NCAA Basketball: Biggest power conference disappointments so far in 2021-22

Big East: Georgetown

Georgetown was picked to finish tenth in the Big East in the preseason poll, ahead of a DePaul team that is 6-1 and just one single point behind a Marquette team that is 7-2 with three quality wins. Georgetown’s expectations were relatively low to begin with, yet somehow they’ve still dramatically underperformed.

The Patrick Ewing era reached a high this past March when Georgetown went on somewhat of a miracle run to win the Big East Tournament, earning an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. This season will almost certainly be the low point of Ewing’s first five years. This is shown in their NET ranking of No. 247 nationally—the fourth-lowest of any power conference school.

The Hoyas are currently 3-4 despite having played the weakest strength of schedule of any Big East team, according to the NET. They have two losses to teams ranked sub-200 in KenPom (Dartmouth, Saint Joseph’s) but have yet beat a team ranked above 200 with their best win coming over Longwood at home.

In the 1971-72 season, the year before the legendary John Thompson took over as head coach, Georgetown went 3-23 for a W-L% of .115, the lowest in program history. Since then the lowest single-season W-L% was in 2016-17 when they went 14-18 for a W-L% of .438 in John Thompson III’s last season at Georgetown. This 2021-22 team is on pace to surpass the 2016-17 team as the worst single-season at Georgetown in 50 years.