Team: Villanova Wildcats
2024-25 Record: 21-15, 11-9 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: Sixth, two games behind a tie between Xavier and Marquette, three games ahead of Georgetown.
Final Computer Rankings
NET: #56
KenPom.com: #56
BartTorvik.com: #51
Postseason? After losing by 17 to UConn in the Big East tournament quarterfinals, Villanova had enough of a profile to get them into the College Basketball Crown event in Las Vegas. They beat Colorado and USC to reach the semifinals, where they lost 104-98 in overtime to UCF…. after blowing an 83-79 lead with less than two minutes left in regulation.
Key Departures: Effectively, the answer here is “everyone.”
There are just three players returning from last year’s roster at all, and two of them did not play. As such, if you can remember a name of a Villanova player from 2024-25, they are not coming back.
In terms of what the Wildcats are losing from their rotation last year, every single one of the departures was expected. Eric Dixon was on his fifth and bonus year of eligibility with the Wildcats, while Jordan Longino was in his fourth and final year on the roster. Going in order of scoring contributions, Wooga Poplar, Jhamir Brickus, and Enoch Boakye were all brought in as transfers with one year of eligibility remaining, so they were also out the door no matter what. Dixon, Poplar, and Longino were all double digit scorers last year, with Dixon’s 23.3 per game leading the entire country, not just the Big East. Poplar averaged 7.0 rebounds per game to lead the team there, while Brickus was the top assist man at 4.7 per game.
In terms of excitement level of watching the Wildcats, I for one am enthused about the upcoming season because the offense is going to be something other than “well, Eric Dixon’s gonna shoot it, I guess.”
Oh, right, there’s another key departure. Head coach Kyle Neptune, less than affectionately known as Kyle Pluto because his teams just kept drifting further away from the light, was sent on his way after missing the NCAA tournament for the third straight year since taking over from Jay Wright in the spring of 2022. The big reason why he was sent on his way? 12-11 in November, with losses to Temple, Portland, Penn, Saint Joseph’s, Drexel, and Columbia. You could argue that Neptune coached his team within spitting distance of the NCAA tournament field in all three of his seasons in charge, but the reason they were merely somewhat close instead of actually in contention for a berth is because they kept flubbing the early season on-paper winnable games and thus set themselves up with hurdles they could not overcome. VU administration found themselves in a situation where Neptune was losing his entire starting five no matter what — a starting five with three transfers brought in with experience in order to save Neptune’s job, to boot! — and they couldn’t allow him to blow their season apart in November for a fourth straight year, and so here we are.
Key Returners: There is one rotation guy returning from last season, and that’s Tyler Perkins. After transferring over from Penn, Perkins appeared in all 36 games for the Wildcats and came off the bench in all but three games. For 26 minutes a game, his numbers were fine: 6.3 points, 4.3 rebounds, an assist, a bit over a steal per game, 35% from behind the three-point line. He only shot 29.5% in VU’s regular season Big East games, and shooting 8-for-20 (40%) in postseason games helped jump his overall number back up to something respectable when the season came to an end.
You guys want to count Matthew Hodge? He was a top 75 prospect a year ago according to 247 Sports, but then the NCAA denied VU’s appeal of an eligibility waiver on November 13th and then he never played as a partial qualifier. He’s still here, but y’know, hardly counts as a contributor from last year.
Key Additions: You know what? It’s important to discuss who replaced Kyle Neptune before we talk about the 11 new faces on this roster, so let’s go there…..
Coach: Kevin Willard, fresh off the best of his three seasons at Maryland. Having current New Orleans Pelicans big man Derik Queen on his last Terrapins roster allowed Willard to coach in the Sweet 16 for the first time in his career that dates back to the start of his stint at Iona in 2007-08. He went 65-39 with Maryland, guiding them to a pair of NCAA tourney appearances in three seasons, and 45-49 in three years with Iona. In the middle of those two jobs? 225-161 at Seton Hall where he went 49-48 (.505) before The Reformation, 35-24 (.593) with UConn in an 11 team league, and 141-89 (.613) in the middle part. Interesting, don’t you think?
Key Additions: And we’re back!
Why did we need to get through the Willard part before we did this? Well, mostly just for the logic puzzle part of explaining that there are three transfers on this roster that followed Willard from College Park to the Philadelphia suburbs. That sounds like awfully good news for this new set up, but the fact of the matter is that only one of them was a rotation contributor for the Terrapins last year. That’s Tafara Gapare (6’9”, 215 lb. forward), who played in 32 of their 36 games and averaged 10.3 minutes. That, uh, barely qualifies as “rotation contributor,” and he played double digit minutes just once after February 1st. Villanova is Gapare’s fourth team in four years after not doing much of anything at UMass and then at Georgia Tech before arriving at Maryland. The other two guys on this VU roster that already speak Willard-ese were freshmen last season, so that does kind of explain why neither one saw much action worth mentioning.
On the topic of freshmen, there are three on this roster, and two of them could find their way into a role right out of the gate. Quite honestly, I don’t know why Acaden Lewis (6’2”, 180 lb.. guard) wouldn’t, as if you have a top 40 freshmen, use him. Chris Jeffery (6’3”, 200 lb. guard) is a top 100 prospect in 247 Sports’ internal rankings, but he’s down at #172 in their Composite system, so I’m kind of caught in the middle of what to expect from him. However, as will become obvious quickly, there are worse plans for Villanova than “hey, let’s let the guy who might have top 100 upside get reps and develop right now.”
That leaves us with five transfers to discuss. Well, there’s five other transfers, but we’re going to skip over Malcolm Flaggs, who has 27 minutes played across three seasons spent at Arizona State and Grand Canyon, and he sat out last year with an injury. Speaking of injury, I can see how you could make an argument that Devin Askew (6’5”, 195 lb. guard) might be a big deal transferring in after being a top 40 prospect. The catch is two-fold: First, he was ranked there in the Class of 2020, played rotation minutes at Kentucky, then bounced to Texas, then to Cal for two injury hampered years before finally ending up at Long Beach State last year. The injury situation at Berkeley is what allows him to take his COVID bonus year this season after putting up 18.9 points, 4.6 rebounds, and a Big West leading 4.5 assists per game for The Beach last season. The other part: “The injury situation” is also why he’s not going to play until maybe the beginning of conference play, as Askew suffered some sort of knee injury in August.
Duke Brennan (6’10”, 250 lb. forward) has been bouncing around a bit as well, going from one year at Arizona State to two years at Grand Canyon. He had a pretty nice season last year, averaging 10.4 points and 9.2 rebounds per game as a straightforward traditional big that doesn’t shoot from the outside . The question, of course, is whether those WAC numbers translate to the Big East? Same “does it translate?” thing goes for Bryce Lindsey (6’3”, 194 lb. guard), who played 54 minutes at Texas A&M before transferring to James Madison where he had a big year last season. 13.4 points, 2.8 rebounds, and 2.2 assists with over 40% three-point shooting is pretty nice, but that was in the Sun Belt. I’m not going to hold that tiny amount of freshman year time against him because I remember how much Buzz Williams doesn’t like playing freshmen. Finally, there’s Zion Stanford (6’6”, 205 lb. guard), who has spent two years at Temple rounding into a nice college player. He was a 15 minutes a night rotation player as a freshman and then a 27 minutes a night sometimes-starter last year. 13.1 points, 4.5 rebounds, and 2.1 assists is good, and it’s maybe not that big of a jump from The American to the Big East as opposed to the WAC or the Sun Belt or the Big West.
Outlook: Let me see if I’ve got this right.
Villanova’s chances at succeeding this season rely on a roster with no Big East starting experience or essentially any high major starting experience at all. They have a top 40 freshman, a guy returning after being a quality bench option, two guys who were quality to good starters in mid-major leagues, another guy with good numbers while starting some of the time, and another guy who might be this team’s best player as long as his knee injury rehab works out okay and in a reasonable amount of time. The depth on the team is essentially just three guys who the new head coach liked at his old job and brought with him, but none of those three guys really have a history of being dependable on-court options.
And the guy in charge of taking this pile of cookies and frosting and turning it into a gingerbread house is a guy who was a Derik Queen-shaped space away from being in real trouble this year at his old job AND kind of maybe had complained his way into bad terms with senior administration at said old job and kind of didn’t have any choice but to leave AND also maybe overplayed his hand about interviewing for the Nova job while coaching his previous team to the Sweet 16 to the point where he miiiight have Wile E. Coyote’d his way off a cliff and didn’t have a choice but to take the VU job because he wasn’t welcome back at Maryland from the boosters/fans side of the aisle either?
Yes, there’s a lot of question marks here, almost enough to put a big ol’ damper on the vibes, because that’s what you’re going to have when you go through a coaching change. Still, coming out of a coaching change, being projected at #50 in the country according to the BartTorvik.com preseason calculations isn’t terrible. Maybe it means you’re not a tournament team, but an optimist’s view of it could easily be “hey, if everything comes together, Villanova is going to do better than that #50!”
And that’s kind of a great reason why I’ve named these posts a Vibe Check. If you assess what’s going on at Villanova from a purely neutral basketball perspective, I think you have to say “ehhhhhh, I dunno?” at best. But if we’re going to take the temperature of the vibes around the program, particularly amongst the fans and boosters, well, I’m pretty sure they’re pretty enthused about what’s going on here.
Let’s put it this way: Would you have been surprised to hear a Villanova fan say “I’m pretty excited for Villanova head coach Not Kyle Neptune!” at some point this summer? I don’t think so! We can all differ about whether or not Kevin Willard is the right guy for the job here, especially since he maybe didn’t have a chance but to jump at this job. There’s real questions to be asked about whether or not he’s good at this or if he just had the longest continuously successful run at Seton Hall in program history because UConn just wasn’t around to swipe up some of his recruits in the Northeast.
But Kevin Willard has a big advantage at least for the time being: He’s not Kyle Neptune. Villanova fans don’t have to stare at the next seven games after their opener against BYU in Las Vegas and think “Oh, God, which of these games is Neptune going to screw up?” They saw one screw up or another in each of the past three years, and they just don’t have to think about that now that he’s gone. If nothing else, that gives them a much nicer mental burden for their team. Might they have a different mental burden in February when they have to go home vs Marquette/at Creighton/at Xavier/home vs UConn in a 12 day window? Maybe, but that’s better than white knuckling that kind of a stretch because your non-conference profile is shot full of holes already.
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