Saturday is senior day for Maryland football, and the program will pay tribute to 22 players before meeting Iowa at noon. It will be a bittersweet moment for several members of that group who will play for the last time inside SECU Stadium in College Park.

It will also be a time of urgency because the Terps (4-6, 1-6 Big Ten) must win their final two games of the regular season to qualify for a bowl game.

“It just sucks being here where we are right now and having to be in the position to be desperate for the wins to get bowl eligible,” senior safety Dante Trader Jr. said Tuesday. “But also taking a step back, it’s been a long career. We’re trying to leave it better than what we came in hands of and just preach to the young guys, ‘However we finish, take the lessons.’ This program is going to be better from this year.”

Such positivity around the program is rare as Maryland is mired in a stretch of five losses in its past six games. Saturday’s 31-17 setback to Rutgers was the team’s third in a row and pushed it closer to the start of an early offseason.

The Terps still have a chance to earn a berth in what would be their fourth consecutive bowl for the first time since a four-year span between 1982 and 1985. But getting to that position requires games against Iowa (6-4, 4-3), which has won the past three meetings, and No. 4 Penn State (9-1, 6-1), which owns a 42-3-1 record in the all-time series.

“I would say that our backs are against the ropes,” junior outside linebacker Kellan Wyatt, a Glen Burnie native and Spalding graduate, acknowledged after the loss to the Scarlet Knights. “We need these. We’re taking them week by week. We have one-game seasons, and we’re going to start preparing for Iowa to do everything we can to win.”

Coach Mike Locksley is a wordsmith when it comes to coining phrases for his players and the media, and two of his favorites this week were choosing “optimism over pessimism” and “growth and progress over dwelling on the past.” But with each loss, the disillusionment from fans has intensified.

Still, Locksley struck a defiant tone when asked how he would address that disappointment.

“I talk to the people that I need to, and that’s my boss and my team,” he said. “So the crap gauge is on medium about explaining optimism to anybody outside of the program because if you really are a true Maryland football fan and you look at this team, sure, it’s disappointing. We left some plays on the field, and there were some games we could’ve won, should’ve won. But that’s happening all around college football.

“What I will say is that the kids in the program, the way they play and the way they prepare, and the way we have recruited, we’re still having a great year in recruiting. Nobody’s falling off the wagon based on this year because we speak very authentic and honestly about where we are, and this record is where we are.”

Locksley cited reasons for that hope. As he mentioned, the program has earned verbal commitments from a group of prospects rated 18th in ESPN’s national Top 20 rankings of schools’ incoming class of freshmen, including four-star Spalding quarterback Malik Washington.

He said he has seen signs of growth from an offensive line and secondary that have been the subjects of considerable criticism this fall, and he announced that redshirt junior quarterback Billy Edwards Jr., one of the players who will be honored Saturday and has started every game this season, will return next year.

Perhaps because of those reasons, senior wide receiver Tai Felton said morale within the team has not diminished.

“We’re all good,” said Felton, who is the school’s single-season leader in catches (86) and was named Tuesday a semifinalist for the Biletnikoff Award that is presented annually to college football’s most outstanding receiver. “We’re staying together. That’s the biggest thing with everybody around us kind of being a little negative and stuff like that, but we’re staying positive. We’re looking at the sunshine and not really trying to be down.

“We know we still have two more games left, and we still have two opportunities to get the job done. So as long as we have two opportunities to get the job done, we’re going to keep on fighting and keep trying hard every week until that time is up.”

Locksley acknowledged that the Terps have much work to do. But that doesn’t mean he has soured on the players or coaches and what they have built.

“I’ll reiterate we aren’t where we want to be, but we’re still who we want to be,” he said. “I can tell you there’s nobody over in that building [Jones-Hill House] that is not willing to continue to put the work in to find a way to finish this thing the right way. And we’re a team. We’re a team that stays in it until the last seconds on the clock. We fight hard until the end. You don’t see us just lay down and quit.”

Saturday’s game against Iowa is an opportunity for Maryland to back up Locksley’s words. One might think the players are feeling the pressure after being backed into the proverbial corner, but Trader, a McDonogh graduate, said the scrutiny from outside of the team doesn’t bother him and his teammates.

“It’s more internal than anything because looking back at going from summer and nicks and bangs that everybody has faced, we want it so bad, but every week, we come out, and it’s just like, ‘What Maryland team is going to show up?’” he said. “Let’s be real. So it’s internal pressure. Yeah, we’ve got the external pressure of the fans. You all deserve to see us come out and play to our ability. If they want to support us, we’ve got to put a product out on the field and everything so that they can do that and support us in the end.”

Have a news tip? Contact Edward Lee at eklee@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/EdwardLeeSun.