For the first time since 2021, the Georgetown University Hoyas men’s basketball team (17-15, 8-12 Big East) will play postseason basketball. The Hoyas are travelling to Las Vegas for the first edition of the College Basketball Crown, where they will open the tournament with a first-round matchup against the Washington State University (WSU) Cougars (19-14, 8-10 West Coast).
The Crown, which Fox Sports helped launch, is an upstart challenger to the National Invitation Tournament, the traditional option for the teams excluded from March Madness. The Big East has a conference tie-in, ensuring automatic qualifiers for the two best non-March Madness teams in the conference. Alongside Georgetown, three other teams from the Big East will be competing: DePaul University, Butler University and Villanova University.
Georgetown’s last game action was a loss to DePaul in the first round of the Big East tournament. With the Hoyas down three with 11 seconds on the clock and junior guard Jayden Epps at the free-throw line shooting one-and-one, Epps airballed the first free throw, erasing any chance of a late Hoya rally.
Epps is the only scholarship player available who has played for the Hoyas for more than a year. He said he has put the end of the DePaul game out of his mind.
“I got to play basketball,” Epps told The Hoya. “Sometimes you have bad games. I had a bad game, so you have to have a short memory.”
Georgetown will be without sophomore forward Drew Fielder, who entered the transfer portal and whom the team has relied on since a season-ending injury to first-year center Thomas Sorber. In his place, sophomore forward Jordan Burks is expected to play center.
Graduate guard Micah Peavy has not been practicing with the team as he recovers from the season and prepares to play professionally, but will be a game-time decision for the Crown, according to Head Coach Ed Cooley during March 28 media availability.
Cooley said he expects to rely more heavily on younger players who didn’t see as much action during the regular season.
“Given that it’s almost two and half weeks removed from our last game, it allows you to do some different things,” Cooley said at the press conference Friday. “It offers us a chance to see stuff that they can do in a meaningful game.”
After the demise of the Pac-12, the Cougars joined the West Coast Conference for this season. They finished sixth out of 11 teams and were eliminated in the second round of their conference tournament.
WSU will also be missing some key contributors. Cougars guards Nate Calmese and Isaiah Watts both announced they were entering the transfer portal ahead of the tournament. They combined to average 26.2 points per game. Forward LeJuan Watts will be the player to watch for WSU. Watts averaged 13.5 points, 6.7 rebounds, and 4.4 assists this year.
Another consideration in the background for the Hoyas is the transfer portal, which opened March 24. While coaching a team through a postseason tournament, the staff is also actively engaged in recruiting prospective transfers.
Cooley criticized the NCAA’s system, saying the transfer portal must be reformed to prevent it from interfering with the on-court product.
“Until we put some guardrails around this,” Cooley told The Hoya, “it’s going to be an imperfect system that needs to be fixed. Hopefully the NCAA, knowing that they made many more errors in the last five decades, can fix this, because it is an absolute shit-show.”
The Hoyas will face Washington State in the first round of the Crown on Monday, March 31, at 11 p.m. EDT.
