|
Post by aleutianhoya on Jun 12, 2015 14:25:08 GMT -5
I'm ducking my head after I hit "create post," but I've always thought Esh got a slightly bad rap with the schedule. His schedules were much, much more competitive than were JTII's schedules. He certainly never got the point that it was better to schedule teams in the high 200s or low 100s instead of in the 300s (that is, cream puffs that you're still going to beat), but he played a fair number of high-major teams many years. Esh's schedules were significantly worse than JT2's. They might have been a better ticket package, but they weren't tougher. Thompson 1993-1994 SOS 27 1994-1995 SOS 40 1995-1996 SOS 22 1996-1997 SOS 89 1997-1998 SOS 79 1998-1999 SOS 43 Esherick 1999-2000 SOS 53 2000-2001 SOS 105 2001-2002 SOS 62 2002-2003 SOS 72 2003-2004 SOS 109 You may be right, and I'll certainly admit as much if you are, but I was specifically thinking about non-conference SOS rather than overall SOS. At least a couple of Esh's years, the Big East (anecdotally, per my recollection) wasn't as strong as many other years and that would have dragged Esh's numbers down. I couldn't find historic information on that on a quick search.
|
|
|
Post by hoyasaxa2003 on Jun 12, 2015 16:09:32 GMT -5
Let's not forget that Hoya basketball was a sociocultural phenomenon in the 80's, fueled by Pops' larger-than-life presence, as well as his philosophies on and off the court, all of which certainly had an impact on recruiting, and in turn allowed a private school from DC to compete and even dominate the national scene. The cultural potential for that type of impact diminished throughout the 90's, and we will never see that again, certainly not at anything approaching that level. This is definitely true, but if Georgetown had more success on the Court in the 1990s, it makes you wonder where we might be now. Would Georgetown have maintained the phenomenon status of the 1980s? Unlikely, but I do think that if the program had continued making Final Fours every few years, we would be in a substantially different position now than we are today. Getting to three national championship games in four years in the 1990s would have been nearly impossible, but I think if we had more success, it would have kept the positive momentum going. Of course, this is where alternative history gets interesting. Had the program been more successful in the 1990s, who knows if John Thompson Jr. would have coached longer, whether Esherick would have ever been the head coach, and whether John Thompson III would have ever been our coach. There are a lot of interesting fictional scenarios to play out there.
|
|
blueandgray
Platinum Hoya (over 5000 posts)
Posts: 6,754
|
Post by blueandgray on Jun 12, 2015 23:29:11 GMT -5
Getting back to topic, in addition to benefitting from a strong SOS, a huge reason why III schedules the way he does is exposure. We need as many games as we can get on ESPN and our only chance of doing so is by scheduling high caliber OCC tournaments. Exposure is everything when it comes to recruiting and the fact that III can rattle off a slew on nationally prominent programs on our schedule is a huge plus for Georgetown.
|
|
|
Post by michaelgrahmstylie on Jun 12, 2015 23:58:15 GMT -5
Getting back to topic, in addition to benefitting from a strong SOS, a huge reason why III schedules the way he does is exposure. We need as many games as we can get on ESPN and our only chance of doing so is by scheduling high caliber OCC tournaments. Exposure is everything when it comes to recruiting and the fact that III can rattle off a slew on nationally prominent programs on our schedule is a huge plus for Georgetown. Solid point. I will accept that.
|
|
TC
Platinum Hoya (over 5000 posts)
Posts: 9,451
|
Post by TC on Jun 13, 2015 4:47:54 GMT -5
You may be right, and I'll certainly admit as much if you are, but I was specifically thinking about non-conference SOS rather than overall SOS. At least a couple of Esh's years, the Big East (anecdotally, per my recollection) wasn't as strong as many other years and that would have dragged Esh's numbers down. I couldn't find historic information on that on a quick search. Here's the conference RPI numbers - while you're right that the conference was down in a few years during Esherick's stint, and it was super strong in a few years of Thompson's, it doesn't correlate at all with Esherick's worst SOS numbers. His worst years were 2000-2001 and 2003-2004 with SOS over 100 in each year. In both those years, the Big East was a strong conference (#3 in 2003-2004, #5 in 2000-2001). Thompson 1993-1994 .5608 1994-1995 .5682 1995-1996 .5702 1996-1997 .5619 1997-1998 .5711 1998-1999 .5634 Esherick 1999-2000 .5588 2000-2001 .5658 2001-2002 .5509 2002-2003 .5589 2003-2004 .5689 Esherick was just a plain awful scheduler in terms of RPI SOS.
|
|
|
Post by aleutianhoya on Jun 13, 2015 6:29:12 GMT -5
Here's the conference RPI numbers - while you're right that the conference was down in a few years during Esherick's stint, and it was super strong in a few years of Thompson's, it doesn't correlate at all with Esherick's worst SOS numbers. His worst years were 2000-2001 and 2003-2004 with SOS over 100 in each year. In both those years, the Big East was a strong conference (#3 in 2003-2004, #5 in 2000-2001). Thompson 1993-1994 .5608 1994-1995 .5682 1995-1996 .5702 1996-1997 .5619 1997-1998 .5711 1998-1999 .5634 Esherick 1999-2000 .5588 2000-2001 .5658 2001-2002 .5509 2002-2003 .5589 2003-2004 .5689 Esherick was just a plain awful scheduler in terms of RPI SOS. I stand corrected. That's what I get for even positing something potentially positive about the Esh regime!
|
|
|
Post by FrazierFanatic on Jun 13, 2015 9:33:51 GMT -5
Here's the conference RPI numbers - while you're right that the conference was down in a few years during Esherick's stint, and it was super strong in a few years of Thompson's, it doesn't correlate at all with Esherick's worst SOS numbers. His worst years were 2000-2001 and 2003-2004 with SOS over 100 in each year. In both those years, the Big East was a strong conference (#3 in 2003-2004, #5 in 2000-2001). Thompson 1993-1994 .5608 1994-1995 .5682 1995-1996 .5702 1996-1997 .5619 1997-1998 .5711 1998-1999 .5634 Esherick 1999-2000 .5588 2000-2001 .5658 2001-2002 .5509 2002-2003 .5589 2003-2004 .5689 Esherick was just a plain awful scheduler in terms of RPI SOS. I stand corrected. That's what I get for even positing something potentially positive about the Esh regime! Silly poster. We forgive you. I went to school with Craig. He was a good guy, I just don't think he was ready to be a head coach at that level, and he became too defensive at the end.
|
|
prhoya
Blue & Gray (over 10,000 posts)
Posts: 23,304
|
Post by prhoya on Jun 13, 2015 10:17:08 GMT -5
Esherick was just a plain awful scheduler in terms of RPI SOS. Esh was not a plain awful scheduler. He was doing exactly what he wanted and what he had seen work under JT2. It just didn't work for him for obviuos reasons. Although it did work for him to get a contract extension... This could go in the "funny" thread as well, but Esh had the cojones to quote his "great" OCC record (against carefully chosen or our traditional cupcakes) to show how good he was doing.
|
|
MCIGuy
Platinum Hoya (over 5000 posts)
Anyone here? What am I supposed to update?
Posts: 9,426
|
Post by MCIGuy on Jun 14, 2015 19:00:07 GMT -5
As for Thompson's recruiting in the 90's ... it is idiotic to criticize his recruiting. Alonzo Mourning (Class of 1992). Don Reid (long time NBA player (1991 recruit) Othella Harrington (number 2 player in country in recruiting class 1992) and Duane Spencer was a huge recruit (recruiting class 1992). Jahidi White (top 10 in country in 1994). Iverson (1994). Jerome Williams (1994). Victor Page (1995). Shernard Long and Ed Sheffey were both bigtime recruits who did not end up staying (1996). Boumtje (1997) and ANthony Perry (1997, MCdonalds AA and top 4 recruit in nation), Kenny Brunner (probably the best player in the class, and a Samurai sword and Bad Santa). Kevin Braswell (1998, one of Georgetown's leaders all time in scoring, assists, steals and 3 pointers). Lee Scruggs (my alltime favorite Hoya) and Wesley Wilson (top 30) in 1999. Gerald Riley and Mike Sweetney in 2000. Harvey Thomas in 2001 (rivals no. 20 and no. SF in Nation) and Tony Bethel was a huge recruit too. That is some bigtime recruiting in the 90s. By my count that is 6 NBA players (Reid, Harrington, Iverson, Williams, Boumtje, Sweetney) recruited by JT in the 90s after Mourning and several others who had huge potential or were very highly ranked (Page, Long, Perry, Scruggs, Wilson, SPencer, Brunner). The non-factual narrative that JT did not recruit in the 90s needs to end. At least on this site. I thought Hoyatalk was for real fans of the program who actually followed its teams, players and recruiting. There may have been other issues, but recruiting was not one of them. Joey Brown started for FOUR years without any true competition for his job. Four years for an average player whom no one remembers outside of longtime, die hard Hoya fans. That says a lot for how awful JT Jr was at recruiting in the 90s. First....don't include Zo in your recruiting wins for the 90s. Alonzo was in the Class of 1988. He wasn't a 90s recruit. Now to be fair I won't include Kenny Anderson as a 90s failure because Anderson was in the Class of 1989. But at the same time don't toss around nonsense about how JT Jr was too busy with the Olympics to recruit Anderson. Anderson's high school coach went on the record that all JT needed to do was make a phone call to Anderson. Just a lousy phone call. But JT wouldn't do that. As he famously remarked a few times he didn't need "no hamburger All American to bring up the ball." So we got four years of Joey Brown instead of two years of Anderson (maybe Anderson would have stayed as long as three years considering how much he loved Gtown). You can bet if Anderson was some high profile big man JT would have taken the time because he tended to find such time for big guys. Everyone else? Not so much. And it showed. But let's go to the 90s where JT started off the decade by blowing it with Grant Hill who was a huge lock for Gtown. JT and Fenlon put on such a poorly conceived (and apparently tone deaf) display that the Hoyas would have to settle for Robert Churchwell. Churchwell was a solid recruit but he was no Grant Hill and he also was not good enough to be a four year starter for a team that had true national aspirations (well, not unless there were four other studs on the court with him and he could do the dirty work). Missing out on Anderson and Hill was a one-two punch the program never recovered from with the exception of the two year run of Iverson. Missing out on those two also helped shift the balance back in the favor of the ACC who benefitted from JT's misses by successfully reeling in Anderson and Hill. And it kept rolling from there. Another guy who ended up eventually being a starter was Brian Kelly. Now I liked BK for what he brought to the table. But he should have always been a bench guy, not someone in the main five. How did Kelly end up at Gtown? He was a player on some small-time Ohio college (not even sure if it was D1) who wrote to Thompson about how he could help the team. And JT was impressed enough to extend an invitation. And in a way that made sense because by this time JT had gotten to a point in which he felt recruits/players should be initiating contact with him and his program first rather than the other way around. If you doubt that go seek remarks by Esherick to the media one or two years into his head coaching tenure. When asked about recruiting Esherick said that the Georgetown philosophy, one he took from JT, was for the recruits and their parties to make the initial contact. And that's just plain nuts. Surely that wasn't JT's philosophy when he got Patrick Ewing or Sleepy Floyd. But with success came the Gtown-Thompson brand name and evidence suggests that Thompson got lazy and started coasting on his reputation (the same way Gary Williams did at UMD after he won a title). Thompson HATED recruiting. He was upfront about that in the latter years. He felt he was being put in a position to beg players to join his program. The recruiting game was changing in the late 80s and the 90s and admittedly for the worse. Coaches, even highly successful ones, had to adapt. But Thompson didn't adapt for the better. He got worse at it. And he had such a narrow scope. Like I mentioned earlier he showed a pulse when a big man was involved. But he seemed to put little regard for the players and their skillsets at the perimeter positions. As long as those guys could play defense and rebound that was good enough for him. Creating off the bounce? Scoring? Shooting? Looked as if he didn't care if they could do any of those things. For goodness sakes he never adapted to the three-point line and the need to find shooters. He would never have a truly legitimately decent outside shooting team for the remainder of his coaching career after the '89-'90 season, the last year of 80s recruits Mark Tillmon and Dwayne Bryant. After that season came the era of Shoot-And-Go-Get-It (our bad shooters would take jumpshots, miss and our bigs would collect offensive rebounds..hopefully). By the way one didn't need to rely on strictly McDAAs to get shooters. Shooters could be found much lower in the recruiting rankings. JT never seemed interested in locating anyway so what you ended up having was a future Hall of Fame duo in Mutombo and Mourning who experienced earlier than expected NCAA tourney outings in their final two seasons together. You think Kenny and Grant could have helped on that front? How about a couple of one-dimensional shooters as well? Thompson could have gotten away with his cavalier approach to recruiting if his program had great facilities, kick-butt assistant coaches who were great recruiters and had kept making appearances in the Final Four (aka being relevant). But the program had none of this and the Big East was beginning to slide from its perch in the 1980s becoming viewed as a boring, foul-heavy league. So Georgetown needed Thompson to remain hungry and stay on top of his game (ala Jim Calhoun after his first national championship) if the program was going to retain elite status. But that's not the Thompson the program got during the 90s. Thompson was practically sleep-walking. Guys like Corliss Williamson who wanted to be Hoyas were not contacted or recruited. The talent level fell off and the coaching level dropped too. Thompson managed one bounce-back year when he hauled in Duane Spencer via his still fertile New Orleans pipeline and had enough clout to win Othella Harrington's services. But Spencer never lived up to expectations and Othella was not the type of big man that Patrick and Alonzo were. Regarding the latter JT probably was all too aware of this which is shy he did put up an effort to snare Rasheed Wallace. But rumors were that his recruiting technique at this point was laughably amateurish at this point and JT lost out. Which meant Othella had to keep playing the five. Fortunately Iverson came along to save the day somewhat a couple of years later but I can't give JT credit for that recruit. Am I ignoring that JT made Gtown relevant and an elite program in the first place? No. But unfortunately he somewaht tarnished his own legacy by leaving the program in a very weakened state. I recall JT during his radio days taking Shaq and Kobe to the woodshed for breaking up their dynasty because of all of their squabbling. It didn't matter that the two had already won three titles according to JT. He emphasized that all that matters was winning titles and how the Lakers could have kept on winning them if the two had put their differences aside. Funny. Couldn't the Gtown program have also kept winning titles if JT had worked his tail off on the recruiting trail? He was an icon in the African American community and could have had his way with many of the elite black recruits and their parents at least if he had hit the road more often and played his cards right when meeting his targets. The winning ways would have continued.
|
|
lichoya68
Blue & Gray (over 10,000 posts)
OK YOUNGINS ARE HERE AND ARE VERY VERY GOOD cant wait GO HOYAS
Posts: 17,440
|
Post by lichoya68 on Jun 14, 2015 20:25:29 GMT -5
Yeah big john said coach wasnt too smart even tho he went to princeton with the shchedule he makes " Must be listening to his mom NOT ME bring on St leos!' yup tough sos battle tested for big east we WILL surprise beat the TWERPS big game.
|
|
KHoyaNYC
Golden Hoya (over 1000 posts)
Posts: 1,900
|
Post by KHoyaNYC on Jun 14, 2015 20:37:36 GMT -5
This schedule is perfect for us this year. Loaded with marquee games for a team that has marquee talent to go deep. Even if we lose a few early will pay big dividends later. No one should panic if we take a few hits in the beginning months.
|
|
jwp91
Platinum Hoya (over 5000 posts)
Posts: 6,013
|
Post by jwp91 on Jun 15, 2015 20:03:17 GMT -5
As for Thompson's recruiting in the 90's ... it is idiotic to criticize his recruiting. Alonzo Mourning (Class of 1992). Don Reid (long time NBA player (1991 recruit) Othella Harrington (number 2 player in country in recruiting class 1992) and Duane Spencer was a huge recruit (recruiting class 1992). Jahidi White (top 10 in country in 1994). Iverson (1994). Jerome Williams (1994). Victor Page (1995). Shernard Long and Ed Sheffey were both bigtime recruits who did not end up staying (1996). Boumtje (1997) and ANthony Perry (1997, MCdonalds AA and top 4 recruit in nation), Kenny Brunner (probably the best player in the class, and a Samurai sword and Bad Santa). Kevin Braswell (1998, one of Georgetown's leaders all time in scoring, assists, steals and 3 pointers). Lee Scruggs (my alltime favorite Hoya) and Wesley Wilson (top 30) in 1999. Gerald Riley and Mike Sweetney in 2000. Harvey Thomas in 2001 (rivals no. 20 and no. SF in Nation) and Tony Bethel was a huge recruit too. That is some bigtime recruiting in the 90s. By my count that is 6 NBA players (Reid, Harrington, Iverson, Williams, Boumtje, Sweetney) recruited by JT in the 90s after Mourning and several others who had huge potential or were very highly ranked (Page, Long, Perry, Scruggs, Wilson, SPencer, Brunner). The non-factual narrative that JT did not recruit in the 90s needs to end. At least on this site. I thought Hoyatalk was for real fans of the program who actually followed its teams, players and recruiting. There may have been other issues, but recruiting was not one of them. Joey Brown started for FOUR years without any true competition for his job. Four years for an average player whom no one remembers outside of longtime, die hard Hoya fans. That says a lot for how awful JT Jr was at recruiting in the 90s. First....don't include Zo in your recruiting wins for the 90s. Alonzo was in the Class of 1988. He wasn't a 90s recruit. Now to be fair I won't include Kenny Anderson as a 90s failure because Anderson was in the Class of 1989. But at the same time don't toss around nonsense about how JT Jr was too busy with the Olympics to recruit Anderson. Anderson's high school coach went on the record that all JT needed to do was make a phone call to Anderson. Just a lousy phone call. But JT wouldn't do that. As he famously remarked a few times he didn't need "no hamburger All American to bring up the ball." So we got four years of Joey Brown instead of two years of Anderson (maybe Anderson would have stayed as long as three years considering how much he loved Gtown). You can bet if Anderson was some high profile big man JT would have taken the time because he tended to find such time for big guys. Everyone else? Not so much. And it showed. But let's go to the 90s where JT started off the decade by blowing it with Grant Hill who was a huge lock for Gtown. JT and Fenlon put on such a poorly conceived (and apparently tone deaf) display that the Hoyas would have to settle for Robert Churchwell. Churchwell was a solid recruit but he was no Grant Hill and he also was not good enough to be a four year starter for a team that had true national aspirations (well, not unless there were four other studs on the court with him and he could do the dirty work). Missing out on Anderson and Hill was a one-two punch the program never recovered from with the exception of the two year run of Iverson. Missing out on those two also helped shift the balance back in the favor of the ACC who benefitted from JT's misses by successfully reeling in Anderson and Hill. And it kept rolling from there. Another guy who ended up eventually being a starter was Brian Kelly. Now I liked BK for what he brought to the table. But he should have always been a bench guy, not someone in the main five. How did Kelly end up at Gtown? He was a player on some small-time Ohio college (not even sure if it was D1) who wrote to Thompson about how he could help the team. And JT was impressed enough to extend an invitation. And in a way that made sense because by this time JT had gotten to a point in which he felt recruits/players should be initiating contact with him and his program first rather than the other way around. If you doubt that go seek remarks by Esherick to the media one or two years into his head coaching tenure. When asked about recruiting Esherick said that the Georgetown philosophy, one he took from JT, was for the recruits and their parties to make the initial contact. And that's just plain nuts. Surely that wasn't JT's philosophy when he got Patrick Ewing or Sleepy Floyd. But with success came the Gtown-Thompson brand name and evidence suggests that Thompson got lazy and started coasting on his reputation (the same way Gary Williams did at UMD after he won a title). Thompson HATED recruiting. He was upfront about that in the latter years. He felt he was being put in a position to beg players to join his program. The recruiting game was changing in the late 80s and the 90s and admittedly for the worse. Coaches, even highly successful ones, had to adapt. But Thompson didn't adapt for the better. He got worse at it. And he had such a narrow scope. Like I mentioned earlier he showed a pulse when a big man was involved. But he seemed to put little regard for the players and their skillsets at the perimeter positions. As long as those guys could play defense and rebound that was good enough for him. Creating off the bounce? Scoring? Shooting? Looked as if he didn't care if they could do any of those things. For goodness sakes he never adapted to the three-point line and the need to find shooters. He would never have a truly legitimately decent outside shooting team for the remainder of his coaching career after the '89-'90 season, the last year of 80s recruits Mark Tillmon and Dwayne Bryant. After that season came the era of Shoot-And-Go-Get-It (our bad shooters would take jumpshots, miss and our bigs would collect offensive rebounds..hopefully). By the way one didn't need to rely on strictly McDAAs to get shooters. Shooters could be found much lower in the recruiting rankings. JT never seemed interested in locating anyway so what you ended up having was a future Hall of Fame duo in Mutombo and Mourning who experienced earlier than expected NCAA tourney outings in their final two seasons together. You think Kenny and Grant could have helped on that front? How about a couple of one-dimensional shooters as well? Thompson could have gotten away with his cavalier approach to recruiting if his program had great facilities, kick-butt assistant coaches who were great recruiters and had kept making appearances in the Final Four (aka being relevant). But the program had none of this and the Big East was beginning to slide from its perch in the 1980s becoming viewed as a boring, foul-heavy league. So Georgetown needed Thompson to remain hungry and stay on top of his game (ala Jim Calhoun after his first national championship) if the program was going to retain elite status. But that's not the Thompson the program got during the 90s. Thompson was practically sleep-walking. Guys like Corliss Williamson who wanted to be Hoyas were not contacted or recruited. The talent level fell off and the coaching level dropped too. Thompson managed one bounce-back year when he hauled in Duane Spencer via his still fertile New Orleans pipeline and had enough clout to win Othella Harrington's services. But Spencer never lived up to expectations and Othella was not the type of big man that Patrick and Alonzo were. Regarding the latter JT probably was all too aware of this which is shy he did put up an effort to snare Rasheed Wallace. But rumors were that his recruiting technique at this point was laughably amateurish at this point and JT lost out. Which meant Othella had to keep playing the five. Fortunately Iverson came along to save the day somewhat a couple of years later but I can't give JT credit for that recruit. Am I ignoring that JT made Gtown relevant and an elite program in the first place? No. But unfortunately he somewaht tarnished his own legacy by leaving the program in a very weakened state. I recall JT during his radio days taking Shaq and Kobe to the woodshed for breaking up their dynasty because of all of their squabbling. It didn't matter that the two had already won three titles according to JT. He emphasized that all that matters was winning titles and how the Lakers could have kept on winning them if the two had put their differences aside. Funny. Couldn't the Gtown program have also kept winning titles if JT had worked his tail off on the recruiting trail? He was an icon in the African American community and could have had his way with many of the elite black recruits and their parents at least if he had hit the road more often and played his cards right when meeting his targets. The winning ways would have continued. A pretty accurate critique. It was maddening at the time.
|
|
lichoya68
Blue & Gray (over 10,000 posts)
OK YOUNGINS ARE HERE AND ARE VERY VERY GOOD cant wait GO HOYAS
Posts: 17,440
|
Post by lichoya68 on Jun 16, 2015 8:45:17 GMT -5
khoya nyc YOU GOT IT wright yup tough schedule BUT have the talent and italy and that schedule oh my and if LJ makes the final under 19 teams OH MY MY MY go hoyas great year coming we will surprise YUP
|
|