Maryland-Georgetown rivalry must be renewed

	Steve Blake and the Terps beat Anthony Perry and the Hoyas in the 2001 NCAA Tournament. Donald Miralle/Getty Images

This is the time of year when we Hoop Thinkers are treated to a bevy of non-conference regional rivalries. You know 'em because you love 'em: Indiana-Kentucky, Gonzaga-Washington, Illinois-Missouri, Kentucky-Louisville, UConn-UMass, Marquette-Wisconsin, Iowa-Iowa State, Cincinnati-Xavier, Florida-Florida State, Villanova-Penn, and on and on.

There is, however, one matchup conspicuously missing from that list, and that is Maryland-Georgetown. As a native of Potomac, Md., which is located almost exactly between those two campuses, I can tell you an annual series between the Hoyas and the Terps would stir great passion and enthusiasm in the area. When I ran this idea by Maryland coach Gary Williams for the umpteenth time this week, he agreed. Which is exactly the problem. "Oh yeah, it'd be a lot of fun for everybody," Williams said sardonically, "except the basketball programs at Maryland and Georgetown."

In other words, the bigger the rivalry, the higher the price for losing. Coaches don't like to eat crow in their own kitchen. And yet, Maryland and Georgetown used to play each other every year for more than four decades. Sometime after Georgetown beat Maryland in the 1980 NCAA tournament, however, Lefty Driesell and John Thompson had a falling out, and the series ended. (I'm told the two have since worked things out.)

The game stayed dormant until 1993, when Maryland, behind an incredible 27-point effort by an unknown freshman named Joe Smith, shocked the Hoyas in overtime in the old Capital Centre in Landover, Md. The teams were supposed to play again the following year in Cole Field House, but Georgetown wanted about 2,000 more tickets than Maryland was willing to provide. That proved to be a deal-breaker.

Alas, outside of a chance meeting in the 2001 NCAA tournament (won by Maryland), the Terps and Hoyas haven't met in the regular season in 12 years. There has been some talk of a revival, most recently by Ted Leonsis and Raul Fernandez, co-owners of the NHL's Washington Capitals. Leonsis is a Georgetown grad and Fernandez went to Maryland, and they offered up the MCI center in Washington, D.C., for a one-game meeting where the tickets would be evenly divided and each school would get half the gate receipts. Georgetown, which was the weaker program at the time and thus had nothing to lose, was willing to play. But Maryland balked.

Perhaps there's a ray of hope in the arrival of second-year coach John Thompson III to Georgetown. While beginning with the requisite caveat that "it has to be right for both programs," Thompson told me he was "not opposed" to playing Maryland. He also revealed that he was willing to play the Terps last year in the BB&T Classic (in which Maryland and George Washington have met the last two years), but once again, Maryland balked. "Because of history people have said there's no way you're going to play Maryland, but I've never said that," Thompson says. "If it makes sense, we'll do it."

Williams makes a fair point when he says that Maryland, unlike Georgetown, plays a tough non-conference schedule every year. "We don't need Georgetown to make our schedule complete just because they're 12 miles down the road," he says. "If you look at Georgetown's history, they don't play a lot of big games outside their conference."