This week, head coach Rob Sgarlata will make his annual trek to New York and the former players reception in the days before the Columbia game, a rivalry in name if not in notice. Like most Georgetown University events, it will accentuate the positive, steer clear from the negative, and avoid change.
Georgetown is not good at change, and is institutionally resistant to the conversation. Athletics is no different, because it waits for multiple levels of approval above before moving anything forward. The days of Frank Rienzo writing the department's seminal "Philosophy of Athletics" and getting it approved by default is ancient history.
These are times of intense change in college athletics, beginning with football. It's not enough to say "we've always done it this way" and not face some accountability for where Georgetown is in the sport today. As Eastern programs go, it's at or near the bottom, ranking 36th of 38 FCS schools in winning percentage over the past ten seasons, and one of just two programs (along with Cornell) without a single winning season during that time. "Four for 40" didn't change this equation. What will?
In the grab bag that is the University's capital campaign, football gets a short item in the list of giving opportunities. "Georgetown Football is seeking investments in coaching funds, the JumpStart Program, travel and recruiting funds, nutrition and sports performance funds, the Annual Fund, and a number of existing named scholarship endowments," it reads. "These investments are critical to our ability to recruit, retain, and reward the best coaches and develop our student-athletes to their full potential inside and outside the classroom, fostering a new era of competitive success for the team."
That is a wish list, but one that isn't changing the perception of football as a square peg in a round hole. Georgetown football needs a strategic plan, a measurable and accountable set of initiatives needed to navigate it in the NIL era of the sport and one where, as University president Jack DeGioia once se the course for men's basketball in his tenure as University president: "The first commitment - that our students will receive our education and they will graduate...secondly, that we do it honestly, that we be above reproach - that we must set the standard for integrity in intercollegiate athletics, and we do, and finally, that we win. We keep score for a reason."
Two out of three ain't bad, as they say, but it's not enough.
A strategic plan is often consigned to a university archives because they are expansive in hope and long since forgotten. More time is often spent on ideation of an organization's mission, its goals, focus areas, objectives, KPIs, etc., than actual planning itself. In many cases, there is no reward for meeting the objectives and no risks for not doing so, so Georgetown trends to avoid the exercise altogether.
In this case, however, it offers an opportunity to address some uncomfortable truths and set some measures of success that can be afforded to deal with it.
Before we go down the rabbit hole of "all we need is 60 scholarships", let's talk more about what a plan would entail, absent this. Here are 10 questions to engage some conversation.
1. What Is The Identity of Georgetown Football? To students, it's a team that is "is pretty awful", as one coed told The HOYA before the Marist game. To alumni, forgotten. To recruits, indifferent. To the Patriot League, an insurance policy. To Washington DC, invisible.
What could it be? Imagine a program that attracts some of the best scholar-athletes in the nation, offers networking and leadership skills above and beyond anyone in the sport, and opens the door for opportunities in pro sports, in coaching, or in business, with a group of mentors and sponsors that can inspire them for life....and that also wins games, to the credit of the University which supports it.
Why can't Georgetown be the civilian version of West Point football: a four year commitment which will offer rewards for a lifetime? How do we get there?
2. What Is This Program's Future In The Patriot League? The Patriot League is a gilded cage for Georgetown: low investment, low expectations, low results. Two decades of coaches have told recruits that Georgetown is competing for Patriot League championships, and that is an overstatement at best. It has won 25 league games in 22 years, in no small part to the competitive imbalance which is only growing between six schools investing in the future and one that is not.
How does that change? When does (or should) Georgetown go to the PL and ask for an admissions waiver, to take up to five recruits a year outside its SAT range known as the academic index? That won't make Georgetown a Penn State on the Potomac, but it could give this team a fighting chance when it comes to playing full scholarship teams that recruit and admit players Georgetown can't even touch. No less strategic, the University should also be prepared to have a fallback plan when the league says no. If the Patriot League won't see fit to support Georgetown, it should find an eastern conference that will.
3. How does Georgetown Football reconnect to Washington DC? The program is invisible in the city, the metropolitan area, and among its high schools. The last DeMatha player was signed a decade ago, the DCIAA ties are nonexistent, and unless a local player went to a prep school like Landon, they're not signing with Georgetown.
Washington DC and its environs provide a lot of outstanding college football talent but few if any see Georgetown as an option, whether it's the scholarship issue, the perception of the program among high school coaches, or simply that they aren't being considered as admittable candidates. These are all fixable problems if they are identified as priorities.
Apart from alumni or parents, do local fans come to Cooper Field? No. Why would they? So why doesn't Georgetown see its schedule as well as its roster as a form of community outreach, starting with committing to a home game each season at Audi Field or Nationals Park against an opponent that local residents would pay attention to - - Ivy League schools do not count. By contrast, schools such as Howard, Towson, Delaware, or Villanova would. Playing at home in front of family and friends still carries weight in recruiting, and if Georgetown can't close the deal locally, its national prospects will not fare much better.
4. How does Georgetown maintain competent staff? Earlier this year, we wrote: "The average salary of an assistant coach in FCS football is $43,387 a year, which buys you a 10 minute commute and a parking space in front of the football building at a Delaware or Lafayette. Try raising a family on $43,387 a year inside the Beltway; and as for parking, prepare to ride the GUTS bus from Arlington." Coach Sgarlata is regularly losing young assistants on cost, and if Rob Spence or Kevin Doherty retire soon, he's got a big problem on his hands.
Imagine the impact of a $300,000 discretionary fund raised for coaching hires. Imagine the ability to secure multi-year housing agreements for coaches with that assures their families the ability to earn a living wage in a high income city without living in another area code. Imagine the opportunities to better leverage Georgetown's master's in sports management degree to enrich the professional development of a young coach.
Why shouldn't Georgetown be the same destination for young coaches as it can be for young professors?
5. What Is The Role of Corporate Partnerships? Above and beyond NIL, to be discussed below, there are a lot of missed opportunities with linking up corporate and non-profit partners with the program and the players. At many major college programs, this is in the form of sponsorship - Alabama, for example, has a staff of 17 doing just that. That's not in the cards for Georgetown, but a partnership is not just a sponsorship.
Georgetown football athletes are well rounded individuals that can appeal to companies and internships from day one. Rather than chasing down internships in New York every spring, let's rethink this--corporate partners of Georgetown should be incented to offer player internships as well as professional skills that manifest as potential hiring opportunities. There are too many major firms in the local area that could offer these valuable skills without taking a serious look at how these relationships could be fostered, and how these corporations could gain by their association with Georgetown.
Back to the example above: if a local recruit knew that committing to Georgetown would not only be a great opportunity to get an education but allows the opportunity to set him up in a career locally, it's another card in Sgarlata's pocket to close the deal, especially for players who aren't looking at investment banking as their future.
6. When To Address The Elephant In The Room? Name, image and likeness (NIL) isn't just an issue at Maryland or Michigan, it's one in FCS and teams like Georgetown are neither immune nor ineligible to address it. For every plaudit about encouraging athletes to "build their brand" comes the darker side of NIL: the collective, the "bag", and the impact of unbridled third party funding of recruits. Let's not kid ourselves that it's not going to be an issue, even in the Patriot League.
Georgetown's approach to NIL did a 180 when Ed Cooley was hired. Hoyas Rising is not a altruistic brand agency, it is a collective, and there are clues which suggest its focus is on basketball, and really only basketball. Somewhere, Jack DeGioia and the board have tacitly signed off on a collective relationship, as if they said "this is the business we’ve chosen." Would they be as comfortable if two Clemson running backs appeared in the 2024 football roster with a five figure handshake from a third party?
There are no rules right now on NIL--Congress is debating NIL rules to head off a tsunami if the NLRB gets involved, every state has its own rules on high school NIL but the District hasn't acted upon a bill for colleges since it was placed in committee last year. Schools can't control collectives, not should they, and so for every Hoyas Rising there could be a "Saxa Sports LLC" hovering out there which could do whatever it wished with deals and GU is left out.
Georgetown is not at a point where, compared to a place like Texas Tech, where a collective will offer $25,000 to every football player as a matter of course. That's not Georgetown, but GU does need a communicated plan in place regarding what NIL really means beyond the "don't ask, don't tell" model emerging across men's basketball.
Again, let's not kid ourselves that it's not going to be an issue in football, even in the Patriot League. There will be a collective at Colgate and probably at Fordham within three years.
7. Is There Campus Engagement? Right now, there isn't much of this. It's not the coaches job to stir up promotional interest, but the Athletic Department still operates under a John Thompson Era tiering of sports when it comes to campus promotion:
- 1. Men's Basketball.
- 2. Everyone Else.
Football doesn't have a lot of time to stir up interest: half the home schedule has already been completed, and it's already the third week of September. Many students arrive without the slightest awareness of sports at Georgetown beyond men's basketball, which they communally understand is bad right now and may or may not get better soon. Their views of football, are even less so, and the opponents are wholly dissimilar to anything they expect a school like Georgetown to be competing among.
What is the time, talent, and expense that the University wants to invest in a positive pre-game, in-game, and post-game experience for students and fans visiting these games, and create a simple call to action that attending these games is a positive, community building experience? This is a strategic issue, and ought to be treated as such.
8. Whither The Gridiron Club? Approaching its 50th anniversary in 2024, the Georgetown Gridiron Club is more of a parents club right now, as the University has not accentuated the need for alumni and fan membership in its support club structure. At one point there were over 2,000 members of the Hoya Hoop Club and that number today is a fraction of that total.
Put another way, how many people from your class talk about being in the Hoop Club?
With membership comes privileges, and this too has eroded over the years. What is a "membership" in the Gridiron Club all about? If you give $25 to the Gridiron Club, what is that worth? How about $2,500? How about $25,000? Fan events outside of tailgates have been inexorably cut out, the end of season banquet went the way of COVID, and, like many universities, Georgetown has dialed back the recognition portion of giving as an unnecessary expense, when it's not an expense at all--it's an investment. Remember the adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching a man to fish? Telling someone to give money returns a gift for one year. Teaching a man the value of giving provides returns for a lifetime.
In an age of NIL and a University which would prefer you gave to programs outside Athletics, it's worth a larger discussion as to how to position the Gridiron Club to support the long term success of the program.
9. How Does GU Address Financial Planning? In some ways, Georgetown was wholly unprepared joining the Patriot League and the PL looked the other way. And that's still the case.
No matter how you view the utility of the non-scholarship model as one of just two non-Ivy schools that still maintain it, the University needs to understand what football needs going forward and the delicate balance of intra and extra-University support needed to accomplish its objectives. Georgetown spends too much on men's basketball but its spending is tied to a strategic approach to being nationally competitive. This is not always wise or effective (more money was paid to Patrick Ewing in 2022 than the entire football budget) but it is a external signal that Georgetown will compete at the highest levels of the Big East Conference.
The opposite is true in football. The numbers in 2022 show a growing gap between the haves and the have-not (have-not is singular, because it's Georgetown):
Georgetown is not going to double it football budget - if it did, it would still be in last place. However, some degree of institutional planning is needed as to where the budget could better support some of the issues discussed above, and where philanthropic support would be most effective.
If GU allocated, say, an extra $100,000 to football over and above cost of living increases, where are the impact areas? If the Gridiron Club committed to covering operating expenses, where does that open up room for targeted growth elsewhere? If GU is not committed to competing at anything close to the top of what is, in many respects, a bottom tier league in FCS football, where can they compete under this budget?
10. Do We Revisit the Mission? At its core, a strategic planning process is an opportunity to align expectations with aspirations; in other words, to tie what we seek with what we can deliver. For athletic teams, that is often defined by a win-loss record, secondarily by off-field recognition, and tangentially by academic honors.
In 2022, Georgetown had 45 players earn a 3.2 or better in the classroom...and won two games in the process. Each has its own place in the expectation set but they are not mutually exclusive (Holy Cross, for example, had 36 all-academic selections en route to a 12-1 season).
The core values of Georgetown athletics, as noted on its web site, include the following: integrity, mastery, winning, community, and formation. I would add these four outputs:
- We are committed to our students throughout their academic and athletic pursuits;
- We are supportive of each other, on and off the field;
- We are committed to setting the highest standards in everything we do; and
- We are accountable for our results.
Is there the structure in place to excel with these? I would suggest there is, but the future demands more than suggestions, but commitments. This starts with discussion.
