With the way that every single person I talked to who covered the Ohio men’s basketball team over the last day revered Greg Monroe and Georgetown, it was really difficult not to think that the Bobcats themselves were going to be intimidated as heck coming into tonight’s NCAA first round catastrophe.
Perhaps those people weren’t able to forget how Ohio had played earlier in the year, how they had collapsed or had been sloppy or had been downright outmatched. They felt they had to hedge.
Perhaps those who were high on Georgetown this week should’ve looked back at the games where the Hoyas hadn’t played well and had the same kind of reservations. They definitely should’ve hedged because as well as the Bobcats played – and I talked yesterday about swagger – this wasn’t the first time Georgetown found themselves in this kind of game. Instead, it was reminiscent of what they looked like at their lowest points this season: vs. South Florida, at Rutgers, and vs. Notre Dame.
“You’ve got to step on the court and play,” said Hoyas head coach John Thompson III, who had a special analysis saved up. “I think I said this, and you can get caught up in heavily favored. We lost to some good teams that probably were better than most people gave them credit for. This team is young. It’s probably the first time I said that all year because we didn’t want to lean on that. This is a team with no seniors… You have to go through some growing pains, and this group went through some growing pains this year.”
The thing is, all week Georgetown talked about how well it was playing. If growing pains are a risk, that talk needed to be ratcheted back. That would’ve been how to prepare for what ensued:
Monroe turned the ball over on Georgetown’s first possession. Julian Vaughn launched an ill-advised 3-pointer on the fourth possession. By they time they got to the sixth, they were down, 8-2. Thompson said a few weeks ago that Georgetown couldn’t play from behind all the time. Yet, here they went again. That just doesn’t happen to a championship team.
“You can’t try and wait and expect the other team to go in a slump or something,” said Monroe. “You have to make plays on your own. They were hot tonight, it’s no secret, and they were making shots. They stepped up tonight. We couldn’t do anything to stop them.”
And that whimper is where the Hoyas end the year. In many ways, it’s also where they started. While they’ve flirted with both greatness and massive underachievement, the key is that you could never tell what would happen on which night – a clarity in judgment that was clouded by last week’s Big East Tournament run.
