The Post says the university is going to name Iowa Provost Wallace Loh as its new president.

I’m not going to pretend like I follow the careers of the nation’s university administrators. So who exactly is this guy?

According to the university’s news release, he’s been an academic for decades, and has a doctorate in psychology from Michigan and a law degree from Yale. He was born in Shanghai but grew up in Peru…unusual combination. He worked with former Washington Governor Gary Locke (now U.S. Secretary of Commerce) to expand affordable access to higher education to thousands of low- and middle-income students in that state. He was provost at Iowa for only two years.

D1scourse offers a quick reaction, but in a nutshell: he’s starting November 1, he’s old (65), and he has a reputation for combating drinking on college campuses. Interesting.

From an athletics perspective, coming from Iowa, he has Big 10 pedigree. As you know, the Big 10 was purportedly interested in luring Maryland away from the ACC. Unlike former athletic director Debbie Yow, interim AD Randy Eaton has indicated a willingness to at least listen to such overtures. Loh will undoubtedly have a large hand in helping to hire Yow’s permanent replacement. Verrrry interesting.

We’ll keep an eye on it.

Sorry…I just don’t. It’s not that I don’t find it important…it’s just that I find it boring. Or sorry, let me try and put it another way. I find it uninteresting. Tedious.

Wake me when it’s time to name the permanent successor. Or when “Terrapins Rising” finally starts (July 14!). Either way. Either way’s cool.

In the meantime, regarding this AD stuff, what am I supposed to do? Research? What am I supposed to be, like, some kind of knower of things? Whatever. Don’t box me in.

If you want me to pay attention to this story, perhaps we should call interim AD Randy Eaton by his professional wrestling handle, Randy “The Ram” Eaton. He gives budget crunches the big elbow smash, and so on. He’s just an old, broken-down piece of meat. But maybe — just maybe — he could get one last shot at happiness. At redemption.

If, unlike me, you continue to be interested in this process, The Diamondback has a good breakdown of the potential replacements. Now have yourself a happy 4th.

So Randy Eaton, the Maryland athletic department’s senior associate athletics director and chief financial officer, has been named the interim athletic director. Here’s the part where I pretend like I know all about him….ohh, yeeaaaahh, Randy Eaton! Sure, Randy Eaton, of course, yes. Good man, good man. A steady hand on the old wheel Mr. Eaton will surely be. Plus his background in gobbledygook will really serve the department well when it comes to executing their woozah-wuzzle.

But seriously, his title and his two decades of experience seem to make him a fine choice to shepherd the department through this, the offseason of our discontent (or content, rather, if you didn’t like Debbie). A tip of the cap and best wishes to Mr. Eaton.

Meanwhile, the search committee for Debbie Yow’s permanent replacement has been announced. Notables include Gary Williams, Len Elmore, men’s soccer coach Sasho Cirovski, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank, field hockey coach Missy Meharg, and Criminology and Criminal Justice Professor Charles Wellford. Would have been nice to see someone on there directly affiliated with the football team, but still, that’s a murderer’s row right thur, boy. You pitch around Missy Meharg, and there’s Charles Wellford staring you in the face. What can you do with that? Nothing. I think theyr’e gonna hit it out of the park. By the way, their timeframe for doing so, according to the Post, is three to four months.

(Photo credit: UMTerps.com)

In the meantime, an interim AD to take over for the departed Debbie Yow should be named this week, with the position expected to be filled permanently by the end of September at the latest.

What caught me most by surprise in the report, however, was that lady Terps’ basketball coach Brenda Frese will definitely be on the search committee; it’s in her contract. The report didn’t mention Gary Williams or anyone else as a potential member — for contractual reasons or otherwise — of the committee. Huh.

In today’s Post, columnist Mike Wise has his Roy Firestone moment. And it’s a big one, too. He got Debbie Yow to cry.

In a nutshell, the column celebrates Yow’s many accomplishments at Maryland. Twenty national titles in six sports during her tenure. Great coaching hires including Ralph Friedgen and Sasho Cirovski. Getting Comcast Center and the Byrd Stadium expansion built. Longer time in the position than five predecessors. And oh yeah, she was the first female AD in the ACC. He hints, in fact, that the “Machiavellian survival tactics” she “resorted” to wouldn’t have been such a big thing if she had a cockandballs. He calls her “a pioneer, a woman playing a man’s game.” Well…true enough.

The article is fair, and he opines that her departure was probably inevitable, given that she essentially organized shadow campaigns to buy out Gary Williams and Ralph Friedgen during their times of struggle. Obviously, those campaigns were not successful. To further my Usual Suspects motif from yesterday — “How do you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss?” Well, she missed. Bye, Debbie.

Still, the article paints her in sharp contrast to full-on eviscerations like John Feinstein’s. But maybe that illustrates a larger theme here.

Debbie Yow’s departure came as a pretty big surprise. Of course, there are always a few blog commenters and discussion board know-it-alls who have to roll their eyes and claim this was in the works for some time. (Oh, really, blog commenter? Debbie’s inner circle must have sworn you to secrecy then…only reason to explain why you didn’t mention anything BEFORE the fact.) Yeah, her bad relationship with Gary Williams was no secret, but still, her depature evidently was.

And that’s the thing. Debbie Yow’s entire tenure at Maryland seemed to happen behind the proverbial curtain. Fans and media — the eyes, ears, and voice of the fan — were necessary evils, not something to be embraced but to be leveraged, or dealt with. When you insist on operating in the dark, you relinquish to others the job of shaping your legacy. That’s what is happening to her, for good and bad, right now.

This move was surely hastened by the new, yet-to-be-named university president coming in late summer. Given that timeline, a new permanent AD selection could be many months away. Speculation on Yow’s replacement is already afoot, but right now it’s just names on a wall. Whenever the search committee gets serious, here’s hoping they pick someone who is a fan of the Terps, and operates with those fans in mind, in the full light of day. After all, sunshine is the best disinfectant. And there’s a serious funk right now coming out of the athletic department.

Whoa. Wow. Someone did NOT like Debbie Yow. I’ll give you a hint: his name rhymes with Schmon Schmeinstein. And if Schmon’s side of the story is fully accurate, he’s not the only one.

On his blog yesterday, Feinstein tore into Yow like she was a camper standing in front of his cubs. The headline said Yow “won’t be missed by many at Maryland,” and the article goes on to note that she had a pretty difficult personality, as “people came and went in the athletic department the way pitching coaches came and went when George Steinbrenner was still running the Yankees.” He goes into some pretty interesting details about her behavior behind the scences, before concluding that her “honeymoon won’t last terribly long” at N.C. State.

Lots of caustic (and juicy) allegations from Mr. Feinstein here, and it’s definitely worth a read.

Bottom line: the reasons Debbie Yow left don’t seem especially hard to figure out. She’s going home to take her dream job. She was on bad terms with the basketball AND football coaches. End of story. But according to Feinstein, there probably weren’t a lot of people trying to talk her out of the decision.

Here it is, straight from the wolfpack’s mouth.

And just like that — poof — she’s gone.

DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!

CSN Washington broke this story last night. Athletic director Debbie Yow, who has been at Maryland for 16 years, is expected to take the same position at N.C. State. She is from that area and her late sister, Kay, was their longtime women’s basketball coach. Word is she’s in Raleigh now.

Maryland President C.D. Mote is stepping down in August, so this could be a sign of recognition that the new president may be interested in selecting his or her own leadership team.

More as this develops…

Over on Bleacher Report, I posted a slideshow ranking the 50 greatest Terps in Maryland hoops history. Plus, as if that wasn’t enough, I did every write-up in haiku form. You heard me. Top that, Simmons. And it only took me eleventy gonzillion hours to complete!

My reward? The money, you say? Ahh, how droll. No, it’s not the money, my friend. There’s no money. Please guess again. If you just said, some self-inflating notion of personal satisfaction, wrong again. If you said, the editors asked you to do it and it seemed like a good idea at the time but then you quickly realized you were in way over your head when you were feverishly comparing Al Bunge to Will Hetzel but at that point you had come too far to back out, DING DING DING DING! You are correct. Your reward? I don’t know. It’s not money, though. It’s not money.

Please do check it out if you’re so inclined. All I have to do now is sit back, relax, and reap all the angry comments that my hard work is sure to sow. “DID YOO REALY JUST LEEVE DUTCH MORLEY OUT OF THE TOP THIRTY FIVE!?!?!?!? PLEEZ LERN SUMTHING ABOUT THE GAME OF BASKETBAL!!!!!!!!!!!!” It’s why I got into this business, after all. Go Terps.

Doing the people's work.

Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on anything these days. And that includes congratulating the Terps on a great season.

According to this story in the Post, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) introduced a resolution congratulating the team. But then Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) objected, saying that Hoyer earlier scuttled his resolution to congratulate UC Irvine on winning the men’s volleyball championship. Campbell then threatened to “take his ball and go home,” according to media reports, to which Hoyer responded that Campbell was “a big fat stupidhead.”

Campbell then noted a rather inconvenient truth, which in fact for him was very convenient — namely the announcement today that Maryland basketball has only an 8 percent graduation rate — the lowest of any in the tourney. (For the record, Gary Williams disputes the numbers by saying that many players go pro and come back to school, but as Maryland isn’t exactly NBA Player Superfactory Number One, I’m not completely sold on that argument.)

Anyway, the measure finally passed, but with 130 Republicans voting against it. Just another beautiful day in Washington.

Thanks to Aaron for passing this along.