After an 11-1 start, Georgetown came into its Big East opener against No. 15 Notre Dame in the eyes of some prognosticators as one of the favorites to win the league. But with their worst performance of the season in a 69-55 loss, the No. 9 Hoyas proved they still have some work to do if they want to be considered elite.

“We had some mistakes we haven’t had and are not going to have,” Head Coach John Thompson III said in the postgame press conference. “To say we were out of sync would be accurate. We have to take care of that. This is not the time to be out of sync.”

With the Fighting Irish (12-1, 1-0 Big East) packing their defense inside to lock down cutting and driving lanes, the Hoyas (11-2, 0-1 Big East), the second best field-goal shooting team in the country, were given decent looks at the three-point line for the first time in weeks. But contested or uncontested, they still shot an abysmal 4-of-22 from beyond the arc and a season-worst 42.6 percent from the field.

“You have to give their defense credit for our shooting woes,” Thompson said. “Everything was contested. And once we started to miss, it almost snowballed.”

“If you look at their win at Old Dominion and their win at Missouri, they were down, flat out beat, and came rolling back by firing from outside,” Notre Dame Head Coach Mike Brey said. “We were alert out there. They’ve [also] really gotten easy buckets this year [in transition]. We had two guys back on every missed shot, because when they get running, they really get into a flow.”

Georgetown was still able to hold Notre Dame to 38.5 percent shooting in a game that possessed no semblance of a flow, but the Irish got to the free-throw line 27 times to the Hoyas’ nine – a result of Notre Dame’s ability to get inside, Georgetown’s perimeter offense and its seeming inability to defend without fouling.

Only senior guard Austin Freeman (21 points on 9-of-16 shooting, a good portion of which came with the outcome already settled) played to his season stat line, with his two backcourt mates – senior Chris Wright and junior Jason Clark – combining to go 2-for-13 from three-point range. Clark continued his anemic post-Missouri stretch by scoring in single digits for the fifth time in seven games. One of the nation’s top assist men, Wright, had six more dimes Wednesday night, but his three points on 1-of-9 shooting did not help the Hoyas’ cause.

“We shoot a lot of shots, and we’ve been fortunate in the first 12 games we’ve made a lot of shots,” Wright said. “We had an off day today.”

With the Hoyas’ trio of guards unable to connect from outside or on backdoor cuts, senior forward Julian Vaughn – when he was not on the bench due to early foul trouble – and junior center Henry Sims had multiple one-on-one opportunities in the paint but were often looking to make passes back out to the perimeter. Vaughn buried a left-handed running hook in the second half, but Sims was bothered by the stronger and more physical Notre Dame forwards Carleton Scott and Tyrone Nash.

Playing only six players for significant minutes, the veteran Irish, who also did not play particularly well offensively and fell well below their pregame average of 80 points per game, relied heavily on guard Ben Hansbrough (17 points, 10-for-10 from the line) and forward Tim Abromaitis (20 points in 39 minutes), both of whom made timely plays when the Hoyas tried to get back into the game in the second half. Leading by just seven with seven minutes remaining, Abromaitis and Hansbrough made consecutive momentum-grabbing threes to push the advantage back to double digits.

Georgetown returns to Verizon Center on New Year’s Day for a 1 p.m. tipoff against perennial Big East cellar dweller DePaul.”