “If I can be given reasons why this isn’t a good idea, I’m open to listening. But when you can’t even sit down with anyone to have that discussion, it hurts everyone.”

Former Georgetown Coach John Thompson Jr., assuring he was not speaking on behalf of the school he still is compensated by — and where his son now coaches — responded to Anderson’s Hoya Annoya boycott: “I’m not gonna permit myself to be threatened; I can tell you that right now,” he said.

Great. Beautiful. Next to these Brahma bulls, putting Pacquiao-Mayweather together could be a piece of cake.

“I have no beef with Coach Thompson,” Anderson says. “I have the utmost respect for him. I know some people in this profession who would not have their jobs were it not for all the things he did years ago to open doors. I just want get this settled one way or the other before we move on. I’m open to changing my position if we start to have a dialogue on this.”

He said he knew a little of the animosity that led up to both schools snubbing each other, including Lefty Driesell and Big John’s dust-ups.

But here’s where it really went sour: In 1993, just as Gary Williams’s Maryland program was emerging from the probation-scarred aftermath of Len Bias’s death, the teams agreed to play at USAir Arena. It was arranged by future Virginia state senator Russ Potts, then an enterprising promoter who had already put on the Ralph Sampson vs. Patrick Ewing Game of the Century in 1982.