We’re #69! Gheorghetown Edition

As of the starting of this post, Georgetown men’s basketball is ranked #69 in the Ken Pomeroy College Basketball rankings.   Sitting at 12-6 overall and 3-4 in a middling Big East, Ed Cooley’s Hoyas are currently outside the NCAA tourney bubble, but at least are in spitting distance of making the dance.  (Note: they have since fallen after yesterday’s games even though they did not play. Take note, this feature may end up being a jinx.)

Recent History: Over the past few seasons, the Georgetown basketball program has been a lot more like Jonestown (too soon?) than the juggernaut that was Georgetown of the 80s & 90s.  In related news, Guyana is going to open the Jonestown site to tourists for anyone that has a morbid interest in 50 year old cult mass suicides.   

The once proud program has been rattling around at the bottom half of the Big East for most of the last decade.  Since the 2014-2015 season, the Hoyas are 135-179 (.430) overall and 54-129 (.295) in conference.  In the past three years they have won 4 Big East games (FOUR!) including the 2021-22 Patrick Ewing led team that went 0-19 in the conference. Ooof.  

Mascot/Nickname Profile:  Georgetown’s mascot is Jack the Bulldog with the current iteration being the 9th live English Bulldog playing the role of Jack.  According to the good folks over at BulldogWorld:

Because of the English Bulldogs build, it makes it difficult and dangerous for them to mate. Their stocky, front-end heavy bodies can mean that the males are unable to mount the females, and even if they are able to mount the female, they are at risk of injuring the female with their heavy bodies. This is why an English Bulldog should be artificially inseminated.

This fact reinforces the bulldog as the perfect mascot for Georgetown.  

As for the nickname, back in the day, fans of opposing teams at the Big East Tournament should chant, “What the hell’s a Hoya?”   I’m still not sure I know.  According to the Googles and the Wikis, it comes from a combination of the Greek “Hoia” and Latin “Saxa” to create the not nerdy at all popular sporting chant “Hoya Saxa!”   Beloved by fans of the classical languages, “Hoya Saxa!” translates loosely to “What Rocks!”.  Yeah, I don’t know either.  

Home Arena: Capital One Arena (Cap. 20,356) As Mr. Fabulous said in The Blues Brothers, “It’s a Fucking Barn”.  

Notable Basketball Alumni: Sleepy Floyd, Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning, Dikembe Mutombo, Allen Iverson and many others.  However, it has been 12 years since the Hoyas have had a player drafted and there is only one alumni currently playing in the NBA. (For those that like to play at home, I’ll put their identity at the end)

While basketball alumni that went on to play basketball get most of the headlines, it’s also fun to dive a bit deeper into the media guide and see what other notables suited up for a team.  Georgetown being Georgetown, they have a few.  These include Henry Hyde (Rob feel free to toss tomatoes or pee on the grave of this political opportunist), and former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue who averaged 11.3 points per game as a 3 year letterman from 1960 -1962, including his senior year when he was elected team captain and student body president.  

Most notably for a certain subsection of the G:TB readership, attorney William Shea was a Hoya cager from 1929-1931.  Shea was instrumental in getting an expansion baseball team awarded to New York in 1962.  When the New York Metropolitans Baseball Club built their new stadium, they named it in honor of William Shea, later indirectly leading to the naming of my cat. 

Current Season Results: As noted above, the Hoyas fortunes are vastly improved this year over the past few years.  They have winning record overall and are 10-3 at home, but have begun to struggle as they face the teeth of their Big East conference schedule.   For the degenerates out there, they are 10-8 ATS.  

Reasons To Believe: Ed Cooley can coach.  The 2022 Naismith College Coach of the Year has turned the program around after the bleak Patrick Ewing years.  They have more talent on the roster now and have a coach who can get more out of them.  Even the best teams in the Big East this year have proven that they can be beaten so anyone in the top half of the conference will have a chance to run the table at the Big East Tournament and get in to the NCAAs.

Reasons To Fade Them:  They have zero “Quad 1” wins so far this season and the Big east is not strong enough so they won’t get too many in conference opportunities to improve the quality win category.  They have lost four in a row and just lost at home to DePaul who had lost 39 consecutive Big East games and had not won a road conference game since 2022.  At this point an at-large bid looks to be a loooong shot.

If I had to bet, I’d bet against G-Town making the NCAA tourney this year, but it does feel like Cooley has this team headed in the right direction.  Big John Thompson is not walking through that door, but there is no reason why G-Town can’t be a power again. 

Hoya still in the Association: Jeff Green.  At 38 years old, the Cheverly, MD product has been a consistent contributor, made over $100M in the NBA and has himself a ring (Denver).  

We’re # 69! A Possibly Recurring Gheorghe: The Blog Feature

College basketball used to be much more of a featured subject around here.  The golden age William & Mary basketball under Tony Shaver combined with lots of great “mid-major” hoops stories made for fertile ground for the scribes of G:TB.  

However, somewhere along the way - maybe at the crossroads of massive conference realignment, the transfer portal & NIL making senior laden mid-major teams a thing of the past, and the Samantha Huge hatchet job on Tony Shaver that led William & Mary basketball back into the wilderness - college hoops lost a bit of its luster for me and many others.   This point was driven home to me earlier this season when W&M started the conference season 3-0, leading me to peruse the overall CAA standings.  

I was aware that in 2023 the CAA conference had renamed itself from the Colonial Athletic Association to the Coastal Athletic Association, I guess because most of the teams are along the East Coast (as they always have been - not sure if league leadership realizes that all of the schools are located in original 13 colonies).    What I had not realized was the motley bunch of schools were now members of the CAA.   Monmouth?  NC A&T?  WTF?  Why isn’t the Tribe applying for admission to the Patriot?  Clearly I had not been paying as much attention to college hoops as I had in the past.

Given that W&M is now 5-0 in conference and my grad school alma mater is threatening to be relevant again for the first time in almost 25 years (at least until the wins are vacated for recruiting violations - Wait, are there recruiting violations anymore?), I have committed to paying a bit more attention to college roundball.   Having a 6 year old at home will limit my ability to be a true hoops junkie like I had in the past, but baby steps…

But how to jump back in?  One thought I had was to focus just on possible NCAA tournament teams.  For my money, NCAA Men’s D1 Basketball Tournament remains our greatest collective sporting event.  Notwithstanding all the upheaval in college sports, the month-long spectacle still retains much of its past charm.  68 of the best college basketball teams in the country competing for a national championship.  Doesn’t matter what conference you are from or how blue your blood is, you win and you advance.  

Now, given all the lowly conference champs that will get automatic bids, bracketologists will tell you that the actual bubble for “at large” bids to the tourney is team ranked in the mid-50 or so in the various computer rankings (NET, Ken Pom, Etc.) but here at G:TB I think its more fun to embrace the juvenilia and (like Gronk) focus on #69.

So, this is my commitment to the tens (ones?) of people reading this. Over the next few weeks, I will do my best to profile some of the 69th ranked teams fighting for a bid to this year’s NCAA tournament.  Also, to make Rob happy and drive post count, I will hold the first edition until at least tomorrow!  Unfortunately, the payoff will likely be less than the lead up and that is not saying much…

Requiem For The 'Hander

Summing up the life of Lefty Driesell is a fool’s errand. Words fail. Descriptions are inadequate. Even the stories about him, which are endless and endlessly entertaining, provide incomplete snapshots of a man who wouldn’t be believable if he were made up. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. 

Start with this: Charles Grice Driesell, who passed away over the weekend at age 92, was one of the most colorful, successful, influential figures in the history of college basketball. Again, accurate but insufficient. Try this: Lefty helped change the sport. Or this: He won and made basketball matter in places where it previously did neither. 

It hardly seems fathomable, when you look at the multi-billion dollar behemoth that college basketball has become, that a man who never won a national championship, who never came close to a national title, would have exerted the influence he did. But it’s true. Lefty never set out to make history or become a seminal figure. He just wanted to coach young men and win games. He was a larger-than-life character, a bear of a man with a southeastern Virginia drawl – he was born in Norfolk, Va. – who mixed southern charm and grace with a competitive streak that manifested in many a sideline foot-stomping exhibition. 

He possessed the gift of gab along with a tendency to muddle the language. The drawl and the malaprops made him an easy foil and often cast him as a rube or un-intelligent, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. He could have sold sand to beachgoers – he was a primo encyclopedia salesman as a side hustle while he coached high school ball in the 1950s – but instead chose to sell himself and his programs to recruits, and especially to their mamas. 

Lefty built programs practically from scratch at Davidson and Maryland, challenging the hegemony of the North Carolina schools at both stops. He coached at James Madison after his tenure at Maryland went sour following the death of Len Bias, and then at Georgia State in downtown Atlanta. When he retired in 2003, he had 786 wins, then fourth-most all time. His teams won two of every three games they played, and advanced to 13 NCAA tournaments and eight NIT berths. He is one of only a handful of coaches to take four different schools to the NCAA Tournament. 

When he arrived at Maryland in 1969, he famously said that the school “has the potential to be the UCLA of the East.” He never pulled that off, but he quickly made the Terps destination viewing and Cole Field House, Maryland’s old barn of a building, rocked under his spell and inspired a generation of fans. 

JMU’s Convocation Center similarly rocked in his early years in Harrisonburg when the Dukes were routinely among the top two or three teams in the league. He created Midnight Madness, the custom of starting drills at 12:01 a.m., on the first day of practice that became an all-inclusive party for fans. The NCAA expanded its tournament to permit multiple teams from the same conference to compete in 1975, due in large part to the fourth-ranked Terps’ loss to No. 1-ranked and eventual national champ North Carolina State in the 1974 ACC Tournament final the previous spring, a 103-100 overtime affair that some still call the greatest game in college hoops history. 

Yet for all that, Lefty often never received his due. He was a great recruiter, one of the best ever, and because of that many people thought he should have won more than he did. Critics banged away at him, said he wasn’t the tactician of his ACC nemesis Dean Smith, or later and to a lesser degree, Richmond’s Dick Tarrant. The notion that Lefty had good players and simply rolled out the balls and let ‘em play frequently stuck. 

The fact that Lefty didn’t make the Naismith Hall of Fame until 2018, fifteen years after he retired, was perplexing. I periodically wrote columns stumping for Lefty when another HOF class came and went without him. Terry Holland, his former player, assistant coach and later rival at Virginia, told me that of course his mentor merited inclusion at Springfield, Mass. ‘There are coaches with better credentials who are in the Hall,’ Holland said, ‘but there’s no one with his credentials who isn’t.’ 

Mike Krzyzewski once said that Lefty would have eclipsed the career wins record if Maryland hadn’t “scapegoated” him for Bias’s death. Though to be fair, an internal investigation claimed that Driesell instructed staff and players to clean up Bias’s room in the immediate aftermath, and academic deficiencies discovered related to Bias and other players tarnished his reputation. I suspect that reasons for Lefty’s omission at Springfield for so long included the lack of a national championship on his resume’ and tainted exits in general and frequently being cited for who and what he wasn’t rather than what he was. 

The Bias episode was jarring for the man who was synonymous with Maryland basketball and where he likely would have coached another 10-15 years. At JMU, his teams slipped in his final years, and he was fired one day after announcing that the upcoming season would be his last. At Georgia State, he quietly stepped down in December of his sixth season when he said he was unable to shake a cold that had sapped his energy. That subdued exit from yet another program he resurrected didn’t jibe with a man capable of commanding rooms and entire arenas, who put his stamp on the sport like few others. He was an original, one whose likes we will not see again.

This Week in Wrenball: The Preview

We here at the digital tree fort are creatures of habit with a sporting bent that sometimes straddles the line between optimistic and quixotic. As the calendar flips to November, we cast an eye toward the annual exercise in ‘what if:’ William and Mary basketball. 

The Tribe kicks off Nov. 6 against Regent University, the late evangelist Pat Robertson’s tidy enclave in Virginia Beach. Unless the competition includes moot court versus Regent’s mostly well regarded law school, the Tribe should have little trouble. After that, however, the schedule mostly gets stickier. 

There are the usual non-conference matchups versus state and regional opponents and a couple of sweet road trips (hellooooo, Malibu!) before diving into the CAA schedule after the first of the year. That’s “Coastal” Athletic Association now, by the way, with the recent additions of schools such as Campbell and North Carolina A&T, located in the seaside towns of Buies Creek and Greensboro, N.C., respectively. 

William and Mary was picked to finish eighth in the league with a roster that’s overhauled from last season’s eighth-place finish. Odd result aside, the Tribe again appears well short of the top tier of Charleston and UNC Wilmington, and looking up at the second tier of Drexel, Hofstra, Delaware and Towson. 

W&M returns two starters in 6-8 Noah Collier, a solid inside presence whose season was cut short by injury last February, and 6-6 wing and 3-point marksman Gabe Dorsey, as well as seven other contributors, all of whom averaged less than five points per game. The Wrens return 46 percent of their scoring, 64 percent of their rebounding and 29 percent of their assists from a year ago. They added three transfers: 6-4 guard Sean Houpt, a 1,000-point scorer at D2 Florida Tech; Caleb Dorsey, a 6-8, 235-pound forward who bolted Penn State after former VCU coach Mike Rhoades arrived; and Trey Moss, a 6-3 sophomore from South Florida. 

W&M certainly could have used 6-8 forward and two-year starter Ben Wight and his 800 career points and 400 rebounds, as well as point guard Tyler Rice, who made the CAA’s All-Rookie Team two years ago but found himself buried on the bench and increasingly disenchanted last season in lieu of grad transfer Anders Nelson. Both elected to leave, Wight for the University of Toledo (he completed his undergrad degree at W&M and he’s an Ohio native) and Rice for East Tennessee State. 

Which brings us to the guy at the helm. Dane Fischer enters his fifth season with a 46-68 overall record (.404 winning percentage) and 28-36 in conference play (.437) – both marks enhanced by his first season when he inherited Tribe all-timer and future pro Nathan Knight. W&M is 18-47 overall (.276) and 11-25 (.305) in the CAA the past two seasons. Far be it from me to stump for a coach’s termination, but the suits and checkbooks who evaluate such things will have ample material to judge if the Tribe produces a third consecutive season of gruel. 

It wasn’t always this way (here’s where Rob’s left eye begins to twitch and his blood pressure spikes) [ET TU, DAVE?!?]. Fischer’s predecessor Tony Shaver made W&M hoops competitive and relevant. The Wrens finished in the top four of the CAA each of his last six seasons. His teams won 20 games four times, made four CAA Tournament title games, three semifinals and went to the NIT twice. But following a quarterfinal loss in the 2019 tournament, She Who Shall Not Be Named turfed him in a public display of ego over accomplishment. 

Which brings us to where we, and the program, are now. There’s no telling how Shaver would have navigated the transfer portal and NIL situations. Inarguable, though, is the fact that he had developed a system that attracted suitable talent and was heavy on development and continuity, essential components for a program without some of the advantages (cough cough, admissions, cough, cough, eligibility curricula) many competitors enjoy. 

Some may think it’s time to shelve the past and move on. Focus on the future and paths to improvement. Moving on completely from the irrational firing of Shaver, however, is a big ask. Have Armenians forgiven and moved past the Turkish Ottoman Empire genocide of the early 20th century? Have Ukrainians forgotten Stalin and the Holomodor of the 1930s? Have St. Louis Cardinals fans forgiven and moved on from Don Denkinger in the 1985 World Series? They have not. The ability to function in polite society and simultaneously hold a low-flame grudge for years if not decades is what separates us from the primates. 

Regardless of whether the Wrens are on your wradar, college basketball season is upon us, itself a reason for good cheer. An abundance of players and teams and games and stories. Decide for yourself if modest expectations are preferable to unrestrained optimism, if anything short of contending for titles is failure or if honest competition is satisfactory. We know which is better for the digestive system. On the other hand, sports-induced gastric discomfort is often temporary. Plan accordingly.

Playing Field, Tilted

As the calendar flips to March, many of us eagerly await the annual exercise in corporate welfare with jump shots. The NCAA basketball tournament is the best event in sports, three weeks of competitive drama so compelling and entertaining that it’s easy to overlook the fact that it mirrors much of American society because it’s heavily gamed toward the privileged. 

Thirty-two conference champions and 36 teams selected at-large make up the 68-team NCAA field. The Power 5 conferences – ACC, Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, Pac-12 – and Big East make up the bulk of the bracket. Teams outside the Big Six must be exceptional for four months, or catch a spark for a week in March to make the NCAA field. Even that might not be enough. 

Whereas teams within the marquee conferences need be only marginally successful to get invited to the party. Upsets are routine. A St. Peter’s or Loyola of Chicago or Butler or VCU makes a run and provides a whiff of inclusion, and the NCAA is glad you think so. 

In the past decade, 264 of the 326 at-large berths went to the Power 5 conferences and Big East – that’s 81 percent. The remaining 62 at-larges (19 percent) went to the other 26 conferences. Now, you might point out that marquee conferences have more good teams and deserve more berths. And you would be correct. But the system is also set up to ensure overwhelming representation for the Bigfoot leagues at the expense of lesser conferences. 

The NCAA has long used statistical measures to evaluate and compare teams and conferences. The current NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) rankings are more comprehensive than the old Ratings Percentage Index (RPI), which was weighted toward teams’ and opponents’ winning percentages. NET rankings account for game results, strength of schedule, location of games, and quality of wins and losses. Games and opponents are assigned to four quadrants, based on level of difficulty. Quad 1 wins are most valuable, Quad 3 and 4 losses most damaging. Different metrics, same results. 

Analytic profiles are used more often to include power conference teams and exclude teams from lower-rated leagues. A seventh-place team in the Big 12 likely has a better statistical profile than a regular season champion from the Mid-American Conference with 26 wins. Is the seventh-place Big 12 team better than the MAC champ? Maybe. But does any seventh-place team deserve to compete for the national championship, while the MAC champ is snubbed by the selection committee because the league is low rated and they lost in their conference tournament? 

Sports are often held up as pure meritocracy, where ability and performance erase class divisions. Tell that to kids and parents who cannot afford the time and expense of travel ball that identify and nurture prospects, to the legion of qualified minority coaching candidates, and to most of those in the ecosystem of college athletics. Quality mid-major programs cannot schedule their way into a better statistical ranking and the at-large discussion, because power conference schools often won’t play them. There’s little benefit. A power conference school might lose to a quality mid-major. Better to schedule winnable home games in November and December, a snazzy early-season tournament, maybe a matchup or two against a fellow Big Six program, and then your conference slate elevates your statistical profile. 

The analytics guys and selection committee look at the 26- or 27-win Big Sky champ that lost in the conference semifinals and say, “Sorry, but your league and strength-of-schedule are too low. Numbers don’t lie.” They don’t lie, but they do dance, depending on who’s playing the tune. 

Conference realignment and consolidation will make it even more difficult for quality mid-majors to schedule up. Big Six leagues are moving toward 20-game conference schedules, which reduce openings for non-league games. That’s why coaches such as Tony Bennett at Virginia and North Carolina’s Hubert Davis deserve some credit. Bennett has scheduled home-and-home series with James Madison and VCU in recent years. Davis scheduled games against College of Charleston and UNC Wilmington, two of the Colonial Athletic Association’s best teams, and JMU this season. All at home, but still better than many.  

The 2011 Connecticut team is cited by some as justification for more power conference schools in the tournament. The Huskies finished tied for ninth in the Big East that season and had lost four of five heading into the conference tournament. Counter to form, they won five games in five days to capture the title and the league’s automatic bid, then all six NCAA games – 11 straight – for the national championship. However, that’s as much an outlier as VCU’s run to the Final Four. UConn at least earned its way into the NCAA field by winning the conference tournament, same as any scuffling conference mutt that gets hot in March. But the Huskies as plucky underdogs? Please. They and their Big Six brethren have access to money and resources of which most programs can only dream. 

There’s discussion of expanding the field to 96 teams, a truly wretched idea that falls into the category of “if some is good, more is better.” Critics argue that a larger field will devalue the regular season, though I’d point out that the regular season is already devalued to some degree. Many power conference teams that finish fifth or sixth get a mulligan and a trip to the NCAAs, while one-bid leagues know that one week in March decides it all. 

Advocates say that more deserving mid-majors will be included in a larger field. That’s almost certainly true, but I have no confidence that current proportions won’t persist, and we’ll see a bunch of 10th- and 11th-place teams from power conferences in the field. 

Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes said that he thinks an expanded field would allow more coaches to keep their jobs, a specious argument. Ask Rick Barnes how annual 20-win seasons and NCAA trips solidified his tenure at Texas. 

I don’t advocate revolution or even equal representation, you filthy Bolsheviks, but merely a few tweaks in the present system. A little less deference to the gated communities, whose residents already have plentiful advantages, and a few more rewards for those that merit. The changes wouldn’t impact more than a handful of teams per season. Any regular season champion with, say, at least 25 total wins gets into the NCAA field, even if it loses in the conference tournament. A team that did exemplary work all season shouldn’t be penalized for one off day or hot opponent in March, a more exacting standard than power conference teams face. 

Twenty-five wins may seem arbitrary, but no more arbitrary than an algorithm that inflates a team’s profile based on a few “quality” wins and the neighborhood in which it resides. Twenty-five is also a lofty enough number that it would eliminate many leagues’ champs from consideration and limit the howling from predictable corners. And if a one-bid league manages to get a second team into the NCAAs, the committee must choose between teams from the Big Six – separate the resumes of the fifth-place SEC team and seventh-place Big 12 team. No cherry-picking from the relatively few mid-majors on the bubble. 

These suggestions have approximately zero chance of being implemented, as committee members and decision makers are well aware on which side their bagels are schmear’d. Far less blowback for kneecapping Stephen F. Austin than, say, Indiana. Showcase marquee conferences and big brands. Just enough representation for lower-rated leagues to appear fair. Competition takes care of itself. Most folks are entertained and go home happy. As the kids learn, who gets screwed can make the how and why much more palatable.