Sports

Backdoor Cuts: Hoyas lost on recruiting trail

September 9, 2010


Some believe that the early bird catches the worm. Others believe that the best is yet to come.  For the Georgetown men’s basketball team, the latter had better be true.

On Tuesday afternoon, Chane Behanan, a 6-foot-7-inch power forward ranked 32nd overall on the ESPNU Top 100, committed to Rick Pitino’s Louisville Cardinals, becoming the fourth player in their recruiting class and their third ESPNU Top 100 recruit for the Class of 2011.

Other Big East powerhouses, like Villanova and Syracuse, are not far behind. Villanova has four commitments already, including two top-100 players.

Syracuse has three commitments, including two top-20 recruits, Michael Carter-Williams and Rakeem Christmas. Even more importantly, Christmas is said to have strongly considered the Hoyas before signing with the fucking Orange.

While other Big East teams haven’t drawn in the excellent classes that Louisville, Syracuse, and Villanova already have, they have made some progress. West Virginia has two commitments and Pittsburgh has four.

The Hoyas have a total of—gulp—zero commitments so far for the Class of 2011.

Adding insult to injury, the Hoyas lost a commitment from the Class of 2012 in Jordan Goodman when assistant coach David Cox left Georgetown in the offseason to go to Rutgers. Before working for Georgetown, Cox taught in the D.C. area and had strong ties to D.C. Assault, where he was an assistant coach.  D.C. Assault is an elite AAU program that is focused on developing youth basketball players in the Washington Metropolitan area. It also happened to be the program that Goodman and many other talented athletes played for.

Even worse, the Hoyas will be losing key graduates Chris Wright, Austin Freeman, and Julian Vaughn after this season.  With the exception of Jason Clark, the projected 2011-2012 roster is full of question marks.

But there is still time for the team to make an impact on the recruiting trail. The Hoyas still are in the running for six ESPNU Top 100 recruits, three guards and three forwards.

The guards are the cream of the potential crop. Rodney Hood, Quinn Cook, and Ky Madden are all top 50 recruits. With the eventual departure of Georgetown’s backcourt staples Wright and Freeman next year, reloading the guard class will be essential for future Hoyas success.

The Hoyas are also recruiting forwards Sam Thompson, Mikael Hopkins, and Angelo Chol. This group of big men, while talented, looks less likely to become Hoyas than the guard group. Chol is going to Kansas’ Midnight Madness on Oct. 15 and Hopkins hasn’t locked in a date yet for his visit to Georgetown.

More names are sure to come up in conversation until the Hoyas fill as many scholarships as they want to for next year. But as the time goes on, more and more recruits will already be signed. If the Hoyas don’t move quickly, basic probability says that it will be harder and harder to put together a class that could rival those of Louisville, Syracuse, or Villanova.

Now, I do not doubt head coach John Thompson III’s ability to do just that. But I’m just going to use a Yogi Berra-ism to warn the Hoyas that they better move quickly—it gets late early out there.




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hoyas SUck

jealousy hurts doesnt it