Pardon the interruption for some candid thoughts at the conclusion of the 2025 season.
For a tenth consecutive season, the white flag flies above Cooper Field, assuming there was a flagpole there in the first place. Another season of promise ends in a program-humbling loss, a tradition of Georgetown football which goes back a quarter century and yet receives not a casual glance from its University. The same University which will send out e-mail and after e-mail pleading for money on an almost weekly basis, pays no attention to those who want to give to football and are dismissively told it's not in their ethos and culture to raise serious money for it.
Winning is a function of preparedness, execution, and commitment. Georgetown University is lacking across all three.
***
It is no more apparent than in the final weeks of the season, every season, when the tank runs dry and the collective attention of the University has long since turned to cheering amidst 17,000 empty seats downtown. There they were on Saturday, to watch a men's basketball program which wrote a check for Wagner College to show up Saturday before an announced crowd of 4,184. Its chfronically self-aware but socially stunted student body does not even know that football played on Saturday. Meanwhile, in Boston, 13,764 showed up for a football game.
With the 42-7 loss to Holy Cross this past Saturday, Georgetown's record falls to 6-6 on the season, Rob Sgarlata's best single season record as head coach. Nonetheless, Sgarlata's record of 41-80 becomes just one of five active FCS coaches with 80 career losses, and one of two of these coaches with a career mark under .500. (The other, Chris Villarrial, moves off the list as St. Francis drops to Division III in 2026.)
The story is familiar: a hopeful season opener in September is weighed down by injuries and depth. Georgetown travels to a lower tier Ivy League school and is beaten soundly--the Ivies don't have schoalrship but their generous aid packages do not go unnoticed. October features an upset here and there, usually against Lafayette or Bucknell. November wilts as the talent runs dry. In the last ten years, Georgetown has lost every single season finale, and by an average of 25 points. Only two of these have been by less than three touchdowns.
The Hoyas are not, as a Holy Cross fan put it, a bottom feeder. In its last three seasons it has finished no lower than fourth in an seven (now eight, soon to be 10) team league. Excepting the arrival of Richmond this season, Georgetown has defeated every PL opponent at least once over the past three years with one exception: the College of the Holy Cross.
Excepting the post-COVID year, each of the past five seasons have ended against Holy Cross, losing by an average of 30 points. The Crusaders have been a good team, so no argument here. By the third week of November, Georgetown is not, and as these games are scheduled every November to end the season; the season comes to a fitful if predictable conclusion.
"Obviously the result was not what we were looking for," said Sgarlata in a tepid post-game statement, but it was the outcome some people expect to come out of this program. Consider the four games that this senior class has faced to end the season. There's a pattern here:
2022: Holy Cross 47, Georgetown 10
2023: Holy Cross 31, Georgetown 10
2024: Holy Cross 34, Georgetown 0
2025: Holy Cross 42, Georgetown 7
Plug in any Patriot League team except Bucknell to the last week of the season and you're likely to see much the same. Since 2001, Georgetown has lost in 21 of its 24 finales in league play. The Hoyas trade in Brown and Morgan State for two more PL games next season. Adding Villanova or William & Mary to the late November mix next year does not portend a turnaround in this trend.
***
This team was unprepared for Holy Cross--physically, psychologically, and perhaps spiritually-- by season's end. The Hoyas limped into Fenway Park missing its #1 quarterback, its #2 receiver, while its #2 running back never fully recovered from injuries. It lost its best defensive player to injury in the first quarter of this game. That's football, it's next man up. Unfortunately for such a thin squad, with far more all-County than all-State players, next up wasn't good enough. From the opening series of this game the Hoyas were pushed around on the lines and its showed. That said, the defense tightened after the opening score and kept things close. holding HC to an astounding 50 total yards by the end of the third quarter. Not the first quarter, but the third.
No one will accuse Danny Lauter of being Arch Manning but Dez Thomas was no Quinn Ewers either. A Division III transfer who played in four games as a backup for Trinity College (TX) in 2022, Thomas sat on the Georgetown bench for two seasons, then was thrust into the starting lineup mid-season and did as much as a Division III-level player could do in an FCS environment. Opposing teams shut down his run ability, linebackers clogged the passing lanes, and Thomas was left with prayers dutifully answered by Jimmy Kibble but not much else. Thomas accounted for an astounding 40 sacks allowed over nine games, befitting a quarterback who stood too long in the pocket and did not go through progressions in a timely manner. The film doesn't lie--teams locked on him more and more in every succeeding week. Saturday's finale was arguably the weakest offensive output of the season.
Thomas had nothing against Holy Cross to open this game and ended the first half 5 for 13 for 25 yards with two interceptions. With the best receiver on the Georgetown roster in 20 years, Thomas passed just four times to Kibble, completing one for five yards. At least two passes were prospective interceptions that the Crusaders were simply late to. Give Holy Cross credit for its defensive adjustments, less to to Georgetown for not adjusting.
To be candid, Thomas should have never been allowed to start the third quarter. Down 14-0, an astoundingly narrow margin given how Georgetown was playing, Thomas' play wasn't enough. Had the coaches had any confidence in Jack Johnson (a sophomore who has played only a handful of plays in two seasons when Thomas' helmet came off after a play), this was the call. Jacob Holtschlag and Aidan Krause never got the reps to be in the conversation because, again, Georgetown puts all its chips down on one quarterback in August, usually the oldest, and they don't change horses in the race unless absolutely, positively necessary. Well, that blew up on them with Lauter's week three shoulder injury. Lauter wasn't leading the Hoyas to a PL title either, but he had in-game experience that Thomas did not. Georgetown doesn't develop backups, so it was all-in on Thomas.
Other signs of unpreparedness were in evidence much of the season and reignited in this game. Punter Josh Leff had shown issues with late punt snaps in a number of games, but the blocked punt in the second quarter was a turning moment in the game. Thomas Anderson struggled in the kicking game this season as well, but with just one PAT and one kickoff, he saw comparatively no action otherwise. Special teams were last in the PL in punt return yardage and dutifully allowed HC an average of 20 yards per return. The Crusaders' first three drives started at its 48, at midfield, and at the Georgetown 45.
The offensive line, battered all season, allowed six sacks but also could not open up holes for the backs, who averaged just 2.7 yards a carry and no running back had a carry of more than 10 yards. The line was stuffed on consecutive plays with one yard to go at the HC 21 with under two minutes to halftime. If the Hoyas could get it to 14-7 at the break, it's a ball game. It was as close as Georgetown would be thereafter.
Dez Thomas' third interception ceded the game and his failed effort to avoid the pick-six summed up the 2025 Georgetown Hoyas: a hopeful band of players that were a step too slow, a size too small, and not deep enough at this level, especially at season's end. Consider this stat: when a Patriot League team has scored 24 points on Georgetown since 2001, the opponent's record is 90-5. When that team is not named Bucknell, it's 82-2.
Holy Cross' record when scoring 24 points on Georgetown? 17-0.
The defense was young and showed it. Despite holding the Crusaders to just one red zone possession, it allowed 21 points overall, 14 with the game out of reach, with a blocked punt and two pick-six interceotions filling out the box score.
In 2025, five teams scored 30 or more points against Georgetown and three of these scores came in the final four weeks. The Hoyas are simply not a comeback team by November, which is why that second quarter goal line stand was so deflating.
Stats don't flower in Week 12 as much as they are sown in August and September. Overall, Georgetown gave up an average of 30 points per game in its final 10 games, with four games allowing 40 or more. That it finished with a 6-6 mark is laudable, but there's no Arthur J. Rothkopf Participation Trophy in the Patriot League.
What was galling was that, entering the fourth quarter, Georgetown was still in this game, 21-7, having held HC to 160 yards in total offense before the roof caved in. With 12 minutes to play, Johnson had the Hoyas in Holy Cross territory. A touchdown closes this to a one possession score with plenty of time remaining and a Georgetown defense which had held a remarkably listless HC offense. Instead, Johnson was leveled and fumbled the ball, with nary a penalty flag to be seen on a night where Holy Cross racked up 194 yards in penalties (110 yards in the fourth quarter alone) and could have well been guilty of 60 yards more. Some would call it dirty play, but Sgarlata doesn't speak ill of other schools.
Employing an aggressive tone all evening, and particularly in the waning minutes of the game, Holy Cross coach Dan Curran, entering the game with a re3cord of 8-15 over the past two seasons, used Sgarlata and the Hoyas as a human punching bag, literally, earning some cheap pops from the Fenway Park crowd of 13,764 (the largest crowd to see a Georgetown game since 2009) and likely cooled down a warming seat with the Holy Cross trustees, who took the unusual step of meeting in Boston the night before and attending the game as a group.
Imagine if the Georgetown Board of Directors ever did such a thing.
As I said elsewhere, who knows, maybe Curran was playing for his job. Finishing 2-10 with a loss to lowly Georgetown might not have gone well today around Fenwick Hall. Or maybe Curran was just trying to stick it to Georgetown in front of the home crowd and he succeeded. That Curran did not approach Sgarlata to shake his hand after the game speaks poorly of the man and the moment. Say what you will about the tactics, Curran and his staff were prepared to win.
***
Georgetown's struggles are deeper than an interception or a blocked punt. The Hoyas can only reach what they are capable of reaching, and by the time they are seniors and haven't played, there's only so much room to grow at the end of a season. A head coach can't produce winners on his own and the role of a assistant football coach is as underrated as there is in sports. Georgetown's assistant coaching legacy isn't a strong one, at least not lately.
Every off-season, some of us hear how there is not enough money to retain coaches and among assistant coaches in general, Georgetown is seen by some as a GA (graduate assistant) job. Of Georgetown's 37 assistant coach hires since 2015, many are now out of coaching entirely. Some became high school assistants--depending on the school district, it might pay as well. Two are at staff positions at G5 programs, and two are at a coordinator level in FCS (John Bear at Bucknell and Adam Neugebauer at Towson), but neither Bear nor Neugebauer have been at Georgetown in the past five years.
The lack of veteran coaches beyond the coordinators makes a tangible difference in player development, and unless someone has the time and interest to earn a sports management degree in their off-season, there's not much to attract a quality young candidate to Georgetown, and even less to keep him there. That no former assistant has gone to a Division I head coaching position since Joe Moorhead in 2003 speaks to a lack of institutional commitment for career growth.
An assistant's salary at Lafayette buys a young assistant coach the opportunity to live 10 minutes from campus and get a parking spot right up front at the Bourger Football House adjacent to Fisher Stadium. An assistant salary at Georgetown might not land a one bedroom apartment in Alexandria, but which does offer a GUTS bus ride into town unless he wants to pay $165 a month to get on the list for parking.
Without career experience and longer term commitment, Georgetown coaches are not prepared to recruit what it takes to be competitive in the PL. It relies on lower value NEPSAC prep school talent to get early admits through the door and then takes its chances with what's left out there, and usually loses the impact recruits to Ivy League schools on aid. Increasingly, it doesn't even compete with Patriot schools without scholarships, and it shows.
Turnvoer matters. Of the 37 assistants hired since 2015, 14 lasted just one season, not counting an OC that left after a month to go to Holy Cross, but that's another story. Just three assistants on the current staff were here as late as 2022. That's not because the others were derelict, but that other schools pay more. A starting assistant's job at Princeton is close to $80,000. An assistant's job at Richmond pays, on average, $102,689 per its public reports. If an assistant can move to a non-coaching staff role at a P4 school, even more.
It's not even an issue of NIL, but don't be fooled that NIL is not an issue at this level, including the PL. What it is, first and foremost, is about contacts and relationships. Few early career coaches have the recruiting ties or the experience to evaluate someone playing in Utah or Oregon, and rely on best-case video sent by a player or coach with which to make an offer. For local kids, more often than not, relationships are not formed amidst a transient recruiting staff. "Four For 40" might sell the parents, but not the recruit or his coach. For every Jimmy Kibble from Loudoun, there are another ten other local players who either have the grades but want a more visible program, or don't have the grades and want the NIL.
In either case, Rob Sgarlata doesn't have the financial wherewithal to sweep the staff and expect a crop of talented and experienced assistants to turn Georgetown into Villanova. By the way, Villanova entered its last season of CAA football with five full time assistant coaches with seven or more years tenure on staff, and four of these will enter their 10th season or more for Villanova next year in their Patriot League debuts. Experience matters. Georgetown got 23 years of extraordinary service from names like Glacken, Droze, Calabrese, and others, but this isn't 1992 and volunteer coaches have gone the way of the rotary phone.
Coaching is increasingly a transient business, everyone knows that. Nick Saban didn't just start ats a head coach--the coach and Miss Terry traveled through assistant stops at Kent State, Syracuse, West Virginia, Ohio State, Navy, and Michigan State all before the age of 35, only for him to be turned down for the head coaching job at Kent State. Former Georgetown coach Kevin Kelly has had 13 coaching stops in his 24 years before Georgetown and five more since. As there is a transfer portal for players, there is one, more or less, for assistant coaches. Some are probably looking right now. However, if Georgetown is not ready, willing, able and prepared to develop coaches that are committed to the long term, why should the players be any more committed?
***
Finally, and most troubling, Georgetown University was unprepared to win Saturday. What is the University doing about it, good intentions and claims of cura personalis notwithstanding?
Every intercollegiate sport at Georgetown is a second line program amidst the institutional all-in on men's basketball that has spent millions of dollars in the past decade, not to mention nearly $22 million in the last eight years for foolhardy and ill-advised contract extensions. Patrick Ewing's parting gift alone was enough to pay for three years of the current football budget.
As much an admirer of Jack DeGioia's tenure as I am, his views of Georgetown basketball's "most favored nation status" came at the expense of sports like football. Jack is retired, of course, but the attitude remains. Of all the indignities around Saturday's game, look no further than the lack of awareness and foresight shown by the University around pre- and post-game festivities.
One would presume that, in the first major Georgetown athletic event in Boston in nearly 20 years and football's first visit to Fenway Park in 85 years, a game broadcast on regional cable TV across the Northeast and not just ESPN+, this would be a university opportunity, if not a priority, to engage with Boston area alumni. Far from it. As far as I could tell, and I have asked, not a single athletic, administrative, or Advancement (read=fundraising) official attended the game nor any pre-game festivities, none. No University communications went sent out encouraging their attendance. The University Twitter account, not merely the athletic department, posted seven messages in the last 10 days about athletics, but not one around this game. In over 40 posts at the athletic department's @GeorgetownHoyas over the past five days leading up to the Nov. 22 game, a total of one post noted that it was "Game Day" for football.
Yes, the president's office is sede vacante of sorts until July, but there are development targets in Boston that are probably on Robert Groves' calendar at some point before Eduardo Penalver takes over in July. Would a luxury box at Fenway been the time for a donor conversation, athletics or not? Were there any senior staff of the University, particularly those which family in New England that could have made a cursory appearance?
Lee Reed was not there. He can't be everywhere and the weekend life of a college athletic director is a hectic one. It would have been memorable to see an AD on the field if Georgetown had clinched that all-important seventh win.
I didn't see any representation from the Alumni Association. Many of its senior leadership were attending an event in Tokyo that weekend, so I understood why; however, there was no visibility or branding from the Association anywhere; which stood in marked contrast to the extraordinary turnout that took place from the Holy Cross leadership--this was not only an athletic event, this was a visibility event for HC, so much so that its president sang the National Anthem from the 50 yard line and its VP of Development was featured on the Fenway video board during a time out.
Georgetown fans did show up, however. A pre-game tailgate set the stage.
This wasn't some tailgate under a tree at Regents Hall. Just short of 700 registrants filled the expansive Cask and Flagon restaurant adjacent to Fenway Park, largely on word of mouth. From parents of players, alumni, and former players decked out in their letter jackets, this was the largest pre- or post-game assemblage I have seen for a football event in over 40 years, even more than the team banquets when those were still held and not deemed an unnecessary expense by the University.
What was the importance of 700? Six years ago, during the John Carroll Weekend in Boston, a total of 586 alumni and guests paid $350/person for a black tie dinner at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, just down the road from Fenway Park, a then-record turnout for the domestic event over the prior decade. The John Carroll Weekend is supported by a University budget and year-long support not only to recognize excellence among its most committed alumni, but specifically to reach out to benefactors and development targets who could make major gifts to support University priorities.
If someone as myself looked out over the huge crowd that night at the MFA in 2019 and said that someday a Gridiron Club reception would top that by almost 20 percent, even I would be hard pressed to believe it. And yet, though the Fenway Park game was announced eight months in advance, no leader at the University saw fit to attend, even as the game drew closer and the premise of a winning season dangled through the clouds. The lack of preparation and delivery by the University was regretful, while the efforts of Hugh Golden and Lars Siegfried of the Gridiron Club ought to be recognized and celebrated.
Those 700 people did not arrive to the Cask and Flagon for finger food or a raffle. They arrived for community and to build support.
Let's also be clear: there were people in that room who, right now, could support football scholarships. There were people in that room who, right now, could support NIL. There were people in that room who, right now, could support assistant coaching salaries and program budget increases. Who knows, maybe someone could have fronted the money for a road jersey. (Georgetown showed up at Fenway wearing five year old white road jerseys. Why? Apparently because the program could only buy one set of new blue jerseys for home games.)
And no one at Georgetown University was there to engage them. Such conversations never took place and no one at GU, at least as of this date, seems to care, much less be aware of the opportunity lost.
These collective anecdotes, colored in the moment of an disheartening loss that needn't have ended in such ignominy, all point to a long seated institutional unpreparedness for a successful and broadly supported intercollegiate football program, emphasis on broadly supported. As I say to anyone who will listen, college sports is not a zero sum game. A rising ride lifts all boats.
***
Sometimes people read my columns and dismiss them out of hand. "We're a basketball school," they say. As someone who has written about Georgetown basketball more than most, I would suggest that in some University quarters, Georgetown hangs on to basketball not for its future, but as an almost vestigial piece of its past. John Thompson isn't walking through that door: it has not sold out a home game in 12 years. It still sells Allen Iverson jerseys even as Iverson turned 50 this summer and has not been seen on campus in more than a decade. The DeGioia era clung to the Thompsonian notion that Georgetown ought to be Penn State in one sport and Penn in 29 others, and that doesn't work anymore. Beyond four nights in an empty Madison Square Garden in the midst of COVID-19, men's basketball is a combined 129-182 over the past ten seasons, having spent in excess of $150 million over that timeframe to do so.
Georgetown football does not need $150 million to succeed, but it does need a life cycle of commitment: commitment in recruiting, commitment in player development, in staff development, in on-field performance, commitment in alumni and local support, and frankly, commitment in winning. That winning does not come by luck, it is a direct consequence to a culture of preparedness set and a culture of expectations met. A winning season should not be seen as an extraordinary accomplishment; yet that is what it has become.
No one is asking Georgetown football to become Auburn on the Potomac, but the indifference at 2nd Healy to the struggles that football endures is evidenced by the lack of institutional awareness exhibited around this game.
***
If you've lasted this far, and thank you for doing so, so, here's the expurgated version:
- The players lost this game because they were worn out in November, as they often do;
- The coaches were unprepared in part because they are not properly compensated to the task at hand.
- The University was unprepared to make inroads with a large and loyal following that is otherwise ignored; and
- Georgetown squandered an opportunity on a stage we will likely not see again in our lifetimes.
And I as I conclude this, a much tamer version that what was rattling around my head Saturday night sitting on a bench at Logan Airport, news today that Georgetown's leading tackler and most impactful defensive returnee for 2026, LB Giancarlo Rufo, is headed to the transfer portal.
Sisyphus returns again.
