Desperate times have come to Georgetown University.
As students everywhere return from an abbreviated end of semester break, we are confronted with difficulties both old and new. Unfortunately, the old problems? huge lines at the bookstore, Jamaican jerk pork at New South, off-campus rent payments, arduous and unsuccessful textbooks searches and the like?somehow seem worse this year than they have in previous ones. Maybe it’s just me growing older and more disillusioned. Maybe it’s a general malaise still hanging over the city after all the nonsense from a few months ago.
But maybe it’s because we lost to Rutgers.
It’s been a dark year for the Hoyas thus far, and, unless something changes, the sun won’t be arriving anytime soon. Close losses to ranked teams like Virginia, UCLA and Miami are excusable. Losing to the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, the perennial laughingstock of organized sports programs everywhere, however, is as embarrassing as it is affirming that the Hoyas are in a big time funk, and I don’t mean the booty-shaking kind.
It’s very easy to point fingers. Everyone loves to blame Craig Esherick for questionable decisions in tight losses. Some like to blame individual players for not living up to their potential or playing as they have in the past. Others have repeatedly and somewhat mindlessly blamed Hoya Blue. As for me, I point my oversized blue “We’re No.1” foam finger at the University administration and the Sports Promotions department.
Has anyone ever noticed that many of the Georgetown basketball games are aired on the network formerly known as Home Team Sports, now Comcast Sports Net? No, probably not. You know why? Because you can’t get those games on campus television. Think about this logically and you’ll give yourself a headache. The University contracts the rights to air its basketball games to a cable channel that the students cannot get. Then the administration has the gall to attempt to discourage underage drinking and bar hopping when the only place a student can watch his or her basketball team play is at the bars!
It seems as though the administration is doing everything it can to suppress the basketball program, a highly dubious notion considering that much of Georgetown’s current academic reputation is due to the surge in applications the school received after the glory years for the Hoyas in the ‘80s. What’s worse is that it seems to be working; it seems as though every day fewer and fewer people care about the fate of the basketball team, the primary reason so many of us came to the school in the first place. What then, can we, as active, pro-basketball students do to get the figurative ball rolling for the Georgetown Hoyas program this year?
Desperate times call for desperate measures. If we make an initial push to bring spirit back to the Hoya basketball games, results will certainly follow. Let’s paint our faces and chests, take the capes and basketball head masks out of the closet and lose our minds at some games. If the administration can’t realize the importance of the basketball program to the University’s reputation, then we must. Let’s go out, save our season and our school.
