Dropped for a loss

Jamari McCollough strode out of the training room in Maryland’s football team house in a dead-of-winter day only to witness something entirely unexpected.

It was unmistakable. Ralph Friedgen, his old-school, sometimes larger-than-life coach, was standing on a scale without a shirt on.

Except there was a surprise.

“I’m like, ‘Something’s different about him,’ ” McCollough recalled. “He looked waaaay smaller. So I started talking to other people, and they said he’s lost a lot of weight. He’s looking smaller and smaller and smaller.”

And smaller still. The Fridge - nix that, the Mini-Fridge - is down 80 pounds since October thanks to a diet almost custom-made for his schedule, the discipline to stick with it and the desire to take care of his health as he slips deeper into his 60s.

“Eighty pounds is a lot,” offensive coordinator James Franklin marveled. “It’s like a sixth-grader.”

His wardrobe is changing by the week. His treadmill is receiving its most regular work in years. His wife, his players and his colleagues notice a more energetic man bouncing around College Park.

And while he’s only a little more than halfway to his goal of dropping 150 pounds, Friedgen is progressing in battling perhaps his most defining - and troubling - trait.

“I pretty much did it because I have three daughters,” said Friedgen, choking up during a recent afternoon in his office. “I want to be around to see their kids and their weddings. [And] my wife nagged the heck out of me.”

Friedgen is the face of his program, and whatever ecstasy and misery the Terrapins endured in the past eight years almost always were credited to the man who was recognized as much for being large as he was for remaining in charge.

Only one of those was ever needed, as Friedgen discovered in recent months while slimming down to 320 pounds.

“I go into places and they’ll say, ‘That guy looks a little like Friedgen,’ ” he said. “I hear them saying that. They don’t quite know because I’ve lost weight. One guy said to me the other day, ‘You look a lot like that head football coach at Maryland.’ I said, ‘I get it all the time.’ ”

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Friedgen didn’t always face these problems. A glimpse of photos from his time as an assistant in the mid-1980s demonstrates it. He wasn’t tiny - about 250 pounds a couple of decades ago - but his weight wasn’t out of line for a former college offensive lineman in his early 40s.

But then he took a pro job in San Diego right when electronic breakthroughs started to seep into the NFL. Friedgen’s reputation for exploiting computers to improve the performance of players and coaches is well-known, but the initial burst of technology sat him down more.

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