Kyle Neptune and Villanova did the thing they couldn’t do Wednesday night. What happens next?
The Wildcats suffered their worst loss under Neptune on Wednesday against Columbia, which was a 17-point underdog.
How does something so obvious seem so shocking?
There were bad losses in Kyle Neptune’s first two seasons as Villanova’s basketball coach. The Wildcats last year lost to Penn and Drexel, and one year earlier, after losing at Temple, they lost a road game to perennial Big East bottom-feeder DePaul. All of them were relatively easy to explain away at the time. A bad shooting night here, an injured player there. He’s a new coach here, this isn’t his roster yet there.
But this? A buy game against a non-Big 5 Ivy, at home, with Eric Dixon making his season debut, and the opponent, Columbia, entering as KenPom’s 217th-best team in college basketball? Compare the payrolls. This is what rock-bottom looks like, and if it’s not, the apathy that coursed through a lightly filled Finneran Pavilion on Wednesday night might only get worse.
Because it barely felt like an upset. Sure, Columbia was a 17-point dog, but the Lions seemed to have the better coach, the better plan, and, for large stretches of the game, looked like the better team. The Lions posted a 90-80 win, and the game was out of Villanova’s reach for the final five minutes.
This is exactly what Neptune and Villanova couldn’t do, lose a game like this during the first week of the season. Former athletic director Mark Jackson made the unpopular decision to bring Neptune back after two seasons yielded the same result: a first-round exit in the NIT. A Final Four program had turned into a bubble program, and the paying customers, both ticket buyers and those who donate to the school’s NIL collective, made their voices heard when they booed Neptune off the court in March.
Neptune went to work in the offseason and retooled a roster that desperately needed a facelift. The Wildcats welcomed Dixon back after he pondered making the jump to professional basketball, they brought in five transfers and a four-player 2024 recruiting class that ranked top 25 nationally. Some analytics sites, KenPom included, had Villanova as a top-25 team. Others had the Wildcats at least in the top 50.
There was a semblance of optimism as the 2024-25 season tipped Monday night and there was more to like than dislike during a season-opening win over Lafayette.
One small step forward, one giant leap backward.
“It is what it is,” Neptune said when asked how deflating Wednesday felt. “We’re human beings. We don’t want to come in and lose. Everybody wants to win. We have a little bit to think about that and accept the fact that it happened, and now we have to move on from it. We got to go get ready for the next game and get better.”
That next game is Friday night vs. NJIT, a quick turnaround before a big test Tuesday at St. Joseph’s.
» READ MORE: Three reasons for optimism, pessimism as Villanova begins its 2024-25 season
Villanova turned the ball over 12 times Wednesday after 17 turnovers Monday. Neptune thought he had fixed his point-guard problem with La Salle transfer Jhamir Brickus, but Brickus had three turnovers and fouled out in 24 minutes. There’s still a point guard problem because the Wildcats don’t appear to have a reliable secondary ballhandler, and if they’re going to ask senior forward Jordan Longino to put the ball on the floor as much as he did Wednesday night, there will be more losses than wins.
Dixon, for his part, was great. He scored 33 points on 16 shots, and Miami transfer Wooga Poplar followed a 20-point debut with another 16. Longino added 14 but needed 13 shots to get there. No other Villanova player scored more than five, and the Wildcats didn’t get a contribution from a bench player until the final six minutes.
Columbia scored 21 points off turnovers. The Lions bullied the Wildcats inside to the tune of a 36-24 advantage in points in the paint. Inbounding the ball, an issue for the last two years, again was an adventure at times for Villanova.
“We’ve got to get more solid,” Neptune said. “Our habits aren’t where they need to be right now, and it seems like it’s just simple things: taking the ball inbounds, coming back being strong with the ball, making entry passes. We’ve just got to get way more solid and pay attention to detail.”
In other words, the coach needs to coach better.
Columbia did have an advantage in a key category: continuity. The Ivies aren‘t seeing the same level of coming and going that has impacted every other conference in Division I basketball. The Lions brought back nearly 80% of their minutes from last season, and it was clear to see. Villanova looked like a team still figuring things out, and that’s exactly what it’s doing. But that’s not an excuse for Neptune; it is his job, this year and every year, until it’s not anymore. Because this is what college basketball is. Build a roster, coach it up quickly, go play the games.
Neptune’s seat was already warm before Wednesday. After bringing back the coach he hired to replace Jay Wright, Jackson left Villanova and is now the athletic director at Northwestern. A search is ongoing for the next athletic director at Villanova at a critical time for the school and the Big East. And while any in-season move to replace Neptune seemed unlikely anyway, it’s even more improbable until the next leader of the department is in place.
This is what that person is inheriting, though: a coach the new AD didn’t hire, and a basketball program that has meant so much to the university teetering on the edge of irrelevancy.