If the story of the Maryland athletic department were only told through pictures, the Terps would be riding high.

Soon after his introductory press conference ended Wednesday afternoon, new men’s basketball coach Buzz Williams found himself quickly flanked by the biggest luminaries the Terps have to offer for the photo ops. In one, football coach Mike Locksley. In another, women’s basketball coach Brenda Frese.

National title-winning coach Gary Williams was ushered onstage with Juan Dixon, his Baltimore-raised, banner-hanging star, to huddle in with Buzz. University President Darryll Pines and interim athletics director Colleen Sorem cozied up to their hand-picked candidate — who seemingly never stopped beaming.

The still scenes projected what Maryland has said to be lacking in recent weeks. Unity. Strength. A winning tradition that is still relevant, and a title-winning standard the program is still chasing.

If only the photos told the whole truth. There’s still a lot of work — and damage control — for the Terps to do. When the key figures actually spoke about the future, very little of these issues was addressed.

This is still a department without a long-term athletic director, with big questions about its name, image and budget and revenue sharing raised by its last men’s basketball coach, Kevin Willard. It’s still a program that (as of Wednesday) has just two players who had not entered the transfer portal — Williams acknowledged at his press conference that he had not had the time to do any recruiting for Maryland during the busiest period of the year.

As good as it was to see a basketball coach ready to play nice with his on-campus peers (imagine trying to cram Willard in a photo with all these Maryland folks he burned in recent weeks), Williams’ word salad of an introduction was more head-scratching than inspiring.

Williams, who coached in this area just six years ago, was most relatable when introducing his wife and four children who flew in from across the country to celebrate his newest job. But he was near indecipherable when outlining the vision for keeping the program on a competitive path.

“Teams can be a basketball team,” Williams said at one point. “Team could be men’s basketball within the athletic department. Teams can be men’s basketball within this institution. This team, relative to this state. There’s a lot of lenses, in my opinion, in how you can view a team.”

I can only best reconstruct those sentences as team-building told through some muddled metaphor of Russian nesting dolls. Williams’ rambling, folksy yarns were clearer in the question-and-answer session, if a bit light on “answers.” When asked about how the administration settled any concerns raised by Willard, he breezed past.

“There was never any question from them on the commitment for us: me, the staff, NIL, the players, the resources, the Gossett Center [training facility] — I saw that this morning with a hard hat on,” he said. “So I’m not trying to be argumentative on anything, but I’m at peace with all of it.”

Williams’ “peace” with his newest surroundings might be a key reason why he’s at Maryland, a job that he seems very happy to have even though he leaves a well-supported gig (with deep-pocketed donors) in his native Texas. Williams was not asked during the session about his propensity to hop from school to school in six seasons or less — in fact, Sorem even trumpeted that he’ll be aiming to win 100 games at his fourth different institution, just like Lefty Driesell.

There were a few reaching efforts to connect Williams to the Maryland legacy, including Pines mentioning that Buzz has the same surname as program heroes: Walt, Buck and Gary among them. But that doesn’t change that Buzz is an outsider, an apparent sticking point for some prominent alums, including Len Elmore, Steve Blake and Greivis Vasquez who called for a Maryland alum to lead the program (Blake stumping most loudly for himself).

Sorem said Buzz Williams was the one person who appeared on “every one of those lists” offered by donors, advisers and other trusted parties. Those figures were invited to Williams’ introduction to help showcase the Terps’ ability to coalesce around Their Guy (when Willard was hired, it was largely a media-only event).

“We’re showing support because we know we have the right guy to lead our program,” Dixon said. “Of course we want to win championships, whether it’s Big Ten or national. But when it comes to the development of men, galvanizing this fan base — he has the personality to do it."

But it’s an open question how the Maryland tradition will be represented in the program’s leadership. Gary Williams said he would “love to see” former Terps represented on Buzz’s staff, but acknowledged it falls under the new coach’s discretion.

It’s not even certain exactly how the leaders who picked Buzz Williams will figure into the long-term picture. While Pines said his trust of Sorem “deepened” in the chaotic wake of Damon Evans’ departure, the university is expected to roll out a search for a permanent athletic director soon.

It’s not altogether unreasonable to wonder how many people posing in the pictures on Wednesday will still be in place in a few short years. The future still feels tenuous for a department that has been under fire.

For now, a photograph is the only way the Terps can all appear on the same page.