Georgetown needs a shot of realism

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.

Craig Esherick, Thompson’s loyal assistant and successor, succumbed to the forces of the environment. He was not Thompson. It was not 1984.

Esherick’s Georgetown has come to be the grown man who still relives his high school athletic days with friends. Georgetown’s identity is frozen in the past, its name no longer powerful enough to persuade potential recruits. And why should it?

Most of the players receiving Georgetown’s appeals probably were conceived after Ewing had made his way from the Hilltop to the Big Apple. They have no idea the way it was, when Georgetown advanced to the Final Four in three of Ewing’s four seasons, when Thompson loomed as large as any coach in college basketball.

No media guide or brochure can convey that time to a recruit whose knowledge of college basketball history extends to Connecticut and Duke, and maybe Syracuse and Kansas, and maybe a few others. But not Georgetown. Not now. Georgetown is nowhere on the national radar.

This is the challenge, among others, before Thompson’s son, John Thompson III, an honorary member of the Georgetown family who already has braced himself for the inevitable comparisons to his father and a legacy that never will be duplicated.

His first assignment could be in alerting the rest of the Georgetown family that his arrival truly marks the start of a new period, posed with a question: What now is the program’s barometer of success?

If it remains what the father achieved, that is not realistic, not in today’s turbulent college basketball culture, not with the Hoyas far removed from the Top 25.

We already know it is not Esherick’s 103-74 record, one Sweet 16 appearance and a 13-15 mark that led to a vote of confidence and a farewell.

In the end, Esherick was to Georgetown what Bill Guthridge was to North Carolina, an unsatisfying measure who lacked the sizzle of the departed legend.

Georgetown seemingly is begging to prompt recollections of the past again, this time with the hiring of the legend’s son.

That dynamic is certain to be omnipresent, even if Thompson III is his own man and has a strong dose of Princeton in his basketball pedigree.

His task is arduous. He has a program to make relevant again, a large shadow to overcome and a need to temper the expectations linked to yesteryear.

“I’m pretty comfortable being John Thompson’s son,” Thompson III said. “The pressure that comes along with that — no one’s going to put more pressure on me than myself.”

A shot of realism on the Hilltop would increase the comfort level of Thompson III as well.