The once-proud Georgetown University basketball program has had a rough go of it in recent times. It’s been nine years since the Hoyas finished above .500 in Big East play, and had it not been for a lightning-in-a-bottle run through the 2021 Big East Tournament, the same would be said about their NCAA Tournament drought.
Most of that futility was chalked up to the shortcomings of Patrick Ewing as the team’s head coach. Still, through nine games of Ed Cooley’s second season after leaving conference rival Providence College, it’s hard to say his results have been much better.
Following Friday night’s loss to West Virginia, Cooley is 16-25 during his tenure at Georgetown. Out of those 16 wins, 13 have been against non-power conference opponents, including all seven of the Hoyas’ wins this season. Cooley’s only wins thus far against major conference teams with Georgetown were a sweep of perennial Big East doormat DePaul last season and an overtime road victory over Notre Dame in December of 2023.
That Notre Dame win, in fact, is Georgetown’s only win under Cooley that qualifies in the first two quadrants in the NCAA’s NET metric, which is used to evaluate the strength of a team’s resume. In all such Quad 1 and Quad 2 opportunities, Cooley has gone 1-22.
That is bad. That is horrendously bad, especially for a coach who was touted — with the track record to back it up — as someone who could fix things quickly. Cooley’s teams at Providence were generally known to overachieve with less talent than most other Big East schools could afford and played with an identity of toughness and focus.
When he was first introduced at Georgetown, it was thought that he would bring a strong, commanding presence to the program that would wash away the incompetence of the Ewing era. Thus far, it’s looking like that presence only applied to him when he was at Providence.
Not only has Cooley failed to win games of any significance at Georgetown, but he has publicly made a clown out of himself on multiple occasions. It started in one of his first games with the Hoyas last season, when he berated the media room’s reporters during his postgame presser.
Later on in that campaign, he bragged to heckling fans that he was “rich as (expletive).” A few weeks ago, for no apparent reason, he referred to the University of Illinois as “that other B.S. school” when talking about standout Hoyas player Jayden Epps, who transferred from Illinois.
Cooley has consistently come off as bitter and insecure, and rumors have swelled since last summer regarding his long-term commitment to Georgetown. It’s been speculated that the main reason he came to D.C. in the first place is because his wife wanted to move and that he himself wanted to stay at Providence.
Reading between the lines, it seems as if Cooley only agreed to take the Georgetown job because it gave him a higher ceiling than Providence did. Now he is second-guessing himself and wants a way out before it tanks his reputation too far.
If that’s the case, then he’d better find some answers while he still has any respectability left. In the transfer portal era of college athletics, rebuilding a depleted program is much less challenging as teams can flip their entire rosters in one offseason and bring in established quality players right off the bat.
Look at the team that just beat Georgetown — West Virginia had to reboot everything after a disastrous 2023-24 campaign due to the mass roster exodus from Bob Huggins’ controversial ousting. Now, in year one under Darian DeVries, they have the look of an NCAA Tournament team.
They’re not the only ones. Louisville, which went a putrid 12-52 in two years under Kenny Payne, has already picked up some quality wins in Pat Kelsey’s first season. Even DePaul — DePaul!!! — looks like a totally different program now with Chris Holtmann at the helm.
Simply put, Cooley has no excuse not to get this ship turned around. It’s not like Georgetown’s roster is bad, either — freshman Thomas Sorber is likely a future NBA contributor, and Micah Peavy is an experienced winning player who has been to the NCAA Tournament in all four of his prior college seasons. Epps is a walking bucket, and Malik Mack averaged 17 points per game at Harvard last year.
The Big East this season looks arguably the weakest it has been in quite some time, which should give Georgetown plenty of opportunities to compete with its conference rivals. If the Hoyas are still near the bottom of the league, Cooley will have to answer for it — that is, if he’s still interested in doing so.
In a way, Georgetown has sunk to an even lower level under Cooley than it did with Ewing. At least with Ewing, there was still some semblance of an identity of Georgetown basketball. He may not have been a good coach, but he tried his best. He cared about the program, and it deeply hurt him and every Hoyas fan to see him compromise his reputation with so much losing.
It should only be fair that if the greatest player in program history had to go out in a state of such disgrace, then the next guy had better be worth it — and to put it lightly, Cooley has not been worth it. Until further notice, Georgetown will now hereby be known as “That Other (Expletive) School.”
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