In 1941, fabled sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote what Georgetown fans already knew. "There can be no set system of ranking football coaches,' he wrote, "However, in my opinion, Jack Hagerty of Georgetown belongs high up on this list among the very best that football knows."

Hagerty was recruited to Georgetown University from Dorchester HS in 1922, where he went on to become team captain and an all-East halfback for coach Lou Little in 1925. "By nature a leader," wrote the 1926 Ye Domesday Booke on the popular senior. "On the gridiron: brilliant, strategic, consistent. On the campus: popular, sincere, genial, unspoiled by his successes." Hospitalized by a back injury that kept him from completing his degree that spring, Hagerty eventually signed a free agent contact with the NFL's New York Giants in the fall of 1926, starting seven games as a rookie.

After five seasons with the Giants, Hagerty spent the 1931 season as an assistant at Holy Cross before returning to the Giants in 1932. By then, he had attracted the interest of his alma mater, where coach Tom Mills was under increasing fire for poor performance and poor relations among alumni and administrators. Mills learned that the school was quietly negotiating with Hagerty to leave the pros and take over at Georgetown, whereupon he resigned midway through the 1932 season and his two assistants followed. Hagerty soon hired a pair of former Giant teammates as assistants: fellow 1926 classmate George Murtagh for the offense, and recent grad Maurice (Mush) Dubofsky for the defense. The three would form a formidable coaching trio for the next 16 years.

Hagerty's first decision as coach was to immediately scrap Mills' Rockne-era formations, though Hagerty later said it was a mistake to teach a new system mid-season. His biggest problem proved to be talent. The results of the decsion to not offer athletic scholarships after 1931 were proving a disaster for all Georgetown sports. Baseball had gone from a 22 win record in 1930 to just three wins by the spring of 1934. Basketball was 17-38 over three seasons and football dropped to 1-6-1 in 1933, Hagerty's first full season. The decsiion was quietly made to return to scholarships in the school's major sports, and GU would return to pre-1931 levels by the fall of 1938. Hagerty's team saw steady but noticeable improvement, with a 6-2-1 record in 1936. But it was 1938 that began Georgetown football's golden era.

"Georgetown began its 1938 season with a team studded with sophomores, supposedly a handicap; however, three warm-up games proved the handicap to be an asset," wrote the college yearbook. It continued:

"The Hilltoppers then defeated Manhattan, upset Temple, trimmed Bucknell and West Virginia, and triumphed over Maryland... When Jack Hagerty, a former member of the New York Giants professional team, accepted the job as head coach at Georgetown in 1932, he insisted that Dubofsky and Murtagh be his assistant coaches. These men have gradually built up a team and combined it with a "Spread System" to produce the caliber of football witnessed on the Hilltop last season...Leaving Georgetown, these men can pride themselves in that they were the fundamental reason for the 1938 Georgetown undefeated and untied football team, the first in sixty-three years of competition on the gridiron."

The sophomore squad of 1938 were juniors and were equally dominant, with only a 131-13 tie at Syracuse preventing a second undefeated season. In 1940, these gifted seniors won seven straight, including Temple, Virginia tech, Syracuse, NYU, and Maryland en route to a #10 ranking nationally.

Georgetown took a 23 game unbeaten streak versus Boston College for the 1940 regular season finale before 34,000 at Fenway Park. Still considered one of the great games of its time, BC held a 19-16 lead into the final minute before the Hoyas' defense held deep in BC territory. Rather than punt it back, BC's Charlie O'Rourke ran the ball out of his end zone, taking a safety and running enough time on the clock to prevent the Hoyas from reaching a game winning field goal thereafter.

Grantland Rice called the 19-18 finish "probably the greatest football game ever played by colleges or by pros," adding that it was "the greatest all around exhibition of power, skill, deception and flaming spirit that I have seen on a football field for over 40 years."

Georgetown was invited to the 1941 Orange Bowl, though Hagerty later noted that if GU had defeated Boston College, the Sugar Bowl would have doubled the $25,000 payout in Miami. The Hoyas were early favorites over Mississippi State but struggled in the Florida heat, falling short, 14-7.

Georgetown fielded competitive five-win teams in 1941 and 1942, with a home record 25,000 at Griffith Stadium for its 1941 opener versus Ole Miss. But Georgetown's conversion to an Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) center eventually put athletics on hold for the remainder of the war and sent the majority of his teams to either the military or the NFL. Hagerty joined the Navy and upon his return from wartime duty in 1946, he found a different Georgetown than when he left.

"Before then the school was smaller. You knew everybody else," he said in a 1966 interview. "After the war it enlarged with the G.I. Bill and boys were taking from the school without trying to give anything in return." With just 20 scholarships, Hagerty found it more difficult to recruit against larger schools, particularly as football was moving to two platoon setups.

"One year," Hagerty said, "I contacted over 500 boys, finally coming up with 60 who could get into Georgetown. Everybody and his brother, including the Ivy League...was after the [same] 60."

The 1948 season proved to be a challenging one. Not only did the Hoyas post a back to back losing season for the first time since Hagerty's first full season in 1933, but there was a internal battle for control of the athletic department, led by Rev. Robert Parsons, S.J. a former dean of the College assigned by his superiors as faculty moderator of athletics. Following the season, Parsons fired athletic director Rome Schwagel and moved Hagerty into a reduced role as graduate manager of athletics, which led to assistant coaches Murtagh and Dubofsky resigning. Later that season, basketball coach Elmer Ripley resigned and track coach Hap Hardell quit over the University's failure to complete an outdoor track repair.

Parsons was reassigned by the Jesuit provincial after just one year, but the effects at deemphasis were apparent. As football moved to a point of no return, Hagerty had no power to stop it, and kept a low profile over the next two decades, with hiring and firing reserved for the Jesuit moderators of athletics or the Athletic Advisory Board. Even the return of football in 1964 was publicly out of bounds for Hagerty, careful not to cross an administration that was largely unsupportive of the club football efforts.

Approaching his 65th birthday, Hagerty retired from Georgetown in 1968 after 36 years as a player, coach and administrator. In 1971 he was presented the John Carroll Award, the Georgetown University Alumni Association's highest honor.

Jack Hagerty died in 1982 at the age of 78.

Year	Record	Pct.	Home	Away
1932	0-3-1	0.000	0-2-1	0-1
1933	1-6-1	0.153	1-4	0-2-1
1934	4-3-1	0.533	3-0	1-3-1
1935	4-4	0.500	2-2	2-2
1936	6-2-1	0.722	3-0	3-2-1
1937	2-4-2	0.375	1-3-1	1-1-1
1938	8-0	1.000	4-0	4-0
1939	7-0-1	0.938	4-0	0-3-1
1940	8-2	0.800	4-0	4-2
1941	5-4	0.555	4-0	1-4
1942	5-3-1	0.611	3-1-1	2-2
1943	No football
1944	No football
1945	No football
1946	5-3	0.625	2-1	3-2
1947	3-4-1	0.438
1948	3-4-1	0.438	1-2-1	2-2
Totals	61-42-10	0.584	34-14-5	27-28-5