Judging by the reaction I have seen and heard inside Byrd Stadium, around campus and on online message boards this week, I think it is safe to say a lot of people have lost hope for this Terrapin football season.

The Terps are 1-3, they have lost two consecutive home games against less-than-stellar programs, and they need to go 5-3 against a decently tough ACC schedule just to qualify for a bowl game.

But somehow, the Terps remain optimistic.

I wouldn’t expect to hear players and coaches on any team say they are giving up after four weeks, their team is not very good, and there is no chance they will turn it around.

But the Terps seem to have no problem taking the positive-thinking approach a step further and throwing out some very lofty goals they still hope to achieve.

So for those of you who have not yet jumped off the bandwagon, and like Alex Wujciak cling to dreams of playing in January at the Orange Bowl, here is a compilation of some inspirational quotes fired off by the Terps this afternoon at their weekly press luncheon.

Coach Ralph Friedgen: “I haven’t thrown in the towel one bit. I’m still thinking about winning. I’m still thinking about winning the ACC. And that’s just the way I am and I’m not going to change.”

“I don’t like losing probably as much as anybody. You can’t worry about what you’ve done in the past, it’s what you gotta do in the future. I really think if we can eliminate the turnovers and penalties we’ll give ourselves a chance.”

Defensive tackle Travis Ivey: “I feel like we can go 8-0. I don’t really look at is as [trying to go] 5-3. What gives me optimism is our work ethic and the type of character guys that we have. We work extremely hard every day in practice, and  we haven’t had the success that we want to have, but I feel like we’re still positive and we still have all our goals  ahead of us and we’re going to keep on doing it until we get it right.”

Center Phil Costa: “Everybody has to realize that we’re still 0-0 in the ACC. We do have a good team. We just can’t hurt ourselves.”

Quarterback Chris Turner: “You can’t lose the faith. That’s the thing. You can’t give in to everything you read or everything you hear. You have to stick together as a team, you have to really believe in yourself and believe that you can win a football game. Right now, a lot of us took it pretty hard after the loss on Saturday, but the goal is still there. We haven’t played an ACC game yet, and if we can just make these corrections and play the way we’re capable of playing, we’ll be fine.”

Greg Schimmel is The Diamondback’s Terrapin football beat writer. He can be reached at schimmeldbk@gmail.com. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Greg_Schimmel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Football, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.