Casual wiseman sleepyhoya talks Georgetown and defense:

The biggest improvement over last year's team has been a new commitment to defense and rebounding. The freshman, in particular, have brought new toughness and enthusiasm on the defensive end and JTIII has the team committed to rebounding. Great rebounding is the best defense you can play - a defense of rebound takes the ball from your opponent and an offensive one keeps it for you. Either way, our opponent can't score when we have the ball. More encouraging has been the swarming team defense that's kept some pretty good teams under 50 points lately and contained Syracuse for much of the 45 minutes.

All this focus on defense is new to a JTIII team and has me thinking about great Hoya defensive players. So, without further fanfare, I present the All-Time Georgetown Defensive Team.

All-Time Georgetown Defensive Team after The Jump:

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Casual wiseman sleepyhoya talks Georgetown's domination of Syracuse in the 80s:

Thanks to BashfulHoya we got an inside look at the Georgetown - Syracuse rivalry in the 1970's. My insights are not quite as close to the court, but cover the 80's, when the rivalry officially turned red hot. To put it simply, the Hoyas completely dominated the Orange in the 1980's. The numbers don't lie. Here is a small sample of the beatdown decade:

1) In the 1980's we played Syracuse 28 times, we won 20 of them including at least one game at Manley Field House.

2) Georgetown beat Syracuse 4 times in the Big East Championship game.

3) Georgetown won 6 Big East Championships, Syracuse won 2. It should be noted that one of those championships came when the tournament was mysteriously played at the Carrier Dome. That seminal experience of 5 days for civilized people in the vast wasteland of upstate NY led the Big East to permanently change the location to Madison Square Garden.

4) Georgetown beat Syracuse in the first ever Big East Tournament Final at Madison Square Garden.

5) The year Syracuse somehow managed to make it to the NCAA finals - you guessed it -Georgetown beat them three times.

Georgetown domination of Syracuse after The Jump:

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Casual wiseman sleepyhoya hands out some awards at the midpoint of the Big East season:

Ladies and gentlemen, the State of our Hoyas is strong.

It's hard to believe but we've already reached the midpoint of our Big East Schedule and are two thirds of the way through our season. With the week off and not much to talk about other than whether Kristen Wiig is actually good-looking, it seems like a good time to hand out some midseason awards.

So here goes.

The Sleepy Awards after The Jump:

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Casual wiseman sleepyhoya takes a look at some curious coaching decisions in the Cincinnati game:

For the record, I have never coached a basketball game at any level. I never played a competitive basketball game after high school. (I don't really count Yates intramural games) There is absolutely no reason why anyone would want to listen to my view on how to coach or game strategy.

What I am an expert in is second guessing. For a time a few years back, I stood at a podium every day and listened to the biggest second guessers in the world, the national media. Everyday somebody stood up telling me what we were doing wrong with some half-baked plan to make it better. Day after day I smiled at these "helpful" suggestions barely able to conceal my contempt for the questioner or the process.

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Casual wiseman sleepyhoya offers this week's opus: 'In Defense of Nate'

Trolling through the blog this season there seems to be one issue that everyone agrees on: the problem with this year's Hoyas is a working class kid from Massachusetts named Nate Lubick. The handwringing is universal, whether it be here on THE GLOBAL PHENOMENON or on the plethora of other sites devoted to college basketball.

The stories are all roughly the same - Georgetown, fueled by a great freshman class, senior leadership from Jason Clark and the reincarnation of Henry Sims as an actual basketball player, is the surprise team of the Big East. Holding them back from potential greatness is the chronic underperformance of Nate Lubick. Recent history tells us that we should be suspicious of being 10-1 in our non-conference schedule heading into big East play. The last three seasons, with that same record, we've won exactly zero post-season games. Isolating Nate Lubick as the reason for our suspicion is just plain wrong on every level.

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Casual Wiseman sleepyhoya delivers his weekly opus, this time while heroically recovering from surgery:

Once again laid up by a bad hip, I've spent a lot of time watching college basketball over the past ten days. College basketball is without a doubt the best sport to watch both on TV and in person. The idea of having all that, and a bunch of painkillers, is almost too good to be true.

I've seen Kentucky play three times over the past two weeks. Maybe it's the painkillers, but in two of three of those games, it's hard to see how Georgetown could even keep it close. Kentucky starts five guys who will be stars in the NBA. Anthony Davis is a beast. Terrence Jones was a beast last year until everyone saw him play next to Davis. Kidd-Gilchrist, Lamb...the list goes on...could all be making big time contributions in the NBA -- right now. It's just hard to see how a normal college team, doesn't cheat, can stand a chance. Matched up against the Hoyas, even a resurgent Henry Sims is no match for Davis and the same goes all down the line. Yet, they lost. Indiana beat them last weekend with a team that has less talent, in my opinion, than the Hoyas. So why do teams with vastly superior talent lose to inferior teams?

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Casual Wiseman sleepyhoya is back with this initial offering of the season:

At this same point last year, we had high hopes for the season. Georgetown had perhaps the most experienced team in the Big East, apart from maybe St. John's, a great preseason schedule and two former High School All Americans who convinced us that this was going to be the year they delivered on the promise. Somewhat bitter from losing Greg Monroe, we daily debated, with hindsight that now borders on folly, whether we were better off without him. Our blowout loss in the NCAA Tournament to Ohio was behind us, filed away as a once in a generation fluke.

More State after The Jump:

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