Week 8 Thoughts

Some thoughts after Georgetown's 22-16 win over Lehigh Saturday:

1. T is For Team: Saturday's game was uplifting for any  number of reasons, notwithstanding the final score. The win was a great, almost textbook example of a team rising to the occasion. When one side of the ball suffered, the other stepped up.

And when the team is playing this well, there is no single player of the game. Michael Dereus, for his early TD catch? Duval Paul, for an alert special teams play? Wes Bowers, for saving the play and getting the vital two points? Gunther Johnson, for those two big fourth down conversions and no interceptions? Kristian Tate's two sacks, Jethro Francois' interception, Jackson Saffold late game running?  

Worthy candidates all, but this was a total team effort and one which should give Rob Sgarlata and the staff some genuine satisfaction. Lehigh didn't lose this game as much as Georgetown won it, and that's worth a game ball all its own.

2. From Hurst To First:  Before all is said and done, Brad Hurst may be the leading punter in Georgetown history. This year,. he is third in punts in I-AA and his 41.5 yard average is a half yard short of the modern (post-1964) record for a single season. But the placekicking...ugh.

Hurst set a school record by missing all five field goals in Saturday's game, and while the movie script ending would have had him kick the game winner in regulation, that was blocked, too. Hurst's style may be more of an issue than his accuracy, which currently ranks next to last among all I-AA kickers, with a season average of just 27.6% completed.

Hurst's kicks (and punts, for that matter) tend to be low off the foot. At least twice in Saturday's game the PL network announcers noted that Hurst was close to getting a punt blocked, which would have changed the game right there. The two blocked kids were each low and Lehigh took advantage.

Georgetown has only two kickers on the roster. Senior Oliver Hill is a walk-on with one PAT last year and none this year, freshman Zachariah McBride hasn't seen any time, so Hurst may still be the best option. The kicking game has never had much consistency and recruits have come and gone (University of Texas transfer Jon Coppens would have been a senior this year but he was gone before the 2017 season even started) but there are games where a kicker can make all the difference. Saturday's could have been that, and maybe should have been, but fate intervened.

3. From The Other Side Of the Field: Saturday's loss is a bitter pill to swallow for a proud Lehigh fan base that has seen better. The Engineers played a strong non-conference schedule with the likes of Navy, Penn, and Princeton, and while these were bad losses, there was some hope that the team would step it up in PL play, as befits a two time champions. If a 43-14 loss to winless Fordham was a warning bell, Saturday's loss was a veritable steam whistle blowing across the Lehigh Valley.

Lehigh fans haven't had to worry about Georgetown, so to lose like this is a body blow--it like Georgetown losing to Florida Gulf Coast. Its fans first saw the Hoyas in 2002, where Lehigh rang up 49 points at the half and 69 for the game. The Brown and White had won 17 games by an average of 25 points. Put another way, Lehigh averaged 38.3 points a game versus Georgetown in the PL era and had nine at the end of regulation Saturday.

It was, in words of the veteran Lehigh blog  Lehigh Football Nation, "rock bottom". It writes, in part:

"This wasn't a game lost at the opening coin flip, like the way Lehigh lost vs. Fordham, or just a complete talent mismatch, like it was vs. Princeton.  This was a loss to a team that in every way is Lehigh's equal.  Georgetown just wanted it more...

It seems like this team and coaching staff doesn't fully appreciate that beating Lehigh means something to other teams. Georgetown certainly has other goals every season, but every single year they had been circling Lehigh on the calendar and doing and thinking of everything possible of how to beat Lehigh.  Georgetown had beaten every other Patriot League team at least once since joining the Patriot League in 2001 - except Lehigh.  They wanted this badly.  It was abundantly clear to anyone who was there, or watching the game on the Patriot League network.

"For this Lehigh team, to salvage the season, they need to get together and pick up the pieces of this broken season and say to themselves that this is not the way they want to be remembered.  They have to not want to be remembered as the team that didn't care that they lost to Georgetown, thought it wasn't a big deal they lost 66-7 to Princeton, that they lost to 0-5 Fordham, that they were the team that lost, six, seven, eight, nine, ten in a row.  They need to say that they have hit rock bottom and they want me to write a different story through the rest of the year."

4. Did You See It? I wasn't at the game Saturday but any shot of the crowd on the PL Network showed a lot of happy faces, but very few young ones.

Yes, the configuration at what I call "mini-Cooper" Field is just 1,800 and maybe that keeps students from showing up. More likely, they have already given up and/or lost interest in spending three hours on Saturday watching a football game when there is so much texting and Instragramming to do. Even more likely, they have been minimized in a discussion of the college football experience at Georgetown.

How many will remember this game with any fondness? Who will talk about it at their first alumni Homecoming, or a reunion? I can't imagine any students were sitting in the Leavey Center watching this on a video feed and many more will read about it Friday in The HOYA and say to themselves, "well, that must have been fun." And it will be immediately forgotten.

In 1998, when the Hoyas upset Holy Cross 13-12, the crowd was electric. Former athletic director Joe Lang once told me that that if any of the rowdier students that day tried to uproot the goalposts at Kehoe Field, they'd pull out a hole in the Yates roof.

For what it's worth, no one rushed Cooper Field for the goalposts Saturday. There weren't enough to even consider it.

In an earlier post, I cited the change that where once these games were 99 percent students in the stands, today there are far, far less. And when or if (but they tell me it's when ) the new Cooper stands take shape, we need a serious, institutional discussion about putting students front and center in the football experience. Not on the edge of the ten yard line behind the band center; no, front and center.

We'll talk about this more in two weeks during the bye week.