NCAA Basketball: Ranking the last 25 national title winning head coaches

Back in the 1980s, John Thompson’s Georgetown team was one of the top programs in college basketball. His Hoyas, led by current head coach Patrick Ewing, won the national title in 1984 and nearly repeated the feat in 1985. He saw his son John Thompson III eventually succeed him and take the Hoyas to the Final Four. How does Thompson’s legacy compare to these other coaches?

Thompson is a native of Washington, D.C. who spent his entire coaching career in D.C. After a brief playing career with the Boston Celtics (including two championship rings as a backup big man), his coaching career began at the high school level in Washington.

In 1972, he was hired as the new head coach at Georgetown, inheriting a program that had seen little to no success in the previous few decades. By the time he was finished at Georgetown, Thompson had helped greatly rewrite the program’s record books.

After a long postseason drought, he got the Hoyas into the NCAA Tournament in just his third year and made them a regular contender not too long after. The Hoyas made three Final Fours, playing in the national championship game in 1982, 1984 and 1985.

This was a perennial Big East contender for the better part of two decades, though a Michael Jordan-led North Carolina team and a hot-shooting Villanova squad kept Thompson from securing multiple championships while leading the Georgetown program.

He brought Allen Iverson and other talents to Georgetown before resigning in 1999. He never could quite match that historic success in the early 1980s, but he greatly elevated this Hoyas program. His son would take Georgetown to the Final Four in 2007, though the elder Thompson’s accomplishments cannot be matched.