Jack DeGioia Comments on State of Georgetown Basketball at London Fundraiser

At a Georgetown City Alliance event on Thursday in London, DeGioia made his first (semi) public comments about the men's basketball team.

At an event in London on Thursday for the Georgetown City Alliance - a Georgetown alumni network located in London that is meant for those in the financial services field - Georgetown President Jack DeGioia held a Q&A session with alumni.

During the session, DeGioia was asked by an alum about the state of the Georgetown men’s basketball program. Multiple sources present at the event sent in a video of his response to Hilltop Hoops. The whole response was around 8:30 long.

Below is a transcribed version of his response, in full length.

Question: I have to ask about the basketball program. [Crowd laughter] So please, tell us the state of the basketball program. And this is coming from a person who grew up in New York, and loves Patrick Ewing to death. He is an idol.

Jack DeGioia: He’s still worthy of your love. Truly he is. And he’s doing everything in his power to try and turn around the program.

[Long Pause]

[Crowd Laughter]

I’m just trying to figure out, where do I start? The program has, in one way or another, reported up to me since 1985, so, I have a deep, deep history with the program. I don’t oversee the day-to-day in my current role, but I get texts from Pat on a regular basis— including today. I’ve known him since he was 18 and it’s been beautiful, beautiful.

Two different ways in approaching it. One is to give you context. For the last two years, until August, I served as chair of the board of the NCAA. In that role, we are trying to address a real crisis in intercollegiate athletics. This is not an excuse or anything, I just want to give you a sense of the context of this crisis.

Others are performing OK in the crisis; we are not, in support of men’s basketball. But the crisis has been evolving over a number of years. It probably is a proxy for the crisis. We were able to do something as an NCAA that nothing in our society has been able to do, we unified the Supreme Court. We had a 9-0 decision against the NCAA in June 2021, and the decision called, Alston vs. the NCAA, which was, could the NCAA limit the amount that could be spent on educational benefits, meaning books, microscopes, trumpets, anything that might be educationally-related? We had limits. We were sued. The judge said, you can’t limit. [Inaudible] Any school could spend up to $5,950 on the additional— beyond the scholarship, beyond the room and board— you could spend more. It’s a very limited decision. But if you saw what the justices said in the opinion, ‘For a 100 years, we have given deference to the NCAA to determine how best to function and organize itself. We will not give you that deference [anymore]. If we think you are in violation of antitrust laws, we are going go to call you out.’

So, what did we do? We stepped back, and I was the chairman of the Board of Governors. We established a constitution. We had to create a constitution after all these years. And we asked one of our independent members— we had a 26-member board— we had five independent members, and one of them was an alum of ours, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. I asked Secretary Gates, would he chair the transformation committee— sorry, the constitution committee— and he did.

By November, we had a new constitution, which was voted on, and got 80% of the membership in support of it. Bob did a brilliant, brilliant job. It was just a tour de force. And he took a group of constitution committee— remember, the NCAA is 1,200 schools, across three divisions, 500,000 student athletes. So we got a new constitution, and along the way we got hit with this other challenge, which is the monetization of your name, image, and likeness. What that means is a student athlete could not be paid for an autograph. This is name, image, and likeness. You can do lots of different things.

The NCAA had three rules: Number one, you cannot be paid to play. You cannot be given money to attend a university as a bonus to come to the university. And whatever you get paid for, it has to be for a service rendered at fair market value. Well, we have created complete chaos with that framework, and why? Well because we have 30 different state laws now. The first one was California in the fall of 2019. It didn’t go into effect until the summer of 2021. We had the second law that went into effect of July 1, 2021, just days after the Supreme Court decision. We do not have a coherent framework for addressing NIL right now. And we’re trying to catch up as a university with that.

Some schools are, I would say, are pushing the envelope in terms of interpretation of those three constraints. And then we opened up the transfer portal. Historically, again, why? Because it was going to be viewed as an antitrust violation and we were going to get dragged back into court. So what does that mean? Well, if you remember growing up, if somebody went to your school and they transferred to another school, they had to sit out a year. Well, now they don’t have to sit out a year, so you saw a lot of movement. Now, we hope some of that will pay off [inaudible] for Georgetown, because Patrick brought in, essentially, seven new transfers this year. He wasn’t alone doing this. Many schools rebuilt their teams through the transfer portal.

We’re not where we need to be on NIL, yet. We’re in the process of building our framework. We hope to have it in place by the early part of the new year. But Patrick is being asked to do something in a new context, and he’s doing it at Georgetown— we’re pretty strict about the rules. And he— he wouldn’t— he is so, so proud to be a part of Georgetown and to be in the role that he is in. No one has been working harder to turn this thing around than him. And if it can be done, I think he can do it. We have some work in front of us, but we put a good deal of support around him. We did build a new training center that we opened in 2016, it’s the John Thompson Intercollegiate Athletics Center and it has a new home for women’s basketball and men’s basketball and locker rooms and training rooms and everything for everybody else.

In my role with the NCAA, we’ve been trying to address these fault lines that are impacting everybody. And the combination of the work I’m trying to do there, and my work now, I still serve on the Board of Governors, the 26-member board went down to nine. I’m one of the nine. I’m no longer chair of the NCAA. But I chair the subcommittee on congressional engagement and action. And we need new law, because we have no safe harbor on antitrust. Even on good, commonsense purposes. We have got to get a new law that gives us the framework to conduct our affairs in new ways.

Patrick has got his home opener in the Big East season tomorrow, so we are 5-6 in the preseason—if we can call it that, that’s not really fair— but we’re 5-6 in the preseason. He had a rough, rough regular season last year in the Big East and we’re going to see tomorrow night just how far we’ve come. It’s a team that is striving to find its identity and to gel. If anyone deserves the benefit of our support, it’s Patrick Ewing, and I just hope everybody stays behind him as he does everything in his power to turn this around. So thank you.