Georgetown University Athletic Director Joe Lang’s comments in the Washington Post last week defending embattled men’s basketball Head Coach Craig Esherick angered many Hoyas fans. Amid criticism following embarrassing losses to St. John’s and Seton Hall, Lang praised Esherick for averaging 21 wins in his three full seasons as head coach, extolled the team’s high graduation rate (84 out of 86 players on Esherick’s watch) and argued that it is “unreasonable” to expect the Hoyas to reach the NCAA tournament every year.
While anonymous flyers pasted across campus and indignant rants on message boards online blasting Lang and calling for Esherick’s head do nothing to improve the situation, neither do Lang’s ill-advised comments and the misguided perspective they herald.
Lang’s claim of Esherick’s success is dubious at best. 21 wins a year on a cupcake non-conference schedule is not particularly impressive, especially considering his Big East winning percentage hovers at a mediocre 50 percent. Realistically, Lang and any basketball fan know that success has for decades been measured by a team’s presence and performance in the NCAA tournament. To say that it is unreasonable to expect Georgetown to compete in the tourney is to claim it is unfair to expect the Hoyas to be good. An athletic department that holds such low expectations insults the team, its coach and its fans.
Lang’s comments are representative of the attitude within the university administration that seeks to marginalize the importance of athletic excellence at Georgetown. Deprioritizing plans for an on-campus basketball arena, paving over the baseball field and eliminating already-shoddy track and field facilities shows that Georgetown does not consider athletics to be core part of the University. By choking programs of the support and resources they need to recruit athletes and build successful teams, the administration flouts the very traditions that made this University great in the first place.
Athletic success is not a legitimate excuse for academic failure, and neither can academic achievement be used to justify athletic failure, as Lang attempted to do. Success on the court and in the classroom are by no means mutually exclusive, as Duke Head Coach Mike Krzyzewski has proved in Durham, N.C. for over two decades. Though we applaud Esherick for keeping his players graduating and out of trouble, his performance as a coach has been mediocre. Lang and the University’s eagerness to extend Esherick’s contract until 2009 shows a willingness to accept mediocrity from Georgetown’s marquee athletic program, along with a misguided concern for the future of Georgetown’s reputation and image.
Until Esherick shows that he can bring a consistent commitment to success on the court as well as in the classroom, Lang and the administration should not have extended any commitment to him. Until the University can manage great expectations for the Esherick and Hoyas alongside great tradition, this success will remain a pipe dream.
