Trust the Administration

[TBird41]

town05 said:

There's nothing to even merit rehashing this discussion. I'm fairly certain III already got his deal, or maybe he didn't ... but WHY DWELL ON IT!?

Further, why do you think we'd even know about this? Wait for a decent press release when the timing is right. A lot of other things going on.

I'd bet that things have already been arranged. It's certainly not our right to know. Do you really expect a random press release in the off season?? Find something else to occupy your thoughts. Yapping on the internet on something you know nothing about does absolutely nothing. Wise fools.

You want to have an impact? Go donate some of your money to the school.

Well, Washington St. didn't have a problem with letting their fans and donors know that they'd signed their head coach to an extension...

[SFHoya99]

town05 said:

There's nothing to even merit rehashing this discussion. I'm fairly certain III already got his deal, or maybe he didn't ... but WHY DWELL ON IT!?

Simply because if III doesn't get a deal, this program is headed to irrelevancy, permanently. And there's nothing to say that the Admin understands this/sees it as undesirable.

Further, why do you think we'd even know about this? Wait for a decent press release when the timing is right. A lot of other things going on.

Seriously? You really believe that the SID/Georgetown is just sitting on a press release for no real reason? Have you ever worked, period? And no, jobs at Georgetown don't count.

I'd bet that things have already been arranged.

I have a bridge to sell you.

It's certainly not our right to know.

Really? I'm pretty sure Georgetown considers me as part of its family. They certainly ask for money like a family member.

Do you really expect a random press release in the off season??

Why not? The SID is paid year round. Every other school that has signed their coach issues a press release. Certainly would stop some negative recruiting.

Find something else to occupy your thoughts. Yapping on the internet on something you know nothing about does absolutely nothing. Wise fools.

Actually, I've gotten calls directly from people in GU leadership based on things I've riled up on this board. But no, I've also written to DeGioia and Muir.

My post is intended to influence some of those who thought May was too soon to pressure Muir and DeGioia to do so now. I bet someone has. It seemed we had forgotten.

You want to have an impact? Go donate some of your money to the school.

I have in the past, but as I've informed the DeGioia, Muir and the people who pester me via mail and phone call for cash, I'm not giving another cent until Thompson is reupped.

[strummer8526]

town05 said:

There's nothing to even merit rehashing this discussion. I'm fairly certain III already got his deal, or maybe he didn't ... but WHY DWELL ON IT!?

Further, why do you think we'd even know about this? Wait for a decent press release when the timing is right. A lot of other things going on.

I'd bet that things have already been arranged. It's certainly not our right to know. Do you really expect a random press release in the off season?? Find something else to occupy your thoughts. Yapping on the internet on something you know nothing about does absolutely nothing. Wise fools.

You want to have an impact? Go donate some of your money to the school.

What Georgetown are you familiar with that you have so much faith in a "decent press release"? The last press release I saw, our school mis-spelled its own name. The biggest problem with this place is that no one ever knows anything about anything. Maybe the reason people have such a problem donating is that there's so rarely any kind of transparency concerning where the money goes, how projects are going, etc.

I can't wait for JTIII to sign long term with Georgeteown.

[FLHoya]

tbird41 said:

Not to mention the fact that there is absolutely no reason to wait to extend JT3 at all.

Padding thread counts on Hoyatalk in the summer? ;D

I mean, lately we've been debating the finer points of student section wristbands and talking about 2008 regional sites, Jacksonville University, and whether the home OOC schedule this coming season is the worst in a decade!

(quick answers: anything more detailed than sections on a wristband doesn't work, hope for Raleigh-Charlotte or Detroit as a backup, that's just random, and 00-01 has the title by a longshot.)

[hoya91]

With regard to Georgetown basketball success and impact on admissions. I'm not aware of any studies, only personal observation and some extrapolation.

My roommate was specifically factoring in college basketball in his choice of schools. His top two choices were Georgetown and Duke. He was accepted to both and chose to attend Georgetown. Clearly Georgetown basketball had an impact on him in two ways - it let him to apply and helped him choose Georgetown as the final choice.

I think the real affect on admissions and academic reputation is probably based on an increase in applications. The more people that apply, the more selective Georgetown can be. When will we know the increase in applications vs. last year to be able to compare it to other years? (In other words, a Final Four appearance vs. a "normal" year?). I expect the increase after a Final Four appearance is greater than past years...

[DudeSlade]

To pull out the list of Top 20 schools in the country and state that athletics have no bearing on improving PR, improving brand recognition, improving reputation, and possibly improving admissions through more applications just because the Ivy League and a handful of other schools don't have phenomenal athletics is not a fair evaluation of the effect that athletics can have. Those schools have very distinct reasons why they maintain their brand recognition, PR, and academics, not the least of which is centuries of tradition as top universities (which, need I remind you, had some of the top athletics teams through the first half of the 20th Century and gained much PR from them) and endowments larger than Big Roy.

Can an academic improvement occur through athletic success alone? That's preposterous and to try to boil the argument down to that is misleading. Obviously, the academic and admissions staff must be putting the right steps into place in order to facilitate this growth and improvement, but it is undeniable that athletics can provide the PR that will increase a university's brand recognition and place in the public conscious. How many times have you heard during Duke broadcasts about how good their academics are and how smart their players are? Do you think all the PR that it's team generated for the school had anything to do with their climbing academic reputation throughout the '90s and 2000's? Is it a coincidence that Georgetown grew from a top regional school to a national academic leader, especially for Catholic schools, during the same time that its basketball teams grew to national prominence? Could it be mere happenstance that USC has for the first time surpassed UCLA in average incoming admission numbers (SATs, GPAs, etc.) during the Pete Carroll era?

Are these phenomena exclusively due to athletics? Hell no. Is the fact that a Los Angelino from USC's biggest feeder school from a family of nearly a century of Trojan grads who earned a full scholarship to USC decided to not only look at a Jesuit school 3000 miles away in the middle of political bravado he has no interest in, but also decided to attend that school have nothing to do with the fact that Georgetown's name made it all the way to the West Coast thanks to its basketball team's rise in the previous decades, providing marketing to a whole other region of people that wouldn't have heard of it otherwise? As that very person, I can tell you, it made a world of difference in just hearing about the school. Heck, after our Final Four last year, it was amazing to have people on the West Coast who previously would ask if Georgetown was "that school for blacks" or if it was in Georgia or had never heard of it tell me how impressed they were that I had attended such a great academic school as Georgetown--the very school they didn't know just months earlier.

For top students from outside the region, the exposure to the name and quality of Georgetown through athletics has a very real affect on interesting them in the university, if not on applying. Usually this increased PR must be prolonged and significant and has an affect down the road--I have no idea, but maybe this is why the stats don't seem to show anything. Now, without the academic improvement to match (ala Steve Sample at USC in the 00s, Duke during the '90s, Gtown during the '80s/'90s/00s), it wouldn't matter -- it'd be like Florida or Texas or UConn or whoever else has won a championship in a major sport in the last few years. Now, as far as donations, you just have to look at the Willingham firing at Notre Dame (don't even question me here, this knowledge is from one of their board members) or USC right now, but that's another discussion and has it's own idiosyncracies. Just like your Top 20 who don't focus on athletics, your top athletic schools may not place the same focus on academics, but for those few who mix a rise to the top in athletics with improving academic standards and programs, the exposure can do nothing but help and JTIII provides that exposure. That was my point. Now when you decide to try to prove me wrong by manipulating my point again, at least you had to read this whole long thing first, cuz I don't even care anymore, I just want to see JTIII extended.

[DFW HOYA]

hoya91 said:

I think the real affect on admissions and academic reputation is probably based on an increase in applications. The more people that apply, the more selective Georgetown can be. When will we know the increase in applications vs. last year to be able to compare it to other years?

Applications in the College rose 2% this past year and 7% overall. It has hit a ceiling of sorts, and here's why.

A lot of schools have artificially inflated their application numbers with the use of the "one size fits all" Common Application. Boston College, for example, now receives 28,000 applications a year, versus 16,000 for Georgetown, whoch does not use the Common application and has no plans to. The demographics of students at the top of their high school classes and with comparable ACT/SAT scores strongly suggests that above a certain number, huge numbers of applicants are going to have a negligible chance of admission.

BC is not going to push Georgetown out of the top 25. The school that does appears to be coming up on the horizon, however, is a city school that now gets 33,000 applications a year, offers 22% of its class merit scholarships, and has zoomed past GU with a $3 billion endowment.

Don't look now, but at #27, here comes USC.

www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/private/docs/admission/Freshman_Profile_2006.pdf

[Eurostar]

dfw said:

Applications in the College rose 2% this past year and 7% overall. It has hit a ceiling of sorts, and here's why.

A lot of schools have artificially inflated their application numbers with the use of the "one size fits all" Common Application. Boston College, for example, now receives 28,000 applications a year, versus 16,000 for Georgetown, whoch does not use the Common application and has no plans to. The demographics of students at the top of their high school classes and with comparable ACT/SAT scores strongly suggests that above a certain number, huge numbers of applicants are going to have a negligible chance of admission.

BC is not going to push Georgetown out of the top 25. The school that does appears to be coming up on the horizon, however, is a city school that now gets 33,000 applications a year, offers 22% of its class merit scholarships, and has zoomed past GU with a $3 billion endowment.

Don't look now, but at #27, here comes USC.

www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/private/docs/admission/Freshman_Profile_2006.pdf

Georgetown will never go to the common app and here's why. The admissions committee understands that even 16,000 qualified applications is a ton and its becoming harder and harder to differentiate between all these people who have similar stats, extracurriculars, etc anyways. Gtown introduces another factor in admissions that I dont think many schools do, and it really shows in the student body: how much the student wants to be on the hilltop. The committee puts a lot of students on the waitlist to see who sends letters, they dont use the common app, and they use the mandatory interview to weed out people and to see how passionate the student is about the school. Honestly, I dont think I met anyone in my 4 years where Georgetown wasnt in their top 2 of school choices. It really makes for a much more cohesive student body and a better college experience.

Im not sure about the other graduate programs, but I know the med school puts an absurd percentage of people on their waitlist and makes the students write letters in order to get off it. We may lose a little money in application fees, and maybe we could get slightly higher scorers if we used different application practices, but if it would sacrifice student enthusiasm for the Hoyas then no way.

[theexorcist]

A few comments:

1. Lots of alums have a love-hate thing with Georgetown. My brother went to Virginia Tech, and he complains that they ask him for money, but he's never alleged vast incompetence. The one item where this is not the case - where Georgetown is believed to get more return than investment - is men's basketball.

I'd guess that men's basketball success might make people a little more willing to donate, especially if they got envelopes in mid-April when the happy feeling remains.

2. Georgetown has four distinguishing factors - it's selective, it's Catholic, it's strong in "government/politics stuff", and it has basketball.

Actually, it doesn't have basketball - it has something that's an event. USC and Notre Dame have this with football. Harvard has this because it's, well, Harvard. Dartmouth doesn't. Washington University at St. Louis doesn't. When I thought of Georgetown, I thought of doing the Washington thing and being part of the student section at USAir.

That "center of the known universe" factor makes Georgetown distinctive, and can help in recruiting over the Dartmouths of the world. Georgetown cannot do this playing St. Peter's for the MAAC championship or playing Providence to make the BET.

[DFW HOYA]

theexorcist said:

Georgetown cannot do this playing St. Peter's for the MAAC championship or playing Providence to make the BET.

Georgetown hasn't played in the MAAC in eight years.

[ExcitableBoy]

dfw said:

Applications in the College rose 2% this past year and 7% overall.

To clarify--we made the final four in March, while applications were due in January. So any potential "surge" wouldn't show up until this year's crop of applicants.

[theexorcist]

I was exaggerating the drop of Georgetown basketball and meant GU dropping down a level in basketball, so the St. Peter's reference was to bball, not football.

[williambraskyiii]

i applied to Northwestern the year after they made the Rose Bowl in 1996-97...their applications shot up something like 25% from the year prior if I recall correctly from the acceptance letter. Around the same time, Northwestern shot up to around 10 in the Us News rankings...

i would assume that Duke also experienced a significant boost in the quality of its student body from say, 1985-2000...largely corresponding with the school's dominance of the college bball world. fact is, poindexters who considered themselves sports fans wanted to be a part of something special...Camp K or whatever else the scrubs like to label themselves.

princeton, harvard, yale, etc will always get top candidates b/c of the strength of their academic programs (perceived or real) and entrenched reputations as elite. but to deny that a strong athletics program and general buzz in the college sports world doesn't assist in recruiting a more qualified student body strikes me as completely illogical. that is not to say that Florida is going to start attracting Rhodes Scholars like hifigator, but for a certain ilk of institutions in the Georgetown, Duke mold, it just seems intuitive.

[ExcitableBoy]

williambraskyiii said:

i applied to Northwestern the year after they made the Rose Bowl in 1996-97...their applications shot up something like 25% from the year prior if I recall correctly from the acceptance letter. Around the same time, Northwestern shot up to around 10 in the Us News rankings...

I heard straight from Northwestern's finance people that, as expected, football donations following that Rose Bowl shot up something like a third. What they were genuinely impressed with, though, was that non-football donations also increased by nearly the same amount. Amazing what a little school spirit can do for the bottom line.

[SFHoya99]

Now I wouldn't be surprised if GU gets none of the lift Northwestern did -- because they don't try. It's been months since the Final Four and I've only gotten generic fund-raising letters. We don't even offer a Final Four video. The school seems like it has no interest in maximizing the exposure basketball gives.

[hilltopper2000]

This is what the NCAA says on the issue. (For the record, count me among those who think that basketball has a meaningful and positive effect on GU for a whole host of reasons (that may not apply to other institutions).)

www.ncaa.org/library/research/athletic_spending/2003/empirical_effects_of_collegiate_athletics_interim_report.pdf

[StPetersburgHoya (Inactive)]

town05 said:

There's nothing to even merit rehashing this discussion. I'm fairly certain III already got his deal, or maybe he didn't ... but WHY DWELL ON IT!?

Further, why do you think we'd even know about this? Wait for a decent press release when the timing is right. A lot of other things going on.

I'd bet that things have already been arranged. It's certainly not our right to know. Do you really expect a random press release in the off season?? Find something else to occupy your thoughts. Yapping on the internet on something you know nothing about does absolutely nothing. Wise fools.

You want to have an impact? Go donate some of your money to the school.

This has to be the dumbest thing I've read on HoyaTalk since we all learned that you have to have a really good point guard dribbling the air out of the ball at the top of the key to breakdown a zone defense.

The irony of you "yapping on the internet" to tell others to stop "yapping on the internet", is, i'm sure, lost on you.

However, let's delve further into the abyss.

People need to know about a coach being extended. These people are called - our amazing recruiting classes that are coming in the next 2 years. They were sort of promised III would be here. If he's not, they might not be coming. Hmmmm ... who are some other people that would like to know? Oh, I know, maybe all of the companies that want to advertise with Georgetown Basketball knowing that they are associating their name with a winning program and a prominent black coach in a large black community. That might be another one.

Random press releases in the off season. That's right I forgot, everyone in McDonough goes on vacation when it's not basketball season. Must be a pretty sweet job. Let's review some "random press releases" that were issued during the off season:

Well, gee, here's one: guhoyas.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/spec-rel/072407aaa.html

Oh man, here's another one: guhoyas.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/spec-rel/071507aaa.html

Wow they must have been super busy this summer because here's another one: guhoyas.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/spec-rel/062807aaa.html

No way, yet another press release during the off season: guhoyas.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/spec-rel/062707aac.html

Clearly all of these press releases were an abberation. I forgot the unwritten (they probably wanted to write the rule down, but it was probably the off season and they realized they couldn't) that we have to wait until the first lay up of midnight madness to learn who will be coaching our team the following year. Silly me.

In short, if you really want to have some impact, think before you speak.

[strummer8526]

sfhoya99 said:

Now I wouldn't be surprised if GU gets none of the lift Northwestern did -- because they don't try. It's been months since the Final Four and I've only gotten generic fund-raising letters. We don't even offer a Final Four video. The school seems like it has no interest in maximizing the exposure basketball gives.

I often wonder who is at fault for this. The Athletic Department obviously has the closest connection to basketball. But then again, the Office of Advancement seems to do the most consistent communicating with alums. Sometimes I wish Dr. P would see this as an obvious area for some "strategic development" as is in his job title, but I don't think fundraising specifically is under his purview.

It's just a huge missed opportunity that evidently slips through the cracks.

[town05]

stpetersburghoya said:

Random press releases in the off season. That's right I forgot, everyone in McDonough goes on vacation when it's not basketball season. Must be a pretty sweet job. Let's review some "random press releases" that were issued during the off season:

Clearly all of these press releases were an abberation. I forgot the unwritten (they probably wanted to write the rule down, but it was probably the off season and they realized they couldn't) that we have to wait until the first lay up of midnight madness to learn who will be coaching our team the following year. Silly me.

In short, if you really want to have some impact, think before you speak.

Think before you write. None of those have to do with a financially burdened private university making the announcment that they're going to extend a huge contract and give us the details, while other programs (not just athletics) are also having issues. The timing is simply not there for a $$$ announcement. A better time will come. All I meant. I certainly agree that there's a serious downside to this if I'm wrong, but I'm not He'll get paid, by us.

Either way, I'm confident that you'll see this school isn't run by a bunch of idiots and you geniuses on HoyaTalk are not just so much more intelligent. ;D Oh, and I'm actually still at work right now, and it's not for Georgetown! Good one, SFHoya. (yawn) We need more intelligent responses from you...

Glad to get you all so riled up over something you're still just yapping about. It's a big deal, but with no news to shed public light on it, you're just running in circles. Patience

[SFHoya99]

Oooh, good to see you've gone with the childish arrogance slant. Love the smilies, too.

This University has done nothing to earn patience or trust. And it is beyond that -- it's not that I think the school is completely run by idiots. Not completely. But it is largely run by two groups of people I don't trust to make this decision with my interests in mind:

1. Academics who have repeatedly shown they do not understand marketing or public relations in any aspect. Georgetown is an underutilized brand to say the least. Making money isn't Georgetown's primary goal, of course, but that doesn't mean you put academics in charge of the marketing and finances. Our endowment and brand name speak for themselves.

2. Academics who have no interest in any kind of big time sports for whatever reason. Some of these reasons I can respect; some I can't. It will be incredibly easy for DeGioia to let Thompson go to a high bidder, claim we couldn't keep him financially and let the program go where it was headed under Esherick.

We lose Thompson, we lose the Big East, we are done, done, done. Do you not see that the time is here for more leadership than just a step up from incompetence? A real vision is needed here. I think Muir might have it from an athletic standpoint. I wonder if DeGioia has a real vision that coincides with Muir's.

I'm well aware that my prioirities may not be consistent with DeGioia's. That's my concern.

What amazes me is that some "fans" on this message board are so lazy that they won't send off an email stating their preference to keep Thompson. In the time you wrote your condescending scribble, you could have made your priorities known to him, whatever they are.