Villanova fires men’s basketball coach Kyle Neptune
Following legendary coach Jay Wright, Neptune was just 54-47 in three seasons leading the Wildcats.
Three seasons as men’s basketball coach at Villanova yielded three consecutive missed NCAA Tournaments for Kyle Neptune, and on Saturday morning, school leadership decided to change course. Villanova fired Neptune less than 48 hours after the Wildcats were eliminated in the quarterfinals of the Big East tournament.
Neptune went 54-47 overall and 31-29 in the Big East after taking over the program in 2022 following the retirement of Jay Wright, under whom Neptune coached at Villanova for eight seasons before leaving to become the head coach at Fordham for one season.
Villanova lost Thursday night in the quarterfinals of the Big East tournament for the third consecutive season — it lost, 73-56, to Connecticut this time — and before a third consecutive Selection Sunday comes and goes without Villanova’s name called.
Assistant coach Mike Nardi will serve as interim head coach for any potential postseason play. Villanova still could receive an invitation to play in the College Basketball Crown tournament later this month.
Villanova had arguably its best roster under Neptune this season, but inconsistent results and too many late-game collapses left the Wildcats on the wrong side of the NCAA Tournament bubble. It left the Wildcats needing an improbable conference tournament run to avoid missing the tournament for three consecutive years for the first time since 2004, Wright’s third season at Villanova.
Why the 40-year-old Neptune wasn’t afforded the same level of patience speaks to the changing world of high-level college sports and Villanova’s place as a program in between two time periods.
The name, image, and likeness era doesn’t lend to maintaining the status quo. Coaches are judged on a different curve when long stretches of losing could mean fewer financial resources flowing to the program and, in turn, the roster.
Villanova — despite the Big East having a down year and the power conferences getting bigger and stronger — still fancies itself as a program that wants to contend, and its list of candidates for Neptune’s replacement likely will be long and maybe even aspirational.
» READ MORE: Kyle Neptune was overwhelmed as Villanova’s head coach. The Wildcats need a dynamic leader.
Whoever gets the job will have a lot of work to do. The entire regular starting five from the 2024-25 season is out of eligibility, and there’s no telling how many players could hit the transfer portal. Villanova had its best transfer portal class under Neptune last offseason, but the results this season weren’t good enough.
The 2022-23 season, Neptune’s first, almost was a wash based partially on the timing of Wright’s surprising retirement following a Final Four run and top player Justin Moore missing the majority of the season. Villanova finished that campaign 17-17. But 2023-24, with a full transfer portal and recruiting cycle at the staff’s disposal, yielded similar results — this time 18-16 — and Neptune occasionally was booed during home games by an impatient fan base that was miffed by a team that produced inconsistent results.
How could the same team that ran the table against good competition at the Battle for Atlantis lose to Penn and St. Joseph’s?
Neptune did himself no favors when the Wildcats lost at home in the second game of this season to a Columbia team that eventually won just one game in the Ivy League. Villanova again lost to St. Joe’s, dropping consecutive games in the rivalry for the first time in 20 years. The Wildcats were badly outplayed by a bad Virginia team and got swept by Georgetown, but they also won games against St. John’s, UConn, and Marquette.
More than sometimes playing down to competition, the late-game collapses kept with a trend of a team and a coach that too often made crushing mistakes in crunch time. Take Thursday night, for example. The Wildcats, playing for their tournament lives and their coach’s future, were outscored, 32-11, over the final 12-plus minutes. A four-point lead turned into a laugher, and new athletic director Eric Roedl, who started in January, and school president Rev. Peter Donohue did not let the loss linger before pulling the plug on Neptune’s tenure.
“We just lost a game,” Neptune said when asked postgame if he was concerned about his job status. “I’m thinking about the guys in the locker room that just lost. I’m thinking about our staff that just lost. Just them, we just lost a game and put a lot into it. That’s all I’m thinking about right now.”
Villanova’s season isn’t officially over. The top two Big East teams that miss out on the NCAA Tournament are slated to play in the new College Basketball Crown tournament during the last week of March in Las Vegas. But Roedl and Donohue could not afford to wait until then and allow potential coaching candidates to go elsewhere. Plus, the transfer portal opens before that tournament starts.
Whether Villanova can field a team for that event remains to be seen. The obvious and immediate focus is on crowning a new coach.
Neptune’s firing created the third men’s basketball coaching transition in the Big 5. Penn earlier this week fired Steve Donahue, and La Salle’s Fran Dunphy is retiring from coaching. The Explorers announced that Radford coach Darris Nichols will be their next coach following a search that lasted a few weeks after the school made Dunphy’s retirement public.
For Villanova, a critical search is only just beginning.