What a difference a week makes.

Last Friday the Georgetown men’s soccer team was ranked 25th in the nation, sitting atop the Big East blue division and coming off a 3-0 shutout of Manhattan College.

Today, the Hoyas (7-4-0, 3-3-0 Big East) are unranked, in third place in their division and coming off two consecutive losses to conference foes.

The last week has clearly not gone the way the Hoyas wanted.

After a 3-2 loss to Providence last Saturday that dropped the team from the national rankings and bumped them out of first in the Big East, the Hoyas were looking to rebound with a strong showing against the Seton Hall Pirates (7-2-1, 3-2-1) on Wednesday afternoon. Instead, it was the Pirates who dominated, scoring two goals in the first five minutes of the match to hand the Hoyas their second consecutive loss.

For the second time in as many games, the Hoyas allowed a goal just after kickoff. Only two and a half minutes after the opening whistle, the Pirates found themselves with a 1-0 lead when freshman forward Eliseo Giusfredi scored from inside the penalty box off a pass from sophomore midfielder Justin McGrath.

Before the Hoyas had a chance to regroup, the Pirates tallied another goal. McGrath took a shot of his own, driving a ball past Georgetown junior keeper Andrew Keszler from 10 yards out to give Seton Hall the eventual game-winner.

“We clicked off defensively,” Georgetown Head Coach Keith Tabatznik said. “We had a couple of individual breakdowns, and the goals came off of those breakdowns. We were losing the ball in bad areas and not recovering.”

Trailing 2-0 and with less than five minutes off the clock, Georgetown never found its own offensive stride. Although the Hoyas are averaging over 14 shots per game, the team managed just four shots in the first half against the Pirates, only one of which was on goal. The Pirates, on the other hand, pounded the Hoyas, taking 11 first-half shots and five corner kicks.

In the 27th minute, the offensive onslaught paid off again for Seton Hall as Giusfredi scored his eighth goal of the year off another McGrath assist. The goal put the Hoyas down 3-0 at halftime for only the second time this season.

Coming out of intermission the game settled down and, although the Hoyas got off six shots and the Pirates had eight, nothing would go in for either team. It was not until the 78th minute that another ball found the back of a net. Again, it was a Seton Hall score, this time by junior forward David Roman with an open-net goal to put his team up 4-0.

The Hoyas finally got on the board in the 88th minute when senior midfielder Ben Jefferson-Dow put away his own rebound from six yards out. It was Jefferson-Dow’s sixth goal of the year and it made the final score 4-1.

“We had the better of it in the second half,” Tabatznik said. “We were generating a lot of stuff on offense and . we felt we should have scored two or three goals. . The issue was not on the offensive end.”

With the loss the Hoyas fall to .500 in the Big East, the first time this year they have not had a winning record. The back-to-back losses were also a first for the Hoyas in 2005, as the team had not dropped two straight all year.

Georgetown will travel to West Virginia tomorrow for a crucial Big East matchup. The Mountaineers (7-4-1, 3-2-1) are coming off a 2-0 win over Pittsburgh on Wednesday and all seven of their victories this year have been shutouts. The Hoyas will need to get on the board and keep the Mountaineers contained in the early minutes to notch another conference win.

“We need to get back to the basic work ethic that got us to where we were after the first eight games,” Tabatznik said. “We need to do two things that seem contradictory: increase our intensity and also maintain our composure. . We need to shut out a team 1-0 like we were doing at the beginning of the season.”

Kickoff tomorrow is set for 7 p.m. in Morgantown, W.Va.