Their record earned them a bye in the first round of the 1988 Big East men's basketball tournament, but they lost to Seton Hall in the quarterfinals.

[2] Sophomore guard Dwayne Bryant, meanwhile, led the team in assists but otherwise had a difficult season, starting only 16 games, shooting only 37% from the field, and scoring in double figures only twice.

[3] After spending his freshman and sophomore years as a reserve shooting guard with only modest success, senior and team co-captain Perry McDonald had moved to forward during his junior season and emerged as one of Georgetown's top scoring threats, rebounders, and defenders.

When he returned from playing on a gold-medal United States team at the World University Games in the summer of 1987, it seemed to observers that he was poised to be the major driver of Georgetown's 1987-88 offense.

This year, after an 0-for-9 effort from the field against Hawaii Loa in the season's opening game, he recovered to score in double figures five times during December 1987.

[5] Like McDonald and Jackson, guard Charles Smith had spent his first two years as an unheralded reserve, seeing only two starts in his first 63 games, but had suddenly and dramatically emerged at the end of the previous season as a potent offensive force in Georgetown's defeat of Ohio State in the second round of the 1987 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament.

Georgetown had no time-outs left and no time to set up a play, so with eight seconds remaining the 6-foot-0 (183-cm) Smith single-handedly took the ball from the backcourt, through the entire Syracuse defense, and to the basket, scoring the winning field goal with a finger roll to give the Hoyas a last-second 69-68 upset victory over the 14th-ranked Orangemen.

[6] In February, Smith had a 28-point performance at Seton Hall,[7] and four days later the Hoyas pulled out another last-second upset win over now-11th-ranked Syracuse,[7] beating the Orangemen 71-69 at the Capital Centre.

During the game, a fight broke out between Tillmon and Pittsburgh's Nate Bailey, a benches-clearing brawl followed, and the teams came away from the incident bearing grudges against each other.

Lane responded with a roundhouse right, and McDonald – a two-time Gold Glove boxing champion in Louisiana – retaliated.

[4][8][9] The Hoyas closed out the regular season with a double-overtime 102-98 win against Seton Hall in which Tillmon scored 35 points and pulled down eight rebounds.