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Inside College Basketball
Just Like Old Times An undefeated start has Georgetown once again looking like the Beast of the East By Seth Davis
Just as the high-profile Thompson's best teams featured glamorous stars like Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning and Allen Iverson, so this Georgetown club is reflective of the new man in charge. The ninth-ranked Hoyas have gone largely unnoticed during their winning streak -- thanks in large part to their milquetoasty preconference schedule -- but have thrived thanks to depth and good chemistry. Through Monday nine players were scoring between 12.6 and 7.1 points per game, and 10 were averaging at least 10 minutes. Even though four players who previously started are now coming off the bench and two freshmen are starters, nobody's complaining. "It's easy to run a team like this," says junior point guard Kevin Braswell, who was averaging 6.9 assists (up from 5.3 his sophomore season). "Last year everybody thought he should score 20 every game. Now we understand that if we make the extra pass, we get a better shot." Georgetown's glut of interchangeable parts also answers one of the questions about Esherick when he succeeded Thompson: Can he recruit? Esherick got off to a promising start by locking up every player who had given Thompson a commitment, including Mike Sweetney, who was then a 6'8" junior at Oxon Hill (Md.) High. That didn't seem like such a coup last spring, though, when Esherick popped in a videotape of the Capital Classic all-star game and was astonished to see that Sweetney had ballooned to well over 300 pounds. "I told him he would have trouble playing for me if he didn't do something about it," Esherick says. Sweetney shed nearly 50 pounds last summer during his twice-daily workouts on the Georgetown campus, and through Monday he was the Hoyas' leading scorer (12.6 points a game) and leading rebounder (7.5). One of Esherick's other recruits, 6'6" freshman Gerald Riley, from Milledgeville, Ga., has also been a pleasant surprise, chipping in with 9.8 points and 3.5 rebounds a game as a starter. Thompson still attends many home games. Esherick, however, isn't about to start feeling overshadowed now. "It's an advantage to have Coach Thompson around because I can still bounce things off him," Esherick says. "I'm different than he is, but the way I coach is the same. I've also kidded him that if I start losing, it's his fault, too." Issue date: January 22, 2001
For more Inside College Basketball see this week's issue of Sports Illustrated, on newsstands Wednesday, January 17. Click here to subscribe to SI.
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