Today Vox is driving into the belly of the beast, braving snow and Eastern Pennsylvania to provide coverage from inside the Carrier Dome of what may be the final Georgetown-Syracuse game for awhile. For our pregame coverage, check out our posts from yesterday (here and here). Follow our Twitter for live updates from the road and from the game, and pick up a copy of the Voice‘s print edition for more coverage of what we hope will be a great game. Hoya Saxa! Forgive us for our light posting schedule today, driving and blogging do not go together, surprisingly enough.
John Caprio threw an alley-oop to Aaron Bowen. Needless to say, Georgetown beat South Florida. Badly.
Tomorrow’s villain
The ultimate villain. Some things never change with Syracuse–Boeheim’s always on the sideline, the defenders are always in a 2-3 zone–but each iteration of the Orange has its own unique characteristics. At 23-1 and ranked second in the country, this season’s model may be the best that Georgetown has faced in recent years.
The key to this Syracuse squad isn’t any one player, and that’s what makes them so dangerous. Nine Orange players are averaging more than 10 minutes per game during Big East play, and that group doesn’t include freshman Michael Carter-Williams, who dropped 13 points on St. John’s on Saturday. Sophomore guard Dion Waiters is probably the team’s best player, and he’s the sixth man.
“They’re one of, if not the deepest team in the country. They have quality depth,” head coach John Thompson III said. “There’s no drop-off from the second team and, in some positions, the third team.”
Georgetown will take on Syracuse this Wednesday, and depending on how the postseason goes (as well as the details of Syracuse’s departure to the ACC) this could be the final Big East contest between the two schools. Vox is going all out to mark the occasion, including a road trip up to the Carrier Dome. But first, a history lesson:
Georgetown first played Syracuse in basketball in the 1929-30 season. The Orangemen prevailed 40-18, and unless you count the recruiting coup that was Fred Mesmer, there wasn’t much narrative significance to the game. It was just two college teams playing basketball.
The two teams would play some 16 times over the next 50 years, with some lasting tensions finally starting to build in the 1970s. All those meetings were merely prologue, however, to the struggle for supremacy that began February 13, 1980–the night John Thompson Jr. closed Manley Field House.
The 1979-80 season marked the first year of the Big East, and the first conference meeting between Syracuse and Georgetown just happened to produce one of the most legendary games in the rivalry. Before the Carrier Dome opened, the Orange played in Manley Field House, a 9,000-seat arena renowned for its Cameron Indoor-like atmosphere–when the Hoyas came to town that night in February, Syracuse had won 57 straight games at home.
Syracuse would move into the Carrier Dome the next season, and the Georgetown game was the final contest scheduled in Manley. Long story short, the closing didn’t go the way the Orange would have liked it. The Hoyas won, 52-50, and John Thompson Jr. used the post-game press conference to issue a proclamation: “Manley Field House is officially closed.”
Thus began what is arguably the Big East’s greatest rivalry. More than 30 years later, surprisingly little has changed. Jim Boeheim is still the coach at Syracuse, as he has been for every year of the conference’s existence, and a Thompson still mans the sideline for Georgetown. And, most importantly, Georgetown and Syracuse are still fighting at the top of the conference standings.
And we thought that playing Syracuse once a year was bad.
Georgetown now faces a future where its most hated rival isn’t guaranteed to appear on the schedule at all. That might be the least of Georgetown’s concerns, however, after Syracuse and Pittsburgh submitted applications and were accepted to the Atlantic Coast Conference over the weekend. The move is a serious blow to both the tradition and competitiveness of the Big East, and it may only be the beginning of a drastic conference realignment.
This won’t be a clean breakup. Syracuse and Pitt will awkwardly linger on the Hoyas’ schedules for at least this year and possibly longer. The Big East requires departing members to pay a $5 million exit fee and give 27 months notice, but don’t be surprised if that timetable is negotiated down to avoid an extended lame duck period.
More importantly, Syracuse and Pitt are just the first dominoes to fall. UConn and Villanova are already trying to join them in the ACC, rumors abound about Rutgers and West Virginia, and the Big East will surely look to reload by poaching from other conferences. Just don’t expect Georgetown to be among the first defectors.
“As a founding member of the Big East in 1979, we have confronted challenging moments in the past and we are confident that as we work through the events of the past days we will maintain the high quality of the Big East Conference,” Georgetown athletic director Lee Reed said in a statement released Sunday night.
Remember how mad you were when the Orange edged us out on our own home ground in February? Well, we may not have any control over our point guards breaking their valuable appendages, but here’s something we non-athlete Hoyas can win at for ourselves: Beer Pong.
According Big Apple Orange, a New York-based Syracuse alumni website, our rivals are throwing down the gauntlet, and inviting any available and up-for-the-challenge Hoyas to a single-elimination-style Beer Pong tournament on June 11 at New York Roadhouse Duke’s.
At $60 per team, the entry fee is a little steep, but that includes bottomless free beer. If you’re not so good at Beer Pong but want to come by and hang out with some Syracuse alums anyway (which…why would you ever?), everyone’s welcome to come by and spectate.
And bonus points to any alum who dresses like this. It may be Beer Pong, but it’s still just as important to juice the Orange.
We here at Vox still haven’t gotten over our sadness, and now the Orangemen have added insult to injury by challenging our ability to fundraise for Relay for Life.
Georgetown Relay will be competing against Syracuse’s Relay until March 12 to see which school can raise more money.
On Senior Day at the Verizon Center and in what was arguably the biggest game of the season, the Hoyas were without their most important player. With guard Chris Wright watching from the bench because of a broken hand, Georgetown fell to Syracuse 58-51. With their second straight loss, the Hoyas are now 10-7 in the Big East and sit in eighth place in the conference.
Turnovers
This was the most telling stat of the game. The Hoyas committed 16 turnovers, while the Orange had only nine. Syracuse made Georgetown pay for their mistakes too, scoring 21 of their 58 points off of miscues. With Wright out, Jason Clark struggled to replace the senior’s production from the point, by turning the ball over five times while only dishing out one assist. Earlier in the month, Wright was the key to breaking down Syracuse’s vaunted two-three zone in a win, and today no other Hoya possessed the ability to attack the zone quite like Wright. Read the rest of this entry »
Chris Wright spoke to the media this afternoon for the first time since breaking his left hand against Cincinnati on Wednesday. The senior point guard, who had surgery on the hand yesterday, was in a positive mood after beginning his rehabilitation this morning. But he declined to comment on the specifics of his rehab or the timetable for his recovery.
“Whenever I can come back is the goal, regardless if that’s NCAA Tournament, Big East Tournament, whenever it is,” he said. “I’m not rushing anything, because obviously I have a future playing after this year. I’m just going to take it as I can. There’s no point in me being sad or dwelling on anything.”
His teammates don’t have time to dwell on the injury either with a game against archrival Syracuse scheduled for noon tomorrow. Coming off a 58-46 loss that was dispiriting enough before Wright went down, the Hoyas know that they’ll have to make adjustments if they want to beat the Orange.
“You can’t replace Chris. He’s a special player and a special player in every aspect of the game,” junior guard Jason Clark said. “Everybody just has to step up. Everybody has to be there for each other.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tonight, JTII and the Hoyas head up to New York for the first of two games against arch rival Syracuse. In the spirit of the rivalry, we dug up videos that’ll keep your blood pressure high until the teams meet again at the Verizon Center on Feb. 26.
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, Georgetown University's weekly newsmagazine. Opinions expressed in posts are those of their author alone unless otherwise stated.
When we last left our Hoyas
Chris Wright spoke to the media this afternoon for the first time since breaking his left hand against Cincinnati on Wednesday. The senior point guard, who had surgery on the hand yesterday, was in a positive mood after beginning his rehabilitation this morning. But he declined to comment on the specifics of his rehab or the timetable for his recovery.
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