Hours after Mike Locksley and Maryland part ways, police are called on reporters outside Terps facility

Days when coaches are let go are chaotic for everyone inside a football building. On Wednesday in College Park, that chaos happened to spill out onto the sidewalk.

Hours after Maryland parted ways with head coach Mike Locksley, two reporters from Testudo Times, Nolan Rogalski and Jude Wilkenfeld, set up outside Jones-Hill House hoping to get a few players to talk about the news. According to Rogalski, it ended with police asking them to leave.

"For @testudotimes, @JudeWilkenfeld and I were outside Jones-Hill House trying to get players to comment," Rogalski wrote on X. "An athletics staffer took pictures of us, and a police dispatch was called for suspicious activity; a cop and 2 cop cars pulled up, and officers ID'd us and asked us to leave."

Rogalski posted photos alongside the account, including one of an officer writing on a notepad and another of a marked police SUV parked outside the facility.

Maryland has not publicly addressed the incident as of Wednesday afternoon.

Earlier in the day, we shared that Maryland and Locksley were parting ways after a 2-5 start that included five straight losses, the latest a 37-30 homecoming loss to Rutgers. A team spokesperson confirmed the move to The Diamondback, and athletic director Jim Smith said he and Locksley agreed "a coaching change was in the best interest" of both Locksley and the program.

Aazaar Abdul-Rahim will coach the Terps for the rest of the season. Abdul-Rahim was elevated to defensive coordinator days earlier, when Locksley relieved Ted Monachino of his duties following the Rutgers loss. He is in his second stint in College Park, having coached defensive backs and cornerbacks at Maryland from 2016-2018 before stops as defensive coordinator at UMass (2019) and as an assistant at Boston College (2020-2023), where he rose to associate head coach and co-defensive coordinator. He returned to Maryland in 2024 as co-defensive coordinator and defensive backs coach. Before that, he was an analyst and assistant director of player personnel at Alabama (2014-2015) and founded the program at Friendship Collegiate in D.C., where he was head coach from 2003-2013.

Now, back to the sidewalk.

There's probably a fair version of this from the athletic department's perspective. A head coach just lost his job, a staff is wondering about its future, and 18-to-22-year-olds are walking in and out of the building trying to process it. Wanting to protect players from being cornered on the way to a meeting is a reasonable instinct, and any coach who has lived through a similar situation can understand it.

But there's a whole lot of space between "please don't approach our guys here" and calling in a suspicious activity report on two student journalists holding phones. A rather simple conversation could have handled this. So would a staffer walking out and pointing them toward the media relations office.

Players can decline to talk, and most will on a day like this. That choice belongs to them, and reporters waiting outside a football building after a coaching change is about as old as the profession itself.

Maryland is about to spend the next several weeks selling its program to a new head coach, recruits and a fan base that has watched the Terps go 2-20 in Big Ten play since the start of 2024. Photos of police cars outside the football facility on the day of the firing aren't going to be framed well as an outside part of that pitch.

We'll update this story if Maryland or the university police department comments. Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest on the search in College Park and around college football.