Georgetown vs. Syracuse: 'It will never be the same'


Jim Boeheim has seen plenty of change in his 37 years at the helm of Syracuse's basketball program. As he has won 912 games, the college basketball landscape has undergone multiple realignments.

The latest conference upheaval threatens perhaps the one constant during Boeheim's tenure: Syracuse-Georgetown. Since the Big East's founding in 1979, an annual matchup between the schools has been as much of a certainty as death and taxes.

Since 1980, the intensity behind those games has been unquestioned as well, thanks to John Thompson Jr.

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Riding a 57-game home winning streak, No. 2 Syracuse was not expecting much of a battle from Thompson's group that season. But Georgetown's hulking 6-10 coach established himself and his program with a signature 52-50 stunner vs. the Orange on Feb. 12, 1980.

After the victory, in an act of defiance and jubilation, Thompson declared, "Manley Field House (Syracuse's former home venue) is officially closed."

Decades later, Saturday's Georgetown-Syracuse matchup in Washington looms as the final scheduled chapter in an epic saga. The schools have played each other 88 times since 1930, but 75 have come in the Big East era, during which both programs have won a national title and reached multiple Final Fours (Georgetown four; Syracuse three).

At the end of this season, Syracuse (23-7, 11-6) is departing for the ACC. Georgetown (23-5, 13-4) is leaving the Big East as we know it, too, bound with the so-called Catholic 7 to form a basketball-only conference as Big East schools with football interests such as Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Louisville have fled. The latter two are also ACC-bound.

"Sad? No. It's life," current Georgetown coach John Thompson III says. "Everything is an evolution. Everything changes."

Thompson and Boeheim are confident the rivalry will continue as a non-conference matchup. Nonetheless, for more than 30years, Georgetown and Syracuse lived with that annual expectation of facing each other, typically with large conference stakes on the line.


A rivalry with some punch

The Hoyas, who have risen to No.5 in the USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll, would appear to hold the advantage in the final contest, playing at home and coming off a Feb. 23 win in which they ended the Orange's 38-game home winning streak.

After that game, Thompson, while certainly satisfied with his young team's 57-46 victory, had no intention of stirring things up the way his father once did.


Thompson was 13 at the time of that game, and he remembers listening to the Hoyas' furious comeback on the radio. He recognized the birth of a vicious rivalry, one in which he would be squarely in the middle years later.

The matchup hit a crescendo in the 1984 Big East tournament at New York's Madison Square Garden, when the Hoyas' Michael Graham, considered one of the toughest to don Georgown's blue and gray, threw a punch at the Orange's Andre Hawkins and essentially got away with it by not getting ejected from the game.

In the same setting the following year, Patrick Ewing and Pearl Washington started jabbing elbows. Georgetown's Ewing responded with a vicious right-handed punch that just missed Washington. Ewing might have had some pent-up animosity from earlier in the season, when Washington hit a game-winning jumper to beat the then-No. 1-ranked Hoyas.

The rivalry has not lost its ferocity since that heyday, though it has been peppered with less on-court animosity.

The verbal jarring has been much the same, and it permeates both campuses.

"I remember my freshman year, at orientation in the (Carrier) Dome, they drilled a phrase into our heads. By the end of it, they would announce the time, say 8 o'clock, and we would respond with, 'And Georgetown still sucks,'" Syracuse sophomore Amaka Ekeocha says.

Syracuse guard Michael Carter-Williams added fuel to that fire before the teams played at the Carrier Dome on Feb. 23, saying, "We've always been better than them. We'll always be better than them."

For that game, the Syracuse faithful packed the dome to a capacity 35,012 fans, a record for an on-campus college basketball game. They honored one of the former heroes of the rivalry, Carmelo Anthony, who delivered Orange fans a national championship in 2003.

But the home crowd left dismayed as the series' latest hero, Otto Porter Jr., scored 33 points to go along with eight rebounds and five steals in the victory that catapulted the Hoyas into the top 10 in the national polls.

"One of the first things that most people think of in terms of Big East basketball is the Georgetown-Syracuse rivalry," Georgetown junior Andrew Logerfo says. "But I had no idea how real the dislike for Syracuse was until I actually got on campus. It really is something that connects everyone, and the Syracuse game is one of the biggest events on campus each year.

"I don't think that the hatred Georgetown feels for the Orange will be going away any time soon."

Hoyas rolling along

Since winning at Syracuse, Georgetown posted an impressive 11-game win streak before falling to Villanova, while the Orange have lost to Marquette and Louisville and dropped to No. 16.

What does Syracuse's skid and Georgetown's streak mean for Saturday's game? If history is any indicator, the answer is not much.

During John Thompson III's first trip there as Georgetown's coach in January 2005, his underdog team took the 17-1 Orange to overtime before losing 78-73.

Syracuse holds a 42-33 edge in the Big East era, but 34 of those games have been decided by five points or fewer, building anticipation for the next matchup.

"We are frenemies," Syracuse alumnus Natalia Del Valle Catoni says. "We want to beat them, but we always want to see them again. That is why this last game as Big East rivals is bittersweet."

Says Boeheim: "I don't think it necessarily is the last game. We'll see what happens. I hope it's not."

Yet it's the last in its current format. Without standings implications, a non-conference game might not mean as much. In the end, even Boeheim, the mainstay throughout the rivalry, concedes as much.

"It's not the same when you're not in the same league," he says. "It will never be the same."

Joseph reported from Washington and Syracuse, N.Y.

Contributing: Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle.