The tumultuous past six months have alienated supporters, turned mostly muffled critics into a booming chorus and amplified the myriad issues the department already faced.

Hanging prominently on the wall behind Evans’s desk is the slogan he hopes unites a department once rife with troubles — “One Maryland” — though for the time-being, it’s missing a letter.

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“The ‘O’ won’t stick to the wall,” Evans said.

That was fixed easily enough. But as Maryland tries to emerge from the football controversies that have rattled the entire campus, athletic department officials face a much more daunting list of challenges — some that go back years, others left in the wake of recent bullying allegations, dual investigations and the death of 19-year-old football player Jordan McNair. The obstacles touch virtually every piece of the department, from raising funds to selling tickets to providing a safe environment for athletes.

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Interviews with current and former athletic department employees reveal that Maryland faces many inherent challenges that are only more pronounced today. Four years into its Big Ten tenure, it is still an anomaly compared with most other conference schools. It lacks the fan support and booster dollars that buttress other athletic departments. Its mission and self-identity haven’t always been clearly defined, and the internal culture at times feels stolen from a soap opera script, with rivalries and office politics undermining the entire enterprise.

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“Building bridges will be key,” said Tom McMillen, the former congressman and Terps basketball star who recently served on the commission that probed the football program. “The student-athletes have had lots of upheaval, and they need some calm. Fundraising will be important, but that cannot start until the temperature is reduced throughout the athletics program. Normalcy and stabilization must be the priority.”

The controversies surrounding the football team cost DJ Durkin his head coaching job, led to Maryland President Wallace D. Loh announcing his intention to retire at the end of the academic year and prompted board of regents chairman James T. Brady to resign under pressure.

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Evans managed to keep his job, but he did not emerge unscathed and is now tasked with steadying a ship that many feel he helped steer off course in the first place. After serving nearly three years as a top deputy, Evans became the interim athletic director in October 2017 and then took over the job on a permanent basis July 2.

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The department he leads was painted as chaotic and disorganized by an independent commission, which raised concerns about Evans’s own actions and ability to lead. The department “suffered from high leadership turnover rates, dissension, and internal rivalries” and “the mismanagement of the Athletics Department had adverse effects on the football program,” according to the commission’s 192-page report.

Even though the commission’s initial charge was to dig into the culture of the football program, the investigators went into great detail on the woes of the athletic department. This was necessary, the investigators wrote, because the “context is important to understand the shortcomings in the operations of the football program that we found.”

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Multiple athletic department employees, though, say the report captured an incomplete snapshot.

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Nick Hadley, not a department employee but a physics professor who serves as the faculty athletics representative, was among those who met with investigators and said the commission did a “very thorough job about football” digging into the program.

“When they went beyond football and tried to extrapolate to athletics as a whole there, I don’t think they had done a thorough job. . . . That was unfair to the department as a whole,” he said.

Bills come due

The football controversy is expected to exacerbate many issues that have festered for years in College Park. When Kevin Anderson took over as athletic director in 2010, he oversaw an ACC school with 27 sports and a budget of $55 million. Eight years later, Evans took the reins of a Big Ten program that has scaled back to 19 sports and struggles to meet its $94 million budget.

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The department had a $475,000 surplus last year, thanks largely to a $40,667,000 payout from the Big Ten. Ticket sales mark its next-largest revenue stream at $14.7 million. Forty-seven percent of that comes from football and 45 percent from men’s basketball.

The department’s expenses escalate every year. Salary and benefits account for $35.6 million, more than double any other cost.

The number of Terrapin Club donors has shrunk considerably in recent years, down nearly 35 percent from its high of 10,900 in 2008, according to Maryland’s figures. With 6,241 donors last fiscal year, the fundraising group has lost more than 2,000 from its rolls in the past three years alone. Those familiar with the situation cite two key factors: waning enthusiasm surrounding the football and men’s basketball programs and constant turnover among administrators in charge of fundraising, a churn that included four development directors in a five-year period.

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Last school year, the Terrapin Club’s annual fundraising, which covers the costs of athlete scholarships, was the lowest it has been in at least 15 years, leaving a $5 million gap that’s instead absorbed by the athletic department’s operating budget.

Endowments are also a major target for the department, but Maryland athletics is far off the pace of other Big Ten programs. Through last year, Maryland had 58 athletic endowment funds, totaling a market value of $19.5 million. Every other athletic department in the conference has at least twice as many endowments. Purdue is the next-closest with 126 endowments worth $26.1 million. On the other end of the scale, Penn State has 400 worth $156 million and Michigan 450 worth $108 million. Many in the department are bracing for athletic donations to suffer even further in the wake of McNair’s death.

In 2015, the school began a major overhaul of Cole Field House, turning the storied arena into an indoor football facility. Kevin Plank, the Under Armour chief executive, kick-started the effort with a $25 million donation, but the project carries a price tag of $196 million. The school is counting on donors to help foot the bill with a goal of raising $90 million. As of last spring, Maryland had received $11.6 million in gifts and another $47 million in pledges, which means the school is one-third of the way from its target and was still seeking $31.4 million from donors.

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Maryland is now trying to woo the football boosters who supported Durkin and also the donors who are upset over the way the school has handled the entire affair.

“We have people on all ends of the spectrum,” said Cheryl Harrison, a senior associate athletic director who oversees fundraising in her role as chief development officer. “We have those who truly support the university, support the athletic department leadership, student-athletes, and are letting us know they’re with us. And we have others who are saying: ‘I’m not sure what’s going on. I need more information, some answers.’ ”

Rotating leadership

The commission report quoted the university’s chief of human resources as saying that in the Maryland athletic department, “There is no structure. That is not normal.”

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Athletic officials don’t agree with this description, but for many years the department was constantly reorganizing its leadership ranks.

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In 2016, Anderson unveiled an organization chart he called the “Maryland 21st Century Athletic Department Matrix.” Unlike a more traditional pyramid, it was a circular structure that “represents a collaborative department promoting communication and free flow of information between the various units,” according to a news release.

There were 10 people in the matrix’s leadership team. Two and a half years later, just four remain. The commission report found that between 2010 and 2018, 14 executives left the department. Many left for high-ranking jobs at schools such as Alabama, Penn State, Georgia Tech and Iowa. At least two are now athletic directors.

The report found fault with the way Anderson worked with some employees but also drew attention to the way Evans managed to rise up the ranks.

After six years as athletic director at Georgia, Evans resigned in 2010 following his arrest for DUI. He worked in the private sector initially, and in 2014, Anderson brought him to College Park as a top deputy to the athletic director. Within a couple of years, according to the report, the relationship between the two deteriorated, and Anderson began to feel that Evans was seeking to take his job.

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The commission found the department’s “dysfunction was largely due to a chasm between Mr. Anderson and Deputy AD Evans.” The investigative report noted that Evans’s calendar revealed 24 meetings with Loh in 2016 and 2017 that Anderson was not aware of. In the summer of 2017, Loh had the two over to his house to discuss the simmering tension. Loh advised them to “develop position descriptions” for their jobs that would clearly draw lines of responsibility.

Anderson refused, upsetting Loh. That set the stage for the blowup that would lead to Anderson’s ouster just a couple of months later.

In September 2017, Anderson approved a $15,000 payment using money from the university foundation to a lawyer representing two football players who had been accused of sexual misconduct. Evans brought the arrangement to Loh’s attention.

The president suspended Anderson while the school investigated the matter. Anderson agreed in October 2017 to take a six-month sabbatical before resigning, and Evans was named interim athletic director.

Even before his stint as the department’s temporary leader, Evans, 48, was a subject of scrutiny. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Maryland received a formal complaint in 2017 alleging Evans was having a romantic relationship with a subordinate, which triggered a human resources inquiry. Evans denied the allegations, and the inquiry turned up no evidence of wrongdoing, according to the Chronicle.

In February 2018, Stan Johnson, the executive director of the Minority Opportunity Athletic Association, sent a letter to Loh contending that Evans helped force out three minority senior administrators: Anderson; Lori Ebihara, a senior associate athletic director; and Jamie Williams, the director of student-athlete engagement. Johnson wrote that “the actions appear to be unjust and have created negative environments within the department.”

The organization received a response one month later from Maryland’s human resources administrator, saying the school cannot discuss personnel matters but noting that in the previous 14 months, the athletic department had made 15 hires, six of whom were women or minorities.

While many boosters had thrown their support behind Temple Athletic Director Patrick Kraft to land the Maryland post, Loh gave Evans the job on a permanent basis in June, 12 days after McNair died.

Even now, there is no shortage of boosters, employees and alums who question whether Evans can effectively lead the department. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) described himself as a “big fan of Dr. Loh” but added, “There are people who are concerned about why didn’t you make the decision [to fire Durkin earlier] and why didn’t you fire the AD.” Scott Van Pelt, the ESPN personality who is among the most visible supporters of Terrapins athletics, questioned how Evans could be retained after Durkin was fired, and the editorial board of the Diamondback student newspaper called for his ouster, saying he “let his personal squabbles get in the way of his duty to protect student-athletes.”

Evans’s leadership team has seen turnover since he assumed temporary control of the department in October 2017. Two senior leaders have left — one of whom was forced out, according to multiple people familiar with the situation — and Evans has hired or promoted three others, including deputy athletic director Colleen Sorem, who functions as chief financial officer and also oversees many day-to-day operations of the department.

“Although it was a time of uncertainty for us as a department, not quite knowing if Kevin was coming back, I think because of Damon’s leadership and who he is and what he represents, he was able to stabilize us and move us through that period,” Harrison said.

'One Maryland'

When Evans met with the board of regents last month, he stressed that the department had prospered under his brief leadership, according to multiple people familiar with the meeting, and that the athletes, coaches and staff members didn’t need further disruption.

“The fact is, in my opinion, Damon had only held the job since July 2, where he had complete authority. Before that, it was somewhat tenuous,” said Barry Gossett, the board’s vice chair and a longtime athletic booster. “You had to go back to the relationship and or the setup of the previous AD. . . . Kevin basically wasn’t around for the last two years.

“With all that said, it was difficult to say that Damon did not perform maybe the way he could have or would have did he have complete control.”

While Evans’s job had been effectively spared, the commission noted that Evans had been responsible for the football program throughout Durkin’s tenure and said Anderson had instructed Evans “to spend more time observing the program.”

“I always have to take a step back and take a look at myself: Are there things that I would have done differently? Sure there are,” Evans said. “. . . I’m a big believer that you should go around programs, not just to have meetings set up but for times when you can just drop by and see what’s going on. So are we frequenting practices more? Yes. Are we going to the facility more? Yes.”

Now that his standing as athletic director is secure, Evans is moving quickly. Over the summer, he shared with his staff eight guiding principles (examples: collaboration, integrity, transparency) and strategic priorities (examples: add 1,000 new donors, develop a staff retention plan, review athletic training program).

“He’s really worked hard to bring us together, to unify us, and kind of our theme of being one Maryland,” said Cathy Reese, Maryland’s women’s lacrosse coach.

By adopting the “One Maryland” branding, Evans aims to give a stronger identity to a department that hasn’t always known what it wanted to be. It has a rich basketball history but then jumped to a football conference. Many of its other programs have been successful — Terps field hockey was the national runner-up this month, and the men’s soccer team beat Kentucky on Friday to advance to the national semifinals — but haven’t received much attention.

“Why can’t we be a football school and a basketball school and a baseball school and a tennis school?” Evans said. “Where does this idea come that we have to be one or the other? That’s been a frustration of mine.”

Evans wants athletes, staff members, fans, donors and the rest of campus to know that the department won’t be defined by the events of the past six months.

“We’ve got to make sure that we move forward in a way that will allow our staff to grow, our staff to become stable and have that continuity,” he said. “We can’t forget about the past. We’ve got to learn from what transpired, which was very, very tragic, do what’s appropriate based upon what we learn but move our department forward.”