Georgetown 4, Syracuse 2 (OT)

Well, ok, the final score was really 64-62, but it was 4-2 in the five-minute overtime period after forty minutes of old-school Big East basketball failed to resolve anything. On paper, this shouldn’t’ve been much of a game– Georgetown is #9 in the country, while Syracuse dresses only eight scholarship players at the moment– but that’s what happens with rivalry games.

The was fairly typical of Syracuse’s season so far. They made a really good effort, and actually led by seven late in the game, but were undermined by inexperience and poor judgement. Jonny Flynn in particular forced a lot of bad shots down the stretch, and that cost them. Donte’ Green was ice cold for much of the game, but never let that stop him from chucking it up.

They’ve got some talented young players, and if they stick around long enough to pick up some maturity, they could be good down the road. When champion knucklehead Paul Harris is your steady veteran influence on the court, though, you’re going to have problems with good teams in close games.

Having bitched at length about bad announcing the other day, let me throw in a quick shout-out to the three-man crew calling this game, Sean McDonough, Jay Bilas, and Bill Raftery. I like this crew a good deal– they do a fair bit of bantering, but they’re reasonably funny, and McDonough never lets critical information slide. And Bilas is well-informed and unafraid to disagree with the officials, which is (for whatever reason) somewhat rare among basketball announcers. He was absolutely right to note that the refs were horribly inconsistent in calling fouls last night, for example, though it was more or less par for the Big East course.

(There was a certain amount of irony in his complaints about the extravagent flopping that’s taken over college basketball in recent years (as players fall over at the slightest hint of contact in an attempt to draw a charge), though– Bilas is a Duke guy, and the flopping epidemic is all Duke’s fault…)