Now that almost two weeks have passed since VCU ended Georgetown’s fourth straight season of underachievement and disappointment, we need to step back and look at what is really happening. We love our team, but is this program really what we think it is?
In 27 years at the helm, John Thompson, Jr. led the Hoyas to an astounding 596–239 record, with six Big East Tournament titles, three Final Four appearances, and a national championship. The elder Thompson’s résumé alone cements Georgetown’s place in college basketball lore. Yet since the early ‘90s, the idea of Georgetown as one of the country’s elite basketball programs has been based more on reputation than achievement.
While we revere the 1984 championship banner and remember all the NBA players that have walked through McDonough, the reality is that this team has won almost nothing in two decades and is now on the brink of dwindling into irrelevance on the national scene.
The Hoyas’ 2007 NCAA Tournament campaign was supposed to signal a rebirth, restoring glory to a program that had fallen on hard times. The school’s first Final Four appearance since 1985 seemed to erase memories of futility and usher in a new chapter of glory on the Hilltop.
Instead, the JTIII-led Hoyas followed it with four straight seasons of disaster. Many things have gone wrong, but it starts with the early departure of 2007 Big East Player of the Year Jeff Green. The star of the team’s Final Four run, Green was in a position to lead a Georgetown squad returning its entire rotation, likely in line for a preseason No. 1 ranking in 2008. Without him, the Hoyas still won the Big East regular season title, but they couldn’t get past Steph Curry and Davidson.
It hardly seems fair to blame Green for the Hoyas’ recent shortcomings, but since he broke from tradition, DaJuan Summers and Greg Monroe have both left promising teams to cash-in on NBA contracts, demonstrating a dramatic change in the culture of the program. Under John Thompson Jr., only two players, Allen Iverson and Victor Page, left school early for the pros.
But the problems stretch beyond early departures. The greatness of Georgetown basketball is also crucially intertwined with a series of elite big men. Patrick Ewing is of course the father of this reputation, but Dikembe Mutombo, Alonzo Mourning, Michael Sweetney, and Roy Hibbert all prospered doing the dirty work in the paint. These post players anchored a Georgetown defense that struck fear in their opponents, as well as offering an inside scoring option, a vital alternative to the perimeter shooting of recent teams.
After Hibbert graduated in 2008, Georgetown has failed to live up to its stature of “Big Man U.” Monroe could have been great, but in two years he never established himself as the kind of interior banger that gobbles up rebounds and sends opposing shots flying into the crowd.
Additionally, the Hoyas top-ranked defense of 2007 is a distant memory. The team finished with the 111th-best scoring defense in Division I this season, in no small part due to the lack of a defensive presence in the paint.
Four consecutive years of early exits to Davidson, Baylor, Ohio and VCU is hardly the mark of an elite program and would be unacceptable at any school that expected greatness. On a given night, JTIII’s teams can beat anyone, but as we’ve seen in this year’s tournament, so can VCU. Is that what this program should aspire to be? It’s time to start demanding a lot more if we want this program to maintain its place in the upper echelon of college hoops. Unless the Georgetown identity is restored, the 2007 Final Four could be the last we see for quite some time.
