2022 college basketball coaching carousel of progress

St. John's, simply because Georgetown has a new-ish basketball facility and St. John's doesn't. Otherwise they're both moribund urban Big East programs facing similar problems. The Johnnies already have been down the "let's hire our most famous alum as coach" path; Georgetown is following them down the same drain. Both programs are tethered to past glories that are unlikely to ever happen again.

 

Georgetown should join the Patriot League or similar league. Great liberal arts private rich school.

 

The A-10 would be a better fit. Fellow Catholic universities (Dayton, SLU, LaSalle, St. Joe's, Fordham, St. Bona's, Duquense), local rivalries to be developed with GMU and GW.

 

This would make all the sense in the world, but Georgetown won't play either GW or GMU in the regular season as nonconference opponents, much less conference foes. It thinks both of those schools are beneath it. Sadly, Georgetown doesn't realize it's closer to GW or GMU in hoops status right now than it is to the blue bloods.

DC could have an incredible Big 5-type thing every year, but won't because of ego. Maryland had to be guilted into the mere possibility of playing GW in the former BB&T classic every year, and then when GW started beating the Terps occasionally, Maryland more or less ended it.

 

Yeah, GMU's been to the Final Four (1) as many times as Georgetown has (1) in the last 36 seasons.

Many, me included, revel in the decline of a once-arrogant program.

 

I watched a bit of the St. John's- Georgetown game today. It was at McDonaugh Field House which seats 2.200 (I guess it was at McDonaugh for reasons of COVID). McDonaugh seats 2,200 and was about half full.

How can a Georgetown-St. John's game generate so little interest.

 

Good luck telling the kids that this used to be a rivalry with a lot of wins and interest. I saw the last couple of minutes of that game in Georgetown's facility. Can you imagine Big John and Looie playing in front of anything but SRO in the Garden back in the day? Then again, Bristlehead already came back and failed in Jamaica. Patrick can't get it turned around in D.C.

Any chance Big John might be partially responsible for the D.C. schools not playing each other more the way the Big Five does in Philly and so on? According to John Feinstein, Thompson once called Lefty Driesell an MF, and Lefty fired back at him through the media, "to err is human, to forgive is divine and I'm divine." I suspect no one has made any serious attempt to mend fences since ... or can someone in/around DC offer us an update?

 

They played at the Garden a couple weeks ago and drew a little more than 5,000

 

This was hoops life at its best.

 

It was a rescheduled game and Capital One wasn't available. They only let students attend the game.

 

This Georgetown/St. John's discussion got me going down a rabbit hole of programs that are total shells of their old selves, at least ones that were good when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.

Temple is one of those programs. Extremely relevant under John Chaney and now just kind of floating around in the ether in a weird league where their conference games are against the likes of East Carolina and Tulsa.

Georgia Tech is mostly irrelevant now, last year's ACC Tournament "title" notwithstanding. Used to be a regular Final Four contender.

UNLV fits this bill. I'd say UMass but UMass was really only relevant for those couple of Calipari years with Marcus Camby and the others.

Maryland is going down this road. The Terps still make the tournament more often than not but have only gotten out of the first weekend once since 2003.

New Mexico is now a nothing program. Used to be fairly relevant. No one talks about how hard it is to play at The Pit any more.

I'm sure I'm missing some.

 

There are ancient animosities at play, yes, but again it mostly comes down to ego. Where will the game be played? Cap One Arena is the logical choice because it's biggest, but it's Georgetown's home floor so the Terps hate that idea. And if it is played there, Maryland will insist on a 70-30 ticket split or something, and the Hoyas will say no to that. So right away, you have a huge stumbling block.

As for creating a Big 5-type thing, that's mostly on Georgetown, which will play American and Howard -- in other words, the bottom-rung low majors -- on occasion but steadfastly refuses to play GW (which is literally right down the street) or Mason. The Hoyas last played the Colonials in 1981-82 and have played Mason only once, in 1985-86. If you look at it from Georgetown's angle, there's very little upside to playing either: A win won't excite anyone while a loss to a "lesser" mid-major school would be humiliating. Never mind the fact that GW and Mason both have fielded better teams, on occasion, than Georgetown over the last 25-30 years or so.

If you go into these discussions with the realization that Georgetown still thinks it's 1984 -- because it most certainly does -- everything becomes clearer. The school can't accept the fact that its basketball program has become completely irrelevant on both the local and national stage.