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Daniel Kucin Jr.

Even as Ed Cooley stretched his arms upward late in the first half Monday night, the Georgetown coach’s “what the heck?” glare spoke louder than any words could after his team’s defense evaporated for a couple of possessions, permitting Maryland Baltimore County to get within two.

Almost as quickly, the Hoyas scored the final two baskets before halftime and then pulled away for an 86-62 victory before a smattering of 2,788 at Capital One Arena.

Moments of bewilderment were common a year ago as Cooley navigated a frustrating first season at Georgetown. He often would burn through two or three timeouts in the first half, aiming to fix the unfixable in a season that ended with a 9-23 record.

Corrections come easier for these Hoyas — and sometimes without a stoppage in play; Cooley has held back on timeouts to give his team a chance to figure things out. On this night, freshman Thomas Sorber scored 23 points and junior Jayden Epps added 16 for Georgetown (7-1), which capped its season-opening homestand with a fifth consecutive victory.

The winning streak hardly means Georgetown has arrived. Indeed, Monday’s defeat of the Retrievers (5-5) merely marked the end of the season’s preliminaries. Starting with Friday’s trip to West Virginia (5-2), all but one of the Hoyas’ remaining games will come against power conference competition.

“We’ve had the home cooking, and the level of play will step up tenfold,” Cooley said. “We’re excited about that, but we feel like we’re prepared and hopefully we’ll go out there and compete at an elite effort.”

If the point of the past month was to pile up victories, the architects of Georgetown’s nonconference schedule aced their task. When the NCAA’s <a href="https://stats.ncaa.org/selection_rankings/nitty_gritties/40928" target=_blank>first NET rankings</a> dropped Monday, the Hoyas were 357th out of 364 Division I teams in strength of schedule. Among power conference teams, only dead-last (but, in a remarkable change of pace, undefeated) DePaul was lower.

For their part, Georgetown’s players understood the assignment as well. Growth in the season’s early stages meant not losing to one-bid-league teams, not going to overtime against one-bid-league teams and not just barely surviving against one-bid-league teams. All three happened in November 2023, against <a href="https://guhoyas.com/news/2023/11/11/mens-basketball-georgetown-cannot-contain-a-late-holy-cross-run-falls-68-67.aspx" target=_blank>Holy Cross</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/11/19/georgetown-american-basketball-jayden-epps-overtime/" target=_blank>American</a> and <a href="https://guhoyas.com/news/2023/11/29/mens-basketball-shorthanded-hoyas-hold-on-for-69-67-win-over-merrimack.aspx" target=_blank>Merrimack</a>, respectively. The Hoyas’ victories this year have come by an average of 20.9 points.

In its only game against a power conference opponent, Georgetown looked like a team with a roster crammed with freshmen and sophomores. The Hoyas were unpolished, were prone to defensive miscues and had an unfailing tendency to end a possession with a poor shot that afternoon <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/11/16/georgetown-notre-dame-mens-basketball/" target=_blank>while taking a 21-point loss</a> to Notre Dame.

These results don’t lucidly define how much better Cooley’s second Hoyas team is than his first. But even a spate of games against overmatched opponents suggests Georgetown is much improved on the defensive end, where it was 321st nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency last season according to <a href="https://kenpom.com/index.php?y=2024" target=_blank>Ken Pomeroy’s rankings</a>. The Hoyas began Monday ranked 94th in that category.

“There’s a budget everyone’s got now to buy some players, and they spent the money on the right ones, I guess,” UMBC Coach Jim Ferry said. “There’s some talent here, and Eddie has them playing really, really hard. He’s just focusing on that. I see it every game I’ve watched. They’re young, and they make some mistakes, and they hang around, and they just go on these runs because you can’t score.”

Much of the credit belongs to graduate transfer Micah Peavy, whom Cooley and his teammates have showered with praise since his arrival from TCU. The versatile 6-foot-8 wing’s numbers — 14.8 points, 3.8 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 3.4 steals per game — say plenty about his impact.

But most striking have been his professionalism and his eagerness to take on the challenge of smothering a potent scorer — basically, the presence of a grown-up on the court. It is a galvanizing development for a program that spluttered through three consecutive abysmal seasons and displayed an almost aggressive indifference to defense for much of the past seven years.

Peavy’s influence might best be seen in the enhanced effort Epps has offered on defense. But he’s different elsewhere, too. The only other upperclassman on the roster, Epps was a classic wired-to-score, ball-dominant guard a year ago. He averaged 18.5 points on 15.6 field goal attempts, and it was an open question how effectively he could adjust with a better cast around him.

The addition of Harvard transfer Malik Mack to provide another ballhandler with the ability to score has helped. But the newcomer who has helped smooth out Epps’s offensive game — and offers the greatest immediate and long-term promise for the program — is Sorber. The 6-10, 255-pound freshman leads the Hoyas in scoring (15.8) and rebounding (8.9); he’s shooting 60.8 percent while showing advanced footwork, vision and passing ability.

“I feel right now we’re more connected than we were in the beginning of the season,” Sorber said. “In the beginning of the season, we were just figuring each other out, who could make the right plays here and there. I feel like we’re more connected and more all-in and more together, and we should be able to come out with wins on the road.”

Sorber is firmly rooted in the starting lineup, but Georgetown’s other freshmen are still developing. Wing Caleb Williams, who scored a career-high 10 points Monday, has expanded his role over the past month, and the program is optimistic about what guard Kayvaun Mulready can provide.

Not all trajectories are linear, and freshman center Julius Halaifonua’s won’t be after he underwent surgery for a fractured left ankle suffered in practice. Cooley offered no timetable on how long Halaifonua will be sidelined other than to acknowledge it probably will be “substantial,” but his absence leaves the Hoyas down their biggest player with the schedule about to stiffen.

“When you have a 7-foot person that skilled, that big, it changes a lot,” Cooley said. “Somebody else will have to step up.”

University of Maryland, BA in Journalism

Patrick Stevens has covered D.C.-area college sports for over 20 years.

Patrick Stevens

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