NEW YORK — In the final weeks of a brutal, star-crossed season, one that tested fans’ patience and an embattled coach’s staying power, Villanova traveled to Madison Square Garden for a let’s-see-what-we-can-salvage trip to the Big East tournament.
The program needed to show some life. The first two years of an unproven coaching regime produced only back-to-back NIT trips. Year 3 hadn’t materialized into a turnaround. The trip to New York was maybe a chance for everyone to feel good about themselves.
All in all, it worked. A loss to UConn ended its conference tournament, but Villanova found something. A team captain said later, “We know that if you follow a system and a coach, good things will happen.” The coach in reference followed by saying, “I’ve said it all season long, but I like this team. I wish practice started tomorrow, so I could start working them out.”
This was 2004. That coach was Jay Wright. The 42-year-old was 52-46 overall at the time, but he had survived hot-seat speculation thanks to his program lineage, a talented young roster set to return intact and some administrative patience. The next season, the Wildcats reached the 2005 Sweet 16, and the bright young coach was suddenly a bright young coach again. Four years later, the Cats were in the Final Four.
Now it’s 2025. Again, this week, a disappointing Nova season ended with a Big Ten tournament loss to UConn. But this time, there was little hope in the wake, leaving Villanova with a cloudier choice to make. Give Kyle Neptune the same chance Wright had two decades ago — to fix things after three unimpressive years — or tear the program down to the studs.
Word officially came Saturday. The demo is officially underway. One of college basketball’s most tradition-rich programs is at a critical juncture, both in where it will go and how it will look.
Neptune inherited a different program than Wright did. In April 2022, when Wright’s stunning retirement rattled silverware across Philadelphia’s Main Line, the school was coming off a trip to the Final Four and was the envy of nearly every program in the sport. With all due respect to Saint Augustine, Wright’s style and substance, plus two national championships in 2016 and ’18, made him the face of a university dating back to 1842. No mortal could reasonably match the Hall of Famer’s level of winning.
But the differences went further. Wright inherited a program with no identity. The prior years were spent chasing fairytales of the school’s fever dream 1985 national title. The architect of that team, Rollie Massimino, left the school a decade earlier in a contentious split and was replaced by Steve Lappas, whose nine-year tenure featured good recruiting offset by poor postseason performances. Through the ’90s, Nova was lost in the sauce behind Big East standard bearers Georgetown, Syracuse and other league rivals. Wright, a former Massimino assistant, arrived in 2001 from Hofstra as both a well-dressed ray of hope and a bridge to the past.
Neptune? He inherited “The Villanova Way,” a catch-all notion of the program under Wright. The ideal. Efficient offense and disciplined defense. Perfectly arranged team huddles. Recruits willingly redshirting. Guards backing down defenders into the post. Incoming players arriving as individuals and growing into avatars. After surviving those tough first three years, Wright went 468-151 over the next 18 seasons, taking Villanova to 17 NCAA Tournaments.
A former video coordinator (2008-10) and assistant coach (2013–2021) under Wright, Neptune inherited what seemed like a failproof system of operations. Was a 37-year-old with a .500 record in one year at Fordham the absolute best hire possible at the time? That didn’t seem to matter to decision makers because Neptune prolonged “The Villanova Way,” retained key pieces Justin Moore, Caleb Daniels and Eric Dixon from the 2022 roster as stewards to the next era, and, by proxy, kept Wright as part of the program.
As a result …
“I don’t think we really changed anything since Coach Wright left,” Dixon said Thursday night, tucked in the corner of a Madison Square Garden locker room. “All the posters on the walls are the same. Same T-shirt messaging. Same practice messaging. Everything is pretty similar. It’s a program-wide mindset.”
The program walked the same and looked the same. Except it played .500 basketball.
“The Villanova Way” was always miscast. It was, in fact, “The Jay Wright Way,” and he wasn’t exactly one to delegate. That’s chief among the reasons there was no natural successor in 2022 and why, again today, there’s no family member in line to take the job.
One of the more stunning facts in college basketball? Wright’s former Villanova assistants have combined for 73 seasons as Division I head coaches. Everyone from Neptune to Patrick Chambers (Boston University, Penn State, Florida Gulf Coast) to Baker Dunleavy (Quinnipiac) to Adam Fisher (Temple) to George Halcovage (Buffalo) to Fred Hill (Rutgers) to Ashley Howard (La Salle) to Joe Jones (Boston University, Columbia) to Billy Lange (Saint Joseph’s, Navy) to Keith Urgo (Fordham).
Those coaches have produced one NCAA Tournament appearance: Chambers at BU in 2011.
Not only was it a profoundly difficult task for Neptune to continue Wright’s approach and results, it feels, in hindsight, laughable to have even tried to operate the same program. College basketball today is not the college basketball of Wright’s tenure, when young reserves turned into old all-conference players and everyone enjoyed a shared ancestry. Yes, Wright had some underclassmen go pro, and took an occasional transfer, but his program ran on continuity and bizarre levels of brainwashing that take time.
It was, truth be told, fairly clear after Year 1 that the ride was over. Neptune’s first team returned multiple veteran pieces from a Final Four team and retained Wright’s final recruiting class of Cam Whitmore, Mark Armstrong and Brendan Hausen. That team finished 17-17. Whitmore declared for the draft that spring. After going 18-16 the next year, Armstrong entered the draft, too, while Hausen transferred to Kansas State.
By his third season, Neptune was a coach trying to figure it out like everyone else. College basketball today is about working the portal, identifying fits, mixing in occasional recruits, and figuring out what’s doable in schemes and gameplans.
“You look at those (Villanova) teams that had three or four seniors, three or four juniors, then some guys graduate and there are three or four sophomores waiting, and juniors become seniors,” Neptune said late Thursday, on his final walk as Villanova coach. “That’s how you get that consistency. You know, we haven’t had the opportunity to build it that way. So, it’s hard.”
Villanova has had six coaches since 1936. The next one is unlikely to have any ties to the past. That’ll be up to Eric Roedl, a 1997 alum who returned to the school in January as athletic director, following 12 years as an assistant AD at Oregon. He and university president Rev. Peter M. Donohue won’t have much other choice.
Various names are already floating around. Maybe Northwestern coach Chris Collins. Or New Mexico’s Richard Pitino. Or VCU’s Ryan Odom. Perhaps none of the above.
No matter who, Villanova will, for the first time in a long time, look different.
That’s the way now.
(Photo: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)
