Cooley Laments Defensive Deficiencies, Asks Hoya Fans to Stick By Team After Creighton Loss

As Georgetown falls to 0-3 in the Big East, Ed Cooley talked about his team's defensive issues after the game, while also calling on Hoya fans to stand by his team despite its struggles.

After seeing his team falter in the second half and get blown out at home, 77-60, by the Creighton Bluejays on Tuesday night, a visibly frustrated Ed Cooley had a lot to say about his team’s continued defensive miscues and lack of physicality

“Our defense disappeared in the second half,” said Cooley at the beginning of his postgame press conference. “This is back-to-back games in the second half where we’ve just melted.

“Defensively, we have to improve,” continued Cooley. “We’re not going to win games if we can’t be better defensively as a unit. The word ‘collectivity’, defensively is so important, and right now, Game 14, we should be better than this defensively.

“It’s an embarrassment the way we’re guarding right now, it’s an absolute embarrassment.”

The numbers support Cooley’s claims.

After Tuesday night’s loss, Georgetown’s defense sits at #263 in the nation in Adjusted Defensive Efficiency.

Georgetown’s opponents are averaging 72.3 points per game against them, which is 217th in the country.

The Hoyas continue to have massive issues keeping their opponents out of the paint and away from the rim. Georgetown is now 293rd in the country in near-proximity field goal attempts allowed per 100 possessions (33.8). On those near-proximity attempts, Georgetown is allowing opponents to shoot 60.37%, which is 273rd in the Division 1.

What is perhaps most concerning at this stage, past the halfway point of the season, is the lack of improvement on the defensive side of the ball for Ed Cooley’s players.

“It’s frustrating when we’re not playing the way we’ve practiced,” said Cooley.

“We’re having some really bad lapses, whether it be a switch, the helpside of our defense, some communication. We should be further along than that as a unit and I’m disappointed.”

Now riding a three-game losing streak, the season is taking on a more grim tone for Georgetown (7-7 overall), who have 17 games left to rectify their defensive mistakes and show some progress on that end of the court heading into Year 2 under Ed Cooley.

For Cooley, whose teams historically have typically carried reputations of being hardnosed and defensively tenacious teams, part of fixing Georgetown’s defensive flaws includes looking in the mirror.

“That to me is the most frustrating thing that I’m going through as the leader,” said Cooley, when asked about this team not living up to the defensive standard set by his teams in the past. “Because I feel like I’m letting my team down.”

“Is it the instruction? Is it the coaching? It’s just something we have to take a long look at. Because normally, the team’s that we’ve coached in the past, I think we’ve done a really good job. We may not have been the most talented team, but right now my team has to be a lot tougher. We have to be a lot more physical in this league. This is not a league that is going to be forgiving.”

Despite the frustrating loss, Cooley still took time on Tuesday night to call on Georgetown fans to stick by the team despite the mounting losses and the lackluster play.

“We need everybody to stay behind us. And it’s frustrating in the last couple of games we didn’t play well in the second half. We have a team coming in here on Saturday, in our building, a noon game. We need people to come out and help us get through this transition and help us get through this build.

“Everybody’s like ‘Well Coach, you gotta win first.’ No, we gotta do this together. We need the District, we need the DMV to come help us get through this together. It may not be pretty right now, but when it’s all said and done, it’s going to be absolutely gorgeous when it’s all said and done.”

Generating consistent fan turnout for home games was always going to be arguably Cooley’s biggest challenge off the court in the early stages of his rebuild of the Georgetown program, and that has proven to be the case so far in Year 1.

This isn’t a criticism of Cooley, whose outreach to the Georgetown community since he was hired has been very strong so far. But the lagging fan attendance (official attendance of 4,980 for Tuesday night’s game) shows just how steep this hill will be for Cooley to climb to get Capital One Arena to be the crazed atmosphere that Cooley and his staff eventually built at the Amica Mutual Pavilion in Providence.

It can be done, but it’s going to take time, and comments Cooley has made at different points this season make it clear that he wants more from the Georgetown fan base.

“Everybody wants the process to win right now. Everybody wants to rush the process of ‘why aren’t we winning'?” said Cooley.

“This is what we anticipated with some pain and some growth, but at the same time we’re still coaching young men, they’re out there fighting, they got to fight a little harder, we got to be a little more patient with their growth and development.

“The process of transition isn’t overnight. It isn’t over a year. It may take some time. And patience is a word that people don’t like to hear. But that’s where we’re at and that’s what we’ll continue to talk about.”

Cooley’s right, patience isn’t the message that Georgetown fans are looking for.

And while you can’t blame folks around the DMV for wanting to save a couple of bucks on a cold Tuesday night and do something else with their time rather than sit in a half-empty arena and watch Georgetown get blown out, Cooley’s point about doing this rebuild together is a fair one.

Ultimately, as Cooley acknowledged he has heard already, the fans will come back when this team wins again.

That’s not entirely fair to Cooley and this program, I acknowledge. But after the way this program has shunned its own fans for many years prior to the arrival of Cooley and his staff, who have done great work already to rebuild the connection between program and fanbase, the only thing that will really lead to the kind of home atmosphere Cooley desires is for the team to start stringing some wins together.

In some ways, Cooley is paying the price for the ignorance of the prior regime when it came to the fans.

But you can tell Cooley cares. And that matters, a lot.

Georgetown hasn’t had a head coach who has cared about embracing the program’s fans in years. Eventually, Cooley will reap the rewards of his outreach to the community. But for now, in the early stages of this new relationship, there are going to be serious growing pains when it comes to getting fans to come out to games, regardless of how the team is performing.