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The Hottest Team in Town is Villanova (a Philly School)
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That’s six in a row for the Villanova Wildcats, who dispatched Xavier in overtime on Tuesday night to improve to 21-5:
The Cats are having their best season since Jay Wright called it quits after a 30-8 finish in 2022. Kevin Willard, in year #1, has already eclipsed Kyle Neptune’s best win total (19) and Nova still has five more regular season games to play before the Big East tournament. They’ve got UConn in South Philly on Saturday, then Butler at the Finn, St. John’s and DePaul on the road, and they wrap it up with Xavier at home.
Not enough people are talking about the job Willard has done in year #1. Maybe the guy is a jerk, or unlikeable because he quit on the Terps, or maybe it’s typical “Nova is for preppy rich kids who wear boat shoes” bias, but no matter how you feel about the Cats, they’re playing good basketball and they appear to be back. They’re showing the late-game poise that was a hallmark of the Jay Wright era but totally missing during Neptune’s three-year tenure.
What they could really use is a signature win against UConn or SJU, but the only “bad loss” on the schedule is probably Creighton. The other four losses are to ranked teams. Joe Lunardi has Nova in the tournament as a 7-seed right now, which would break the Big 5’s three-year tournament drought.
Truthfully, the Big 5 has done okay this season. Low bar to clear, but St. Joe’s and Temple* are both 15-10 and 7-5 in their respective conferences. Drexel is straddling the .500 line like they seemingly do every year. Fran McCaffery has the Quakers at 13-10 in year one and La Salle is 7-18 under Darris Nichols but wasn’t expected to do much of anything in year #1 with a new coach anyway.
*Pagan is no longer with us, which means nobody to shit on Nova while slurping Temple at the same time. But we’ll be fair to the Owls at Crossing Broad. We want them to win, it’s just that their conference is such a joke that it’s hard to take seriously. Not a single person gives a flying fuck about USF or Tulsa basketball. Get Temple out of that conference, STAT
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com