Dog, meet tail

The kid's number -- 79 -- is still painted on the grass in the end zone, and inscribed on the flags carried fluttering into the stadium by his teammates. And of course it is carved into the hearts of those teammates, because that is what a team does when one of their own falls.

So at least there is still that bit of decency, where the University of Maryland is concerned.

Of the rest, one can only say there are priorities, and the Maryland board of regents displayed their university's in screaming neon letters yesterday afternoon.

They called a news conference and announced -- inexplicably, unaccountably and apparently with only one dominant thought -- that they were reinstating head football coach DJ Durkin, on whose watch No. 79, Jordan McNair, died of heatstroke last spring. And they were retaining the athletic director, Damon Evans. And they were retaining the school president, Wallace D. Loh, although Loh will step down next June in a move widely interpreted as a forced resignation because Loh, alone among those in a position of authority, advocated Durkin not be reinstated.

And so the university was responsible for Jordan McNair's death, but no one was really responsible. This makes exactly as much sense as you think it does.

Which is to say no sense whatsoever, unless you understand the obvious, which is that college football on the level Maryland plays it is a business, and business supersedes everything else. It is the tail that wags the academic dog, despite the gauzy fables the people who run collegiate athletics love to spin about education and The College Experience. 

And yet ...

And yet even on that level, nothing about this makes sense.

On Durkin's and Evans' watch, for instance, the football program continues to leak interest and money, and -- according to a Baltimore Sun report published last week -- has become something of a black hole, incurring annual operating expenses of about $19 million. Football scholarships accounted for five times the amount for any other team; the $6.2 million budget for the football coaching staff, meanwhile, accounted for more than one-third of spending on all of the school's coaches.

Maybe the regents therefore thought they'd invested too much in Durkin to blow things up so soon. After all, they'd have to shell out another $5 mill to buy out his contract, piling further debt on an already debt-heavy program.

In any case, their explanation for retaining him suggested strongly that the regents had been into something stronger than coffee and Danish. Yes, the atmosphere around the program was toxic, but it wasn't, you know, toxic. Yes, the fired strength coach, Rick Court, was abusive, but that wasn't Durkin's fault, even though he personally made Court his first hire and had known him for years. Yes, the university was responsible for McNair's death, but, you know, not Durkin, who, as a first-time head coach, was deemed not to have given the proper training for his job.

Even though Durkin has been coaching on the college level for 17 years, and worked under the likes of Urban Meyer, Jim Harbaugh and Wil Muschamp. Even though he has been head coach at Maryland since 2016 -- during which time he's gone 10-15 and 5-13 in the Big Ten, not exactly the sort of record you'd think anyone would stand behind so resolutely.

And yet the Maryland regents have. And now Durkin will return to the sideline, despite the fact no one but the regents seems to want him there. Sources told ESPN that several players, including some starters, walked out on him when he spoke to the team yesterday.

This does not suggest the Terps are going to be winning a lot of games in the near future; when a coach loses his team, after all, he rarely gets it back. In which case it doesn't seem likely Maryland football is going to be much of a going concern in the near future, either.

No, sir. All the regents seem to have done here is transform their expensive, under-achieving football program into a full-blown dumpster fire.

In the meantime, Jordan McNair is still dead.

Jordan McNair is still not coming back to his family, or to his friends, or to his teammates, ever again.

"Saturday my teammates and I have to kneel before the memorial of our fallen teammate," Ellis McKennie, one of those teammates, tweeted yesterday. "Yet a group of people do not have the courage to hold anyone accountable for his death. If only they could have the courage that Jordan had. It’s never the wrong time to do what’s right."

Except this time, apparently.