Georgetown needs a shot of realism

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The Georgetown basketball program is ever distant from the scowling days of Patrick Ewing and the national championship in 1984.

Georgetown was one of the brand names of college basketball in those years, the favored program of America's inner cities. Its apparel was big business, its social stew the stuff of commentary both supportive and critical.

The Georgetown basketball program mattered then in a way it never will matter again.

It might have been the "perfect storm," with the elite university giving the imposing John Thompson the freedom to conduct his social experiment in basketball, with players who sometimes succumbed to the school's demanding academic challenges.

Whether you found it worthy or not, the Georgetown basketball program represented something more than winning teams. That something contributed to the program's panache and mystique, fostered by a coach who could be as cantankerous as necessary, and strengthened its recruiting pipeline.

There always was an accidental element to Georgetown's national presence in college basketball. The school is a pseudo-Ivy League entity that would have been content with the occasional NCAA tournament appearance in the Thompson era.

It has reverted to its natural self since Thompson's retirement, only now administrators and alumni cling to the sweet memories of what once was and cannot imagine that Thompson was the program and that he came along at the right time.

Could Thompson do today what he built in the '70s and then maximized in the '80s?

Not in the same fashion.

Thompson could see the changes coming to college basketball in the 1990s, when the Hoyas began their incremental slide. No college program would have a 7-footer of Ewing's quality for four seasons today. A program today probably would consider itself lucky to have an Ewing-like player for one season.