It’s long been a contested issue, since their last regular season meeting nearly 18 years ago at the old USAir Arena: will the Georgetown Hoyas and Maryland Terrapins ever play one another again? An answer to that question might be coming soon, though. According to the Washington Times, the two programs are in talks to renew their college hoops rivalry.
The series has been dormant since 1980, with the exception of the aforementioned ’93 game and two tournament matchups which, strictly by chance, pitted the two local teams against one another (during the 2001NCAA Tournament and the 2008 Old Spice Classic). Maryland won in 2001, while the Hoyas prevailed in 2008.
Maryland athletic director Kevin Anderson, who replaced Debbie Yow last year (who also didn’t schedule a single Maryland-Georgetown game during her tenure), told Times reporter Patrick Stevens that he is “pursuing at least a two-game series between the Terrapins and the Hoyas as part of a larger push to provide Maryland fans with more appealing nonconference games.”
“Lee Reed, the athletic director at Georgetown, is a very good friend of mine,” Anderson said. “We’ve talked about renewing that series and doing a home-and-home series. We’re in a serious conversation now.”
While there is no definitive reason why the series evaporated in 1993 after Maryland defeated Georgetown in the season opener in nearby Landover, fans of both programs have clamored for two of the biggest hoops programs in the area to once again regularly face one another. This would not only be a victory for Terps and Hoyas fans alike, but also for college basketball, and more importantly, the D.C. metropolitan area. An annual Big East/ACC battle between two programs whose campuses are mere miles from each other would generate significant interest on a local, if not national, level.
While Georgetown has hosted powerhouse non-conference opponents like Duke in recent years, the same cannot be said for Maryland. Excluding games at the neutral-court Verizon Center and games during the annual Big Ten/ACC challenge (scheduling of which is mostly the job of television executives), Florida was the last elite out-of-conference program the Terps have faced during the regular season at Comcast Center, and that was in 2002. Anderson is hoping to change that, and restarting the Maryland-Georgetown series would be a major step in the right direction.
DCist wants to know what you think. Would a rekindling of the Georgetown-Maryland rivalry excite you? Would you want to see these teams battle it out each season?
