Maryland football’s second game of the season will be in primetime. The Terps’ matchup against Charlotte on Sept. 9 will kick off at 7:30 p.m. on NBC, The Action Network’s Brett McMurphy reported.

While most of the Terps’ kickoff times are to be determined, it’s the second known night game on this fall’s schedule and the first that will be on NBA as part of the Big Ten’s new TV deal with the network, a valuable chance to play in front of a big national audience.

Their game a week later against Virginia was moved to Friday night, it was announced in late April. Those two games are part of a season-opening stretch during which Maryland will have a chance to build a strong record heading into the perennially brutal stretch of games in Big Ten East play. They open with Towson, Charlotte and Virginia, travel to Michigan State and then host Indiana before the schedule turns tougher; ranks their schedule the 10 hardest in the country.

So that opening five-game stretch of winnable games will play a large role in determining the Terps’ success this season. After winning 15 games combined the past two seasons, Oddsmakers have set the Terps’ wins total for this fall at 6.5 wins.

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The goal is “to be able to be better than a year ago. And to me, that’s not always shown in the win or loss column. It’s shown in the type of program you have, it’s showing the way we compete. It’s showing the way that our players are being developed,” Terps coach Mike Locksley said on The Number One College Football Podcast in the spring.

Maryland will be heavily favored against Charlotte, but the 49ers will have some extra motivation. First-year coach Biff Poggi, the former coach at Baltimore high school powerhouses Gilman and St. Frances Academy, has a long list of former Terps — almost all of them former St. Frances players — on his roster, including ZionAngelo Shockley, Joseph Bearns, Challen Fa’Amatau, Terrance Butler and Ja’Khi Green.

“Look, I spent 30 years of my life coaching in Maryland and in the DMV, as it’s now called, and I spent my playing days in high school here,” Poggi said during a January interview on Glenn Clark Radio. “I’ve invested a lot of time in this town. This is my town and my home. … When you get a long period of time to be at a place like Baltimore and the DMV, it means that you have impacted and honored people and their children. When that happens, people have a certain loyalty to you. So we have had an incredible amount of success here.”