In A Season Filled with Challenges, A Return to Providence Provides Golden Opportunity for Ed Cooley and the Hoyas

Despite the challenges endured so far, a win against the Friars can wipe away the disappointment, and help propel the Hoyas towards a strong end to the season.

A date that has been marked on calendars for nearly 10 months by many college basketball fans, not just fans of the teams involved, is finally here.

On Saturday afternoon, Ed Cooley will walk into the Amica Mutual Pavilion as the head coach for the other team, the Georgetown Hoyas.

For Georgetown fans and Providence fans alike, the 2023-24 season has been building up to January 27th.

For the Friar faithful, they finally get their chance at revenge against their formerly beloved, now hated head coach. The scene at the AMP tomorrow will be an intense and potent concoction of anger, hurt feelings, and a thirst for payback.

For Georgetown fans, Saturday provides an opportunity to see their team do one of the funniest things possible in college basketball history.

A win against a superior Friars team— one that is carried by players recruited by Ed Cooley, such as Devin Carter— would be a major blow to Providence’s hopes of making the NCAA Tournament.

The Hoyas, who have a record of 8-11 overall, and 1-7 in the Big East, are 11.5-point underdogs at the time of writing. They are riding a four-game losing streak, and have lost seven of their last eight games.

A loss to Georgetown, at the AMP, would be catastrophic for Providence’s postseason hopes, and absolutely hilarious for the narratives that have surrounded this matchup for months.

So far this season for Georgetown, there have been more downs than ups. A 90-66 home loss to Butler on Tuesday night was a new low point in a season that has had its fair share of disappointment up to this point.

Two losses at home to Holy Cross and archrival Syracuse stand out as particularly disheartening performances for a Hoyas team that wasn’t expected to contend this year, but was still expected to show signs of progress as the year went on.

As things stand now, Georgetown is ranked #176 overall on Kenpom.com, with an offensive efficiency of 111.4, good for 94th in the nation, and a defensive efficiency that is so bad it may make you gasp (112.7 - 291st in the country).

The numbers under the hood don’t paint a prettier picture. The Hoyas’ paint defense is abysmal, ranking 337th in the nation in defensive near-proximity percentage. Their defensive field goal percentage of 47% is ranked 307th in the country.

For an Ed Cooley-coached team, those defensive numbers are shocking.

But despite all the bad losses, injuries, and other bumps in the road this team has encountered in Year 1 of the Cooley Era, all that disappointment and negativity can be washed away with a win against Providence— either tomorrow or at Capital One Arena on March 5th.

It will be a tall task, but for a Georgetown team that has fared comparatively well on the road this season compared to its performances at home, it’s not too far-fetched to think the Hoyas have a sliver of a chance against a Friars team that has its fair share of issues offensively in halfcourt sets, and is also without star forward Bryce Hopkins (torn ACL).

It was only just last week that the Hoyas took Xavier down to the wire at the Cintas Center, losing 92-91 after Jay Heath’s shot attempt bounced off the rim. According to Haslametrics.com, Georgetown is ranked 45th in the country in Haslam’s away-from-home metric.

In his postgame press conferences, Cooley has talked a lot about building a culture in his program, about planting a seed that eventually grows a tree that will eventually “delicious fruit”.

A win against Providence on the road in an extremely hostile environment would be a landmark victory for this program, a pivotal moment in a season that has lacked many visible markers of success for fans to latch on to.

Indeed, it could be the “seed” that Cooley has been searching for, that signature moment that can instill belief in his players and also help start the construction of a lasting culture, like the one that Providence fans are still reaping the awards from at Providence, even after Cooley left them for greener pastures.

While Cooley has downplayed the significance of Saturday’s game to the media, multiple people close to Cooley’s circle have indicated this week that the Providence native badly wants to win this game.

To do it, his players will need to play their best game of the season, in front of thousands of jeering Friar fans. They’ll need to begin to show signs that the culture that Cooley has talked so much about is beginning to take hold on the Hilltop.

Can everything come together in time for Saturday’s game? It’s a tall task for the Hoyas. But for a program desperate to show signs of life, and eager to begin growing into something greater down the line, Saturday’s showdown against Providence is as golden an opportunity as any to erase the disappointments of this season and finish the last 6 weeks of the regular season strong.