Big East Roundup: Cooley Creating Continuity at Georgetown

This is one in a series of stories covering roster changes around the Big East heading into the 2025-26 college basketball season.

The Georgetown Hoyas managed to post a winning record during the 2024-25 season, improving to 18-16 with a College Basketball Crown run after going 9-23 (2-18 Big East) during their first season under head coach Ed Cooley.

Georgetown lost just one player to graduation last season, albeit a critical piece in leading scorer Micah Peavy; they also lost freshman forward Thomas Sorber, who averaged close to a double-double, to the NBA Draft. Right now, pundits see Georgetown as a fringe tournament team: they’ve spent time on Joe Lunardi’s offseason bubble rankings.

Starters lost to the ravages of the transfer portal include Jayden Epps (12.8 points per game) and Drew Fielder (7.1 points and 5.4 rebounds per game), while Jordan Burks, Curtis Williams Jr. and Drew McKenna made spot starts.

Benefitting from one of the youngest lineups in the Big East last season, Georgetown managed to retain ten players. Junior guard Malik Mack put up 12.9 points and 4.3 assists per game, the headliner among returning Hoyas, while 6-foot-7 sophomore forward Caleb Williams averaged 4.3 points and 3.8 rebounds in 20.4 minutes per night.

6-foot-9 forward Jayden Fort took a redshirt year, as did 6-foot-9 center Seal Diouf, while 6-foot-6 guard Mason Moses missed his true freshman season due to injury. Other returning Hoyas include seven foot tall, 270 pound center Julius Halaifonua of New Zealand, who appeared in just six games during his true freshman season; guards Hashem Asadallah, Michael Van Raaphorst and Kayvaun Mulready all played sparingly as well.

Hoyas Transfers

Along with a transfer class of six (the Hoyas didn’t recruit any freshmen), that leaves Georgetown with 16 rostered players against a hard limit of 15: they’ll likely try to grandfather in former walk-on Austin Montgomery.

The Hoyas transfer class includes 6-foot-4 guard KJ Lewis (10.8 points, 4.6 rebounds, 2.9 assists off the bench during his sophomore season with Arizona last season), DeShawn Harris-Smith, a Maryland transfer who started under Kevin Willard during the 2023-24 campaign but played sparingly as a sophomore, and Vince Iwuchukwu, a 7-foot-1 forward who came off the bench during his junior season at St. John’s after a pair of seasons at USC.

Georgetown also picked up graduate guard Jeremiah Williams, who put up seven points per game on a Rutgers team whose offense ran through a pair of top 5 NBA Draft picks; senior guard Langston Love, a spot starter who scored 8.9 points per game on a Baylor team that made the second round, and 6-foot-7 forward Isaiah Abraham, who played an average of 3.6 minutes across nine games during his freshman season at UConn.