For those of you who follow the NBA very closely, you’ll know that it isn’t a great time to be a Charlotte Bobcats fan. For those of you who don’t follow the NBA very closely, there’s a fairly new team in Charlotte, NC. They’re called the Bobcats. They’re beginning their fourth season in the NBA, and they’ve got some problems.
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• Coach Thompson hosted an Open Practice at McDonough on Sunday for Hoya Hoop Club members. He spent 45 minutes answering questions and then let the Hoop Club members stay for a one-hour training session, mostly doing routine drills and some 5 on 4 and 3 on 3 half court sets.
• MASN announced that they will be airing nine Hoyas games this season, including road games at Old Dominion, Rutgers, and St. John’s.

Good news: Today is Friday. More Good News: Tomorrow is Saturday. Even More Good News: Tomorrow is only four weeks from the Georgetown Basketball Season Opener!
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We already talked about Mike Sweetney’s current situation in the NBA. Now we’re going to look back at his time spent with the Blue and Gray. His first game as a Hoya was on November 17, 2000 against Bethune Cookman at McDonough Gymnasium. Late in the first half, Mike was posting up just outside the lane near the block. He used a quick spin move around the defender and elevated to the front of the rim for a two-handed slam. The last Hoya big man I’d seen make a move like that was Alonzo Mourning. In that first half with Georgetown, Sweetney played 15 minutes and scored 15 points on 7-9 shooting. True, it was against an inferior opponent, but that was just the start of his remarkable career.
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This past weekend, amidst the silly celebrations for the beginning of this year’s basketball season, we learned something significant about the program. No, not that the players are hungry to win. Not that Jeff Green was good but is now in the NBA. Not that Roy Hibbert had a good off-season. The most telling sign about the future of Georgetown basketball was not about the current team at all. It was about Greg Monroe.
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Many years ago, during my first semester as a student at Georgetown, I had a difficult class list. I was in the School of Languages and Linguistics, which meant that I had to take two language classes (in my case Italian and Spanish). The SLL language classes were called “Intensive”, which meant that they met everyday. My Italian class also had a lab session. Those two classes, plus my other standard three credit courses meant that in my first days at college I was taking 20 credits. To make matters worse, all five of my classes met on Fridays, so I was in class from 8:50 to 4:05 every Friday that semester. I should’ve transferred to Cincinnati. My schedule that fall was a piece of cake compared to the Hoyas’ calendar this winter.
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Today is Brandon Bowman’s 23rd birthday. After the 2002-03 Georgetown season ended (the loss in the NIT Final to St. John’s at Madison Square Garden), I went into the locker room to try and console some of the players as well as to congratulate them on the completion of their season. I walked up to Brandon and extended my hand to him. He handed me his empty Gatorade bottle. I told him, “I’m offering to shake your hand, not take your trash.” He felt bad, shook his head and my hand. Throughout his career he got a bad rep for sort of being a head case, and even though my anecdote reinforces that belief, Hoya fans should be grateful since he really was a great player for the Hoyas, even if he did have some moments of interesting decision-making. So to paraphrase, ‘I come to praise Bowman, not to bury him.’
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• Georgetown kicked off its 2007-2008 season with the Midnight Madness festivities on Friday night in front of a raucous crown at McDonough Gymnasium and a national audience on ESPNU. The Hoyas “practiced” for the first time and unveiled the 2007 Final Four banner along with Jeff Green’s Seattle SuperSonics jersey.
• Greg Monroe, a 6′10 senior from Helen Cox High School in Louisiana, gave a verbal commitment to attend Georgetown. Listed as the number one recruit by Rivals.com, his unofficial pledge with the Hoyas is a statement of the rising status of the program.

As most of you now know, Midnight Madness is tonight, and there’s already been a lot of media attention given to the opening ceremony of the Hoyas’ season. Tonight, ESPNU along with college basketball guru Bill Raftery will be at McDonough Arena covering the night’s festivities. But there is one person who will not be there tonight: Jeff Green.
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I’m old school. If you’re a Hoya fan, you should be too. When people talk about old school, they’re talking about the time in history when people used to carry around oversized boom boxes on their shoulders, when Michael Jackson looked like a black dude, and when the Hoyas ruled college basketball. I grew up in that time period, and I look back on it all very fondly, except for my clothing choices (why were Coca-Cola Rugby shirts so popular?). Patrick Ewing and company sort of epitomize old school basketball. They were as big in the 1980’s as UNLV or Michigan’s Fab Five was in the 1990’s, but unlike those two teams, the Hoyas never had a hot dog. None of the players on Big John’s teams of that era ever posed for the camera after doing something spectacular, and nobody ever played up for the crowds.
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