No one would have blamed Georgetown for taking a wistful look around a largely empty Capital One Arena on Tuesday night after it polished off a 71-54 drubbing of Coppin State before an announced crowd of 2,924.
The Hoyas won’t be back for three weeks, and they will know plenty more about their trajectory by the time they return Jan. 2 to face Creighton.
Indeed, Tuesday marked the end of any preliminaries for Georgetown (6-4). It’s all power conference opposition from here, starting with Saturday’s trip to Notre Dame and then on to visits to Butler and Marquette next week to begin the Hoyas’ 20-game Big East slate.
“We’re going into some hostile situations,” Georgetown Coach Ed Cooley said. “We’re going to go play another Catholic institution, and then you have Big East play. You embrace that. That’s what you sign up for. That’s how you get better. I think we did the right thing by scheduling the way we scheduled in order to bring in this new team, bringing in a new era of basketball and gave us a chance to get comfortable in this building.”
Dontrez Styles scored 14 of his 19 points in the second half for Georgetown, while Rowan Brumbaugh had 14 points, seven rebounds and four assists in his first start since Nov. 19.
He got the nod because guard Jayden Epps, averaging a team-high 18.9 points, was sick. Cooley said that Epps fell ill Tuesday and that he was uncertain if the sophomore will play Saturday.
“Whatever — we have to figure out a way, regardless,” Brumbaugh said. “It don’t matter. Anyone could be out.”
Justin Winston scored 18 points and snagged 11 rebounds to lead Coppin State (1-11), which fell to 0-5 all-time against the Hoyas and lost its fourth in a row overall.
It was another rough night for the rebuilding Eagles, who are in their first season under Coach Larry Stewart. The Coppin State alum, who spent parts of four seasons with the then-Washington Bullets in the early 1990s (and was an NBA all-rookie second teamer in 1991-92), took over a program with 12 consecutive losing seasons. Ten of the past 11 included 20 losses.
This year doesn’t look like it will be much better for the West Baltimore school, and its biggest problem is an inert offense which began the day ranked next-to-last nationally in KenPom.com’s adjusted offensive efficiency rankings.
That unit proved an easily stoppable force even for the often-movable object that is Georgetown’s defense, which ranked 312th of 362 schools in KenPom’s adjusted defensive efficiency metric entering Tuesday.
Coppin State’s offensive output was the lowest by a Georgetown opponent since the Hoyas’ 73-48 defeat of Creighton in the 2021 Big East tournament final. The Eagles scored 32 points in the final 13:07.
“The last 10 minutes, our players got content and I think overly content,” Cooley said. “You have to give them credit, because I thought they made a couple really tough shots. But overall, I was happy. I thought we at least got a little bit better.”
Nonetheless, most of the opening half was a rough-to-watch slugfest, filled with missed shots from both teams and a spate of early Eagles turnovers. To its credit, there were blissfully few foul calls, and Georgetown wasn’t whistled for one until 2:17 remained before the break.
Yet even at that point, the Hoyas were only up 21-13, adrift offensively without the slick Epps to create havoc. Brumbaugh and Jay Heath connected on three-pointers on consecutive possessions in the final 63 seconds of the half to create a belated cushion and bump Georgetown’s lead to 29-14 at the break.
That proved the start of a flurry of made shots from the perimeter for the Hoyas, who got three-pointers from Ishmael Massoud and Styles to make it 41-18 and nudge the Eagles into a timeout with 16:12 left.
From there, Georgetown never led by less than 13 points, securing its most stress-free victory since a 94-57 rout of Le Moyne in its Nov. 7 opener. There aren’t likely to be many victories by comfortable margins the rest of the way, and sluggish stretches such as the one that spanned a chunk of the first half are likely to be met with far more punishment than the Hoyas received Tuesday.
Still, Cooley has high aims as his first season at Georgetown moves into its next phase.
“If you asked me [if this is] where I thought we would be, the answer to that is absolutely no,” Cooley said. “We should be 10-0. That’s exactly what we should do. You don’t prepare to lose. You’re not being greedy, you’re being real. You look at the games we lost, turnovers hurt us. Two of our losses are by one point. … We should win every game we play, and that’s what we expect to do.”