College basketball rankings: Maryland drops out of Top 25 and 1 after heartbreaking loss to George Mason

Maryland won each of its first three games. At surface level, the season is off to a good start. But the Terrapins entered only one of those competitions and consistently slipped at KenPom – from 18th last season to 26th after winning 68-57 last season. Vermont last week.

That shows Terrapins didn’t work as expected.

On Wednesday, it caught up with them.

The last point: George Mason 71, Maryland 66.

Patriots were 12 out of 24 from 3 while shooting 44.8% from the field. D’Shawn Schwartz finished with a game-high 24, nine rebounds and three steals.

“We thought we had to beat everyone; it wasn’t,” said Maryland coach Mark Turgeon. “It’s so hard. We didn’t vote for the 20th [in this week’s AP poll]. And so you get the best photo of everyone. We don’t know how to handle it yet.”

For the purposes of the CBS Sports Top 25 and 1 daily college basketball rankings, Maryland — removed from the Top 25 and 1 updated Thursday morning — is the story. But what happened Wednesday night was about George Mason.

That was a great deal.

George Mason didn’t come NCAA Tournament since 2011 and never finished better than fifth in Atlantic 10 in six seasons under Dave Paulsen. So the school fired Paulsen last March and replaced him with a 33-year-old player Tennessee assistant Kim English, a prominent person at Missouri who then played in NBA. He grew up in Baltimore and attended high school 60 miles from George Mason’s campus, just 40 miles from Maryland’s. And in just his fourth game as head coach, the Maryland native gave George Mason his first win in the Maryland program, and he did it on the Maryland campus.

“That’s what he’s come here to do – to build this program and win games like this,” said Schwartz, a transferee who has played the past four seasons at Colorado, where English was an assistant from 2017 to 2019. “In the dressing room, we talked about doing nothing differently from our first three games. Our standards are our standards. us, and that’s what we play.”

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