COLLEGE PARK — When college basketball teams make the transition from rebuilding to nationally relevant, their coaches, players and fans often can point to a few games that helped speed up the process.
Someday Mark Turgeon might talk about Tuesday night's 59-53 victory over No. 5 Wisconsin that way.
ESPN analyst Jay Bilas, who called the game, said Wednesday that a late-season win over a team thought to be a Final Four contender "was a really important win, one of those program-building wins" for Maryland.
"For a team that has played really well during the course of the year, not that they didn't believe [in themselves] before, but they can really believe now that there's nobody out there that they can't beat," Bilas said. "That doesn't mean there's not a long list of teams that can beat Maryland. There is. [But] they can compete with anybody."
For Hall of Fame coach Gary Williams, that game in his tenure at Maryland might have come in the opener of the 1993-94 season. With a starting lineup of three sophomores and two freshmen — including a virtual unknown center named Joe Smith — the Terps upset 15th ranked Georgetown at the old USAir Arena in Landover.
"It was the day after Thanksgiving, it was on national television and we had only been back allowed on TV the year before [following NCAA probation] and we weren't any good," Williams recalled. "That game — went overtime, it was dramatic — got us out there where people think, 'They might be OK.'"
Then, after making the NCAA tournament for the first time since Williams returned to his alma mater four years earlier, the 10th-seeded Terps upset second-seeded and eighth-ranked Massachusetts, coached by John Calipari, in the second round in Wichita, Kan.
"A lot of people thought they were going to the Final Four that year," Williams said. "To get that win really solidified the idea that we can play with anybody. The next year, we went undefeated in Cole Field House and beat No. 1 [North] Carolina in February. There was no question after that we could be pretty good."
It's too early to tell the full impact of Tuesday's win before a sell-out crowd at Xfinity Center. For now, Turgeon knows that it has at least validated much of what he had been saying recently about his team's ability to compete, even when the final scores of wins over Northwestern, Penn State and Nebraska weren't particularly inspiring.
"We've had some good wins at home," Turgeon said, referring to a victory over then-No. 2 Duke two years ago and one over then-No. 5 Virginia in last year's regular-season finale. "We've always competed. We just haven't been in position to go to the NCAA tournament, which is everything in our sport, unfortunately."
More than the victory over then-No. 13 Iowa State in late November, which helped the Terps gain their first Top 25 ranking since 2010, the win over Wisconsin will carry greater significant because of when it happened.
Beating the Badgers keeps alive a small chance of the Terps getting a share of the Big Ten Conference regular season title — Maryland (24-5, 11-4 Big Ten) has an easier schedule then Wisconsin (25-3, 13-2) the rest of the way — and it also likely solidifies a top four seed for the Terps in both the Big Ten tournament and NCAA tournament.
As a top four seed in the Big Ten tournament, which begins in Chicago on March 11, the Terps will get a double-bye and won't have to play until the Friday quarterfinals. As a top four seed in the NCAA tournament, it could mean that Maryland will get to start off close to home, presumably in Pittsburgh.
Considering that Tuesday's game was on national television, it certainly won't hurt Turgeon in terms of recruiting. The Terps are locked in a down-to-the-wire battle with Wisconsin and Connecticut for 6-foot-11 center Diamond Stone of Milwaukee, the nation's No. 6-rated prospect.
Former Maryland star Len Elmore, who served as a television analyst on a few of Maryland's games this season, agreed with Bilas' take that Tuesday's win could be "seminal" for Turgeon's program.
Yet Elmore was quick to warn that the Terps still have to back it up, starting with Saturday's Senior Day game against Michigan, followed by road games against Rutgers and Nebraska to close the regular season.
"If they lose to someone inferior, all that is forgotten," Elmore said.
Calling it a "turning point" in the rebuilding Turgeon has done, Elmore said Tuesday's win was reminiscent of a victory during his sophomore year in 1971 when the Terps beat No. 2 North Carolina at Cole Field House.
"We beat them in a close game and the crowd stormed the court — nobody got hurt by the way," Elmore said. "That's when we as a team really started to believe. ... This game is convincing this team that they belong, that they can do some damage."
Bilas said the game plan Turgeon and his coaching staff devised — particularly in terms of taking advantage of Dez Wells, who finished with 26 points, seven rebounds and four assists in 31 minutes — was executed to near perfection.
"I thought they carved [Wisconsin] up on offense — a low possession game where it's hard to get a rhythm going and they carved them up," Bilas said. "And [the Terps] defended very well, they defended hard and they limited mistakes at both ends of the floor. They stuck with what they were taught to do under pressure. That was really an impressive win."
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