The greatest player in Georgetown history, Patrick Ewing returned to the University in 2017 following a 17 year NBA career and 15 years as an NBA assistant. Frustrated by the lack of head coaching opportunities available to him in the NBA, he was invited to apply for the vacant Georgetown position by his former college coach, John Thompson.

If Georgetown considered a break from the Thompson lineage, it chose not to do so. Ewing had no prior head coaching experience and there were public concerns that Thompson intentionally kept the door open for Ewing to emerge as a candidate when no other candidates stepped forward.

"Pat was not anointed here nor given a pass through a process," said athletic director Lee Reed. Details of the contract were not announced by Georgetown but were later reported as a six year, $18 million deal.

"It is my vision that you know to try to play a style of ball that's going to be conducive to, similar to that style that we play in the NBA," Ewing said at his introductory news conference. In a nod to his past, Ewing recreated the iconic photo of him holding a Georgetown pennant skyward, as he did when announcing to attend Georgetown on Feb. 2, 1981.

With two starters returning from a 15-18 team, Ewing took a cautious approach to scheduling in his first season. He withdrew Georgetown from a prestigious tournament organized by Nike featuring its top schools nationwide, and configured a soft non-conference schedule that featured 10 of its first 11 games at home and an resultant 10-1 record entering Big East play. Georgetown dropped nine of its final 11 games overall, finishing 15-15 on the season.

Ewing's second season was its most promising to date. Led by senior Jessie Govan and three all-Big East freshman selections (James Akinjo, Josh LeBlanc, Mac McClung), the Hoyas showed significant improvement, finishing 19-14 and an even 9-9 in Big East play. Late season wins over #17 Villanova and Seton Hall raised hopes for a return to the NCAA tournament, but a stunning 101-69 loss to DePaul closed the door to the NCAA and a 73-56 loss to Seton Hall in the Big East tournament locked it. Either game could have tipped the scales in favor of an NCAA bid, but neither went Ewing's way. Georgetown was invited to the 2019 NIT, but lost to Harvard in the opening round.

The growing momentum of 2018-19 hit a wall in the first month of the 2019-20 season. Amidst growing on-court tension between Ewing and sophomore point guard James Akinjo, Georgetown announced Akinjo was leaving the team following a home loss to NC-Greensboro, and also announced sophomore Josh LeBlanc, benched earlier in the season, would follow. A firestorm erupted later that evening when it was discovered that LeBlanc and two newcomers on the team, Galen Alexander and Myron Gardner, were accused of theft and sexual assault earlier in the first semester but had remained on the team. Three different news releases issued by Georgetown in the week further stirred media attention. Within two weeks, its leading recruit for 2020 decommitted, while Alexander and Gardner left the team following a civil settlement. Battered by injuries and attrition, sometimes playing as few as six scholarship players, the 2019-20 Hoyas dropped 11 of its final 14 games, and each of its final seven en route to a 15-17 record.

During an off-season wracked by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading scorer Omer Yurtseven opted not to return for a fifth year, and its second leading scorer, Mac McClung, left for Texas Tech. With two returning starters and eight newcomers, the 2020-21 Hoyas slumped top a 3-8 start, its worst start since 1971-72. Following a four week hiatus for a positive COVID-19 case, the Hoyas rebounded, finishing 9-12 in the regular season and defying all projections with four consecutive wins in the 2021 Big East Tournament, earning Georgetown its first NCAA appearance since 2015, a first round loss to #22 Colorado.

The perceived good times were short lived. Opening the 2021-22 season with a humbling home loss to Dartmouth, the Hoyas were a mere 6-4 in mid-December before a historic free fall, losing its final 21 games of the season and destroying past records for futility set in the 1971-72 season. Attendance fell to a 40 year low of just 5,525 per game, yet Georgetown seemed institutionally paralyzed on what to do; a result, perhaps, of a reported extension Ewing quietly signed in 2021. Seven players left school within a month of the season, including its leading scorer, Aminu Mohammed, whose high expectations for the NBA Draft were unrealized.

In a move uncharacteristic of the Georgetown teams of the past which stressed academic progress and four years players, Ewing swept the roster clean in the spring of 2022, dropping or otherwise watching 10 players leave the program and welcoming in a flurry of transfers and wayward talents from other schools in an attempt to right the ship. Just two scholarship players remained from the previous year.

In an interview that summer, Ewing declared, "With the way that things happened last year, it can never happen again on my watch." Yet, in almost bizarre form, the 2022-23 season was exactly that. Opening with an uncomfortable overtime win over a struggling Coppin State team, the Hoyas were just 5-6 entering Big East play and were summarily noncompetitive across a season deep in the Big East basement, losing 29 consecutive conference games until a 81-76 win over DePaul on January 24, 2023 en route to a 7-25 season, the same number of losses from 2021-22. The Hoyas ranked near the bottom in most categories, with highly touted sophomore Brandon Murray even less effective than his predecessor, Aminu Mohammed. Georgetown lost its final three games of the season by a combined 92 points, and Ewing was fired one day after a 80-48 rout by Villanova.

"I am very proud to be a graduate of Georgetown University. And I am very grateful to President DeGioia for giving me the opportunity to achieve my ambition to be a head basketball coach," said Ewing in a prepared statement. "I wish the program nothing but success. I will always be a Hoya."

Thus was the Patrick Ewing paradox: the school's most prominent former player and the heir of the John Thompson dynasty ended his career, and the dynasty itself, holding the school's worst career coaching record.

Year	Post-Season	Record	Pct.	Home	Away	B.E. Tourn	NCAA/NIT
2017-18		15-15	0.500	11-8	4-6	0-1
2018-19	NIT	19-14	0.575	13-5	6-7	0-1	0-1
2019-20		15-17	0.468	10-8	5-8	0-1
2020-21	NCAA	13-13	0.500	7-6	2-6	4-0	0-1
2021-22		6-25	0.193	6-11	0-13	0-1
2022-23		7-25	0.218	5-12	2-12	0-1
Totals		75-109	0.407	52-50	19-52	4-5	0-2