Every great rivalry has a signature moment. This one’s involves knitwear.
Georgetown and St. John’s have been playing basketball against each other since 1909 — 128 meetings across three different centuries’ worth of arenas, with St. John’s holding the all-time edge at 71-57. They turned the series annual in 1965, co-founded the original Big East in 1979, and in one unforgettable winter turned a conference rivalry into the center of the college basketball universe.
1985: The Season the Rivalry Owned the Sport
For most of the 1984-85 season, the two best teams in America were Georgetown and St. John’s — ranked No. 1 and No. 2, trading places, and destined to collide four times.
The first collision came January 26, 1985, at a sold-out Capital Centre, where No. 2 St. John’s stunned the top-ranked Hoyas 66-65 and snapped Georgetown’s 29-game winning streak. St. John’s coach Lou Carnesecca happened to be fighting a cold that night and wore an old sweater to stay warm. The Redmen won. Then they kept winning — ten more in a row — and Carnesecca, no fool, kept wearing the sweater.
Which set up February 27 at a sold-out Madison Square Garden: St. John’s now No. 1, Georgetown No. 2, and the whole sport watching. At the pregame handshake, Georgetown’s John Thompson Jr. opened his coat to reveal a T-shirt printed with a replica of Carnesecca’s lucky sweater. The Garden roared — and then Thompson’s Hoyas roared, ending the St. John’s streak with an 85-69 statement in what both schools still call, simply, The Sweater Game.
Georgetown wasn’t done. The Hoyas beat St. John’s again in the Big East tournament final, then a fourth time in the national semifinal at the 1985 Final Four, 77-59. Four meetings, the last three all Georgetown, on the biggest stages the sport had to offer. Rivalries rarely get a season like that.
The Long Middle — and One Vacated Trophy
The series kept simmering for decades: MSG classics, Big East tournament eliminations, and one genuinely strange footnote — the 2003 NIT championship game, which St. John’s won 70-67 and then had to vacate for using an ineligible player. Somewhere in the record books, there’s a rivalry game that officially only one team lost.
When conference realignment shattered the original Big East in 2013, both programs landed together in the new one, and the rivalry got a nostalgia jolt when its two greatest players returned to the sidelines: Chris Mullin coached St. John’s from 2015 to 2019 and Patrick Ewing coached Georgetown from 2017 to 2023 — the stars of that 1985 collision, facing each other in suits.
And even in down years, these games stayed hot. A 2013 meeting ended with a handshake-line brawl that drew a suspension; a 2018 game saw Mullin himself having to be separated from Georgetown coach John Thompson III after players tangled. As one St. John’s player put it after one of the melees, nothing specific started it — you’re basically born into the feud the day you enroll at either school. And the feud doesn’t belong to the men alone: Georgetown’s and St. John’s women’s programs renew it every Big East season, too.
The Present Is Red — But the War Moved Off the Court
Right now, the rivalry has tilted as hard as it ever has. St. John’s has won twelve straight meetings, a run stretching back to December 2020 — the longest streak in the series’ 117-year history — including three wins this season alone: an 89-71 December rout at Carnesecca Arena, a 72-69 escape in March, and a 68-63 overtime thriller in which Dylan Darling poured in 25 points, 17 of them down the stretch and in the extra period. Georgetown hasn’t just lost the recent games; an entire class of Hoyas has come and gone without ever beating St. John’s.
The 2023 hires were supposed to reignite the on-court battles: Rick Pitino to Queens, Ed Cooley lured to the Hilltop from Providence. Instead, the fiercest fights have happened in the transfer portal. Bryce Hopkins — who starred for Cooley at Providence — visited his old coach at Georgetown, then chose Pitino and St. John’s a week later, a defection Cooley admitted stung. Georgetown answered by flipping big man Vince Iwuchukwu out of Queens. The rivalry that once traded elbows in handshake lines now trades rosters — and everyone around both programs seems to agree it’s only a matter of time before that tension spills back onto the floor.
That’s exactly the kind of imbalance this rivalry has always corrected eventually. Georgetown once won 29 in a row against everyone; St. John’s once hung 107 on the Hoyas in a single night. The pendulum in this series doesn’t swing gently — it snaps. Whenever the next meeting lands on the Big East calendar, Georgetown will be carrying twelve games of grievance into it, and somewhere, someone should probably check what sweater the coaches are wearing.
All-time series: St. John’s leads 72-57 (129 meetings) • First meeting: December 8, 1909 • Current streak: St. John’s, 12 (2020-present) • Signature game: “The Sweater Game,” February 27, 1985 (Georgetown 85, St. John’s 69) • Last meeting: 2026 (St. John’s 68, Georgetown 63, OT)
