Beating Baylor would boost Jay Wright’s Hall of Fame resume | Mike Jensen

If there’s a Mount Rushmore of all-time college hoop coaches, could Wright eventually snag a spot?

Jay Wright isn't shy about pointing his program toward the sky.Read moreMaddie Meyer / MCT

Published March 26, 2021, 4:31 p.m. ET

Maybe it’s easy not to take it all in locally – the stature Jay Wright has in his sport right now. Way ahead of the pack around here, sure. Just in exceedingly rare air nationally.

If there’s a Mount Rushmore of all-time college hoop coaches, could Wright eventually snag a spot?

His colleagues offer perspective. On the phone this week with Hartford coach John Gallagher – who competed in this NCAA Tournament, a first-ever trip for his school, and also got chopped up by both Baylor and Villanova this season – we weren’t talking about matchups. The conversation involving Wright was about legacy, how right now, after Wright has earned his way into the top ranks of college hoop coaches, it’s a question of whether Wright eventually makes the conversation for the very top.

“They beat Baylor, he would be,” Gallagher said.

Overstating it? Not that it would get Wright there – just get him deeper into such a conversation as a new-century candidate. This NCAA Sweet 16 game, Saturday at 5:15 p.m., is that big a shot at a legacy enhancer, a free roll of sorts since Villanova is a legit underdog.

That status is a rare thing for Villanova these days. By seeding, this is the first time a Jay Wright team has faced an opponent at least four seed lines better than Villanova since 2008, when No. 12 Villanova beat No. 5 Clemson in the first round. The only other time before that in Wright’s entire tenure was 2005 when the seedings and the round were the same as this year, when No. 5 Villanova lost to No. 1 North Carolina by a point in the Sweet 16.

You wish the great Associated Press writer Jim O’Connell was still alive to offer a little insight on this legacy issue. Wright is a finalist this year for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and the only question for the selection committee is when, not if. (The answer we’ll predict, this year.)

O’Connell didn’t spill any secrets from the selection room, but did explain once that with the heavy professional orientation on the selection committee, it often fell to him to speak up for the college coaches, while no less than Larry Bird would call O’Connell “college boy.”

Talking about best-ever, college division, John Wooden may have retired that forever. Bobby Knight and then Mike Krzyzewski made runs at it, but Wooden is still standing up there with his 10 NCAA titles.

Winning as an underdog has an added mystique, since it suggests a coach has a little more work to do. There were no seedings back when Wooden coached UCLA, but his Bruins were never ranked worse than second in the Associated Press poll at the end of the regular season during his NCAA tournament years, which means his guys were always top regional seeds pretty much by definition.

Krzyzewski has five national titles, four as a top seed, the first as a No. 2 seed. Knight coached Indiana to three NCAA titles, as an undefeated team just before seedings began, so a No. 1 overall that year, then two more as a 3 seed and a 1 seed.

The all-time list of titles: Wooden 10, Krzyzewski 5, Adolph Rupp 4 … then Knight, Jim Calhoun, Roy Williams with 3 and Wright among nine coaches with 2.

Legacies aren’t just about numbers, but moments. In the last game Villanova was an underdog in an NCAA regional game, 2016 against Kansas, Vegas had Villanova as roughly a 2½-point underdog, then a favorite by the same spread in the national semis against Oklahoma, and a 2½-point underdog in the national final against North Carolina. Villanova was top-seeded and always favored in the 2018 tournament.

So this Baylor game, with Villanova a 6½-point underdog, represents something a little different. What’s it like to be the legit underdog? Wright kind of laughed.

“You know what, you don’t think about it that much, but it’s definitely less pressure on the coaching staff,” Wright said. “But I don’t think the players think of themselves as underdogs. Which is a good thing. Sometimes that’s a thing you have to battle when they’re not underdogs. The good thing about coaching young people, 18 to 22, I don’t think they think they’re underdogs that often. But as coaches you definitely know you are.”

My own view on this Villanova team hasn’t changed much since January. I’d be shocked by a Final Four run, getting the better of four straight to get there, not done in by shooting doldrums. But any single Wildcats game, including against Baylor, you would not be thrilled to face them.

”They always expect to win at Villanova,” St. Joseph’s coach Billy Lange, a former Wright assistant, said this week. “When they’re lacing up to play, they feel like they’re the better team or the better program. That is the most transformational thing he has done.”

By 2009, Lange had left to become Navy’s head coach, but he explained that he’d gone up to Boston for Villanova’s Sweet 16 matchup with Duke, was in the hotel the night before when Wright talked to his team about the opportunity to play Duke.

Lange remembers these words … ”We want to be the next Duke.”

Interesting to look back. At the time, you might have said sure, and tack on the Nobel Peace Prize, too. Duke lost to Villanova the next day, but has won a couple of NCAA titles since, Krzyzewski still the active gold standard.

But Duke isn’t part of this March Madness, while the school that now has legit claim to be the next Duke will take the court early Saturday evening in Indianapolis, seeing if Baylor is ready for the pressure of facing Villanova as a favorite. We’ll note that there is only one school left among the 16 that is situated within 175 miles of the Atlantic Ocean.

Be the next Duke?

“It was talked about,” Lange said. “One of the things I learned from Jay – talk about topics head-on. He took that head-on.”

In that case, maybe it’s at least worth asking Wright – has he ever been to Mount Rushmore?