Maryland coach Ralph Friedgen will be asked to take a buyout, a source familiar with the program said tonight.

Friedgen's ouster comes just hours after athletic director Kevin Anderson declined to say Friedgen would return for 2011 and on the same day offensive coordinator and head coach in waiting James Franklin accepted the head coaching position at Vanderbilt.

The source also said defensive coordinator Don Brown, running backs coach John Donovan and wide receivers coach Lee Hull were invited to join Franklin's staff and are possibilities to do so.

The military helicopter peels sideways through the broad blue sky as the crowd roars, and soon enough Frank Beamer appears at the mouth of the tunnel here at Lane Stadium. He’s about to lead his team onto the field, but as usual he pauses as he allows the fervor to gather, all the while surveying the world he has built from what was once the quaint mediocrity of Virginia Tech Football.

On this day, his face is drawn and tired and fixed with the grave concern that always clouds over him when one of his teams stumbles. This 2010 group waits nervously behind him in the tunnel. The players are mostly young and uninitiated yet very eager to please Beamer. But stumble they have in spectacular fashion. They appeared to have beaten third-ranked Boise State in a season-opening Monday night game, only to collapse and lose at the end. Five days later they suffered the greatest humiliation of Beamer’s impressive career by falling here, on their home field, to lowly James Madison.

“It is what it is,” he told the media afterward. It is a phrase Beamer has used often in his 30 years as a head coach.

It’s the phrase his mother taught him long ago. Projected to perhaps challenge for the national championship, Beamer’s club instead began the season with two losses. So now he stands here, eyeing the expanse of Hokie faithful who have spent the past dozen days venting their anger on talk radio across the state.

He is eager to see if they still love him.

ESPN will begin its year-long initiative, Year of the Quarterback (YQB) -- an in-depth examination of one of the most critical, coveted and talked-about positions in all of sports – with content across all platforms including television, radio, ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine.

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Two for the Show – A four-part half-hour series following the career path of three top-tier college quarterbacks: Jake Locker (Washington) and Tyrod Taylor (Virginia Tech).

Lately it's becoming more and more obvious why Virginia Tech used to shy away from playing non-conference games against quality opponents.

The Hokies can't seem to win them.

Hoping to enhance their chances of earning an NCAA tournament berth this spring, Virginia Tech beefed up its 2010-11 schedule and added games against schools such as Kansas State, Purdue and Mississippi State. The Hokies also played in the Phillips 76 Classic in Anaheim, Calif., where they faced the likes of Oklahoma State and UNLV.

So far the move has backfired.

At 5-4, Virginia Tech is one of the biggest disappointments in college basketball thus far. Seth Greenberg's squad opened the season with a No. 22 national ranking but quickly fell out of the polls after being drubbed by Kansas State in the second game of the season.

Sure, you can read the statement from the University below, but all you really need to know about Al Golden is that he lifted weights to "The Final Countdown," which is roughly the equivalent of breastfeeding whiskey, he's going to recruit his ass off, and he'll be introduced Monday.

Hite said he met with both on Monday to discuss their future and each decided to explore their draft possibilities. He added that Evans's paperwork has already been sent out, and Williams should have his together shortly.

"Just my gut feeling, I don’t think both of them will come back," Hite said. "But there’s no real rhyme or reason behind it right now."

Any time a team wins 11 in a row, something magical is going on. But two people in particular worked a special kind of magic this season.

I'm talking about Bryan Stinespring and Tyrod. (That's right; after the year he had, he's earned "Pele" name status).

Stinespring, the offensive coordinator, enjoyed his finest season.

He has always worked tirelessly; he has his priorities in order; his players like him. But for the last few years he's been a polarizing figure in Hokie Nation. A lot of fans were unhappy over the direction and production of Tech's offense. Someone even created a web site urging his dismissal. He's been the subject of columnists, radio shows and message board posts.

This year he answered every challenge. When the media criticized him for Tech's ineffectiveness in the red zone, he worked until he solved the problem. When he was ripped for the Hokies' third-down woes, he fixed that issue too (at one point in the ACC Championship game, Tech was 12-of-14 on third downs). When he was criticized for a lack of crossing patterns in slants in the Tech offense, he found a winning play with Danny Coale. In a year when the defense was young, his offense stepped up and put points on the board.