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#24. The Substandard Celebrates March Madness
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Dudes Chatting — NCAA brackets and the Georgetown curse: This micro-episode covers March Madness, with the hosts discussing their bracket picks before the conversation settles on Georgetown basketball's long arc of disappointment. JVL and Vic trace the program's history from the John Thompson Jr. era through the Craig Esherick doldrums and John Thompson III's eventual firing, debating at what point the Big East powerhouse permanently lost its edge. JVL then reveals the episode's best detail: he was rejected from Georgetown three separate times, and in response cursed the Hoyas to perpetual mediocrity — a curse he appears to consider entirely credible given the evidence.
Full transcript
Vic00:00:00One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Sonny00:00:02That's good. That's good. Just talk it. I can't talk normal. Oh, my God. What a f***ing baby.
JVL00:00:07Oh, mister, I've got 125 reviews on Amazon or on iTunes, so I don't really have to.
Sonny00:00:13I can talk over a damn well one. That's right. That's right. We're not going to have him if you don't talk so people can hear. Or maybe we will.
Vic00:00:19Remember what he... I knew it.
Guest00:00:30Hello and welcome to another micro-episode of The Substandard.
Vic00:00:52I'm Victor Matus along with Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. As you know, we're in the middle of March Madness. Or as some people had started to call it, March Mayhem. But I insist it will always be Madness. Who has ever called it March Mayhem? Oh, some of the networks do that. No one has ever called it that. You're just making things up now. I think there were some copyright issues and they couldn't call it that.
Sonny00:01:12Oh, is March Mayhem like calling the Super Bowl the big game? Yeah, something like that. Oh, that's funny.
Vic00:01:16They had an issue with it. They had to go with Mayhem. But we all know it's Madness. And of course, tonight's big game is going to be Gonzaga. The final, Gonzaga versus North Carolina. And so we just wanted to talk very briefly about the... NCAA tournament and a little bit about what's happening at my alma mater, Georgetown. But I was thinking about this time of year, JVL, back in the day, we lived in the office for this time of year. Do you remember that?
JVL00:01:46I do. You and I would go to Burger King with our brackets to figure out who we were going to pick. You and I ran the office pool for The Weekly Standard for 18 years.
Vic00:01:56At least the last Madness Invitational. That's what that was. That's what it was. And we used to get everybody involved.
JVL00:02:02Half of all winners, Fred Barnes.
Vic00:02:05You just stole my line. Oh, I'm sorry. No, I was going to say, wasn't it like every other year Fred was winning?
JVL00:02:10Literally every other year. Who's the guy out in Vegas who's like the mastermind who sets all the sportsbook lines? That's Fred Barnes when it comes to college basketball.
Vic00:02:19I remember, in fact, one time Fred won the whole tournament and he was interviewed about it at Roll Call or The Hill. And they said, oh, you're going to win. What are you going to do for the office? And he said, oh, I don't know. Have a pizza party. He never did. Son of a bitch. Instead, he paid for all his kids to go to school. With The Weekly Standard?
Sonny00:02:38Yes, Sonny. March Madness money? March Madness. How much money were you putting into this pool?
Vic00:02:44It's a long time ago. It was a donation. We said it was, remember this? We had a Kentucky office. Oh, my gosh, we did. We partnered with, for some reason, a Kentucky congressional office. Yes, a really nice guy.
JVL00:02:57And so it was great. It was like taking candy from a tree. It was great to take candy from a baby, because all these Kentuckians Oh, they always vote Kentucky. Kentucky to win every year.
Vic00:03:03Either Kentucky or Louisville. Kentucky or Louisville.
JVL00:03:05No, no, no. They were all Kentucky. They were all Kentucky. No, they were all. They were like, Louisville loses first round no matter what. They were all KU people.
Vic00:03:12Yeah, yeah. That was probably when, who was coaching them? Roy Williams at the time was probably there. Was it Roy Williams? Tubby. Tubby Smith. It was Tubby Smith.
JVL00:03:18Tubby Smith, yeah. Roy Williams never coached Kentucky. Oh, I get confused.
Vic00:03:22Kansas. Kansas, sorry.
Sonny00:03:24My bracket was in pretty good shape this year until, you know, it unfortunately got blown up. This weekend when Mississippi State beat Connecticut. I was just, it was, you know, it was just a disaster. I forgot, Sonny. You do the women's. You do the women's game. You know, men and women are equal, so I think it's offensive, frankly, just to do a men's bracket.
JVL00:03:41You know what? We were in one year. We were in a very woke pool. Yes. Where you had to do two brackets, one men and one women, and your final score meshed the two together. Wow. And I remember all of us sitting on it. This was in The Weekly Standard? No, we were like part of somebody. Oh, okay. We did our own, but then there was this. Yeah. Jonathan used to. There was a lot of gambling.
Vic00:04:04We had a co-worker, a female co-worker, who took part in the female bracket and needed help because she said she knew nothing about basketball.
JVL00:04:12Jackie Goldberg.
Vic00:04:14Thank you.
JVL00:04:14The great Jackie Goldberg.
Vic00:04:16And JVL, I remember you, you know, JVL was very dismissive and said, look, you know, you just, it's so predictable on that side of the bracket. Just, you know. Chalk. Yeah.
JVL00:04:25Take chalk the whole way. All the way through. And sure enough, she did it.
Vic00:04:28Yeah. She won. So predictable. And then the number one, of course, was the number one.
JVL00:04:31I'm saying chalk and then pick UConn to win. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. UConn over Tennessee. UConn over Tennessee. UConn over Diana Taurasi.
Vic00:04:37Diana Taurasi. And so there was that. But I have to tell you, this year I was not paying much attention to the brackets because, yet again, Georgetown did not make it. I can't even make the NIT joke where I go, oh, well, you know, we're looking forward to the big dance meeting the NIT because it was two years, it's been two years in a row that Georgetown, my alma mater. Finished below 500. And this has been an ongoing drama since Jonathan and I started working together at The Weekly Standard many years ago. And, you know, the issue was, of course, at the time when we were working there was the old man, John Thompson, Jr., and he's not doing a really good job despite the talent on his roster. If you remember, the 1996 team went all the way to, it went to the Olympics. And that team had four future NBA players on that starting team. Including an NBA League MVP. Oh, the one and only, Allen Iverson, and I think Othello Harrington, Ja'Heidi White, Jerome Wallace, Junkyard Dog.
JVL00:05:44Your mother could have coached that team into the Final Four.
Vic00:05:48Yeah. They faced, do you remember this, they got stopped in their tracks in the Elite Eight by UMass and Marcus Camby. And then later on, I think the other problem was, it was the other show. Then it was Iverson versus Ray Allen. That was another big one. Ray Allen was at UConn. And of course...
JVL00:06:05When not making movies with Spike Lee.
Vic00:06:07Yes, great movies, no less. And Iverson, I believe, was the first player to not graduate. And he went pro early after two years. And Thompson allowed that. At Georgetown. At Georgetown. No, no, no, no, no, no. At Georgetown. And then everybody else wanted to follow his lead after that at the school. And many of them with not great consequences. I mean, other players have finished early. But... After that, it went to Craig Esherick, the assistant coach. And in many ways, that was a bad idea because Esherick's only experience was being on the bench as an assistant coach. He had no other head coaching experience for 25 or however number of years, 72 or whatever. Was he handpicked by John Thompson? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people said that.
JVL00:06:46No, but this is all... Okay, it's important to understand the criminology of this. There's a lot of criminology here. Because the old man, John Thompson, wanted his kid, John Thompson III, to have the job. John Thompson III was at Princeton. He didn't have the pedigree. It would have been rank nepotism, and he would have been in a lot of trouble. So instead, you hand the position to Craig Esherick, this weak water guy who has no chance of succeeding. And then, waiting for the Esherick experiment to fail, then you have a plausible successor in his son, John Thompson III. And John Thompson III was, we all thought, unfireable. Because his dad is so enmeshed with the university. And so the university made a mistake. Both the university— In turning to a man they didn't fully understand. Because once you have that guy as your coach—
Vic00:07:41I always said, this is an insane business decision to hire John Thompson III because he's unfireable.
JVL00:07:46You were right for many years. And it got so bad, Vic, that they finally did it. And I would just like to know, how happy did it make you?
Vic00:07:52I was stunned because I think I was on record as far as Twitter goes. I don't know if that counts. That counts.
JVL00:08:00Also, Hoya Paranoia, right? You post to the Hoya message board still. Oh, I'd written about it.
Vic00:08:05No, no, that was Jody Bottom, by the way. Joseph Bottom, a contributor both to The Weekly Standard and the Washington Free Beacon. He would randomly call me during basketball season. I'd see the area code 605 or whatever it is for South Dakota. And then he'd want to talk, you know, not about politics, not about theology, but rather about what's going on at Georgetown. He'd say, you know, I only pay minimal attention, Jody would say. And also, I go on board, but I use a different name when I go to the chat rooms. And throwing out questions. Are we blowing up his spot right now? Are you doxing him? Yes, it was Hoya Saxa Aquinas, I believe was his name. No, I don't know that for a fact. But it was really surprising. I thought, no way, the university, as Jonathan always insisted, and I thought he was going to be right about this forever, they're going to keep him on at least for another year of horribleness. But what happened was, I think, there was such an uproar with the alumni. The students did a petition. You can only ignore them for so much as well, and especially names. Now you do these online petitions, that's a big deal. And it came out that his salary at last available, the last publicly available tax filing was maybe 2015 or 2014, $3.6 million. They think that it was backloaded so that he was actually increasing, despite whatever his record was. $3.6 million was more than Jay Wright made when Villanova won the championship. It's more money than Roy Williams at UNC makes now. That's an issue. The Board of Trustees, that's the rumor. I get all my news from Casual Ahoya. They were up in arms, and what I heard was the Board of Trustees forced President DeGioia's hand.
JVL00:09:39Who authorized the hit? Because a firing like this has to get signed off on, right?
Vic00:09:46Yeah, absolutely. Again, from what I heard through CasualAhoya.com is that it was Board of Trustees that forced Jack DeGioia's hand, the president. And it's unclear to me if the old man was not involved. Well, I'll tell you what. Like in The Godfather going, I'm sorry, we've got to take care of Fredo. No, I mean, the thing is, and I would like it if the next quote—I take Tommy Amaker, you know? Our good friend John Feinstein suggested Richard Pitino, as in the son of Rick Pitino. I think that the rumor now is— Instead, you're getting Patrick Ewing.
JVL00:10:18Yes, the rumor is Patrick Ewing. Thank you, Sonny. Or the guy who ate Patrick Ewing. Well, Patrick Ewing ate— No, he ate the guy who was up for it. Patrick Ewing ate Craig Esherick, and that's why— This is going to matter, and it's going to matter—not going to matter at all because of this. Let me tell you a little story. Very brief. I know we're up against the break here. This is a story about a young man from South Jersey, a young Catholic man, very earnest, whose entire goal in life was to go to Georgetown and be a Hoya. He established this goal by age six. All he wanted to do was go to Georgetown. And then, like Peter with Jesus, he was denied by Georgetown not once, not twice, but three times. Is that— That young man was me. I was there, Jonathan. Does that mean you're going to— Rejected as a high school senior, rejected as a freshman transfer who actually was a pretty good rower and who the crew was trying to recruit because his grades were so bad, and then rejected from the medical school. And on that day, I cursed them. I cursed the Hoyas.
Vic00:11:19They shall not win another national championship.
Sonny00:11:25The curse of the—the last curse. The last curse. It's the last curse.
Vic00:11:28You know what? I remember going through those transfer admissions when I worked at the admissions office, and I looked at yours, and I thought, you know what? He'll be fine.
?00:11:58you
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