Villanova has been walking a wire for a while and can’t afford to fall now | Mike Sielski

NEWARK, N.J. — As Villanova’s coaches and players fell into the postgame handshake line Wednesday night at the Prudential Center after their 66-56 loss to Seton Hall, their faces were as serious as stone, and it was reasonable to expect that those looks were as expressive and expansive as the Wildcats were going to get. Kyle Neptune, their head coach, tends to be pretty tight-lipped in his public comments, and his players tend to follow his example. So when Neptune was asked about his team’s next game — Saturday afternoon against Creighton at the Wells Fargo Center — and its importance to Villanova’s NCAA Tournament chances, even his strongest statement was one that he has uttered often over the last several weeks.

“Our approach,” he said, “is that this is our Super Bowl.”

Neptune then hedged some in a postscript — “Our approach hasn’t changed; we try to have that focus every time out” — that only underscored the challenge that the Wildcats have been facing for the last five weeks and still face. Yes, Super Bowl Saturday is ahead for a ‘Nova team that is 17-13 and may or may not yet be considered worthy of a berth in the NCAA Tournament. Beat the Bluejays, who are 22-8 and ranked No. 10 in the Associated Press top 25 poll, and everything gets clearer and easier for the Wildcats.

They’d welcome that clarity and the deep exhale that would accompany a victory, because they’ve been going full-Philippe Petit for a while now. They were 11-10 and had lost six of seven games after Marquette beat them at the Finneran Pavilion on Jan. 30, and they have been walking a wire ever since, and their performance and the result against Seton Hall had the feel of a natural letdown for a team that has been playing nothing but must-win games for more than a month.

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“We’ve got a veteran bunch,” Neptune said. “I don’t think any pressure like that is more than the pressure we put on ourselves.”

That’s a lot of pressure, wherever it’s coming from: within the Wildcats’ locker room, within the athletic program, from alumni and boosters and fans. Villanova’s .500 record last season, Neptune’s first as Jay Wright’s successor, was barely tolerated, if it was tolerated at all. The Wildcats haven’t gone consecutive years without qualifying for the NCAA Tournament since 2003 and 2004, Wright’s second and third seasons as coach and the final two of a five-year drought for the program. The people paying to fill the Finn — and the coffers of the university’s NIL collectives — won’t respond well to a return to that era of uncertainty about the program’s future.

“Pressure is a privilege,” guard TJ Bamba said. “If people are coming to us, telling us we need this, we need this, to them it’s pressure, but to us, it’s something we’re going to rise to that occasion for. We worked so hard throughout that whole losing streak. We kept saying, ‘Just do what we do. Just do what we do. In time, results will follow.’ The results have been following, and now we just took a little step back.”

Some of it was them. Some of it was Seton Hall. Villanova is an excellent defensive team, and that quality can keep it in any game. It did Wednesday. Seton Hall entered the night as the worst three-point-shooting club in the Big East, making just 31.4% of its attempts, and the Wildcats have guarded the arc well all season; their opponents had shot just 32.2%. So Neptune, rightly, had his players cede the three-point line, daring the Pirates to hit shots from there. They did. They went 9 of 23 from three (39.1%).

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Villanova is also a spotty offensive team at best, and that quality can lose the Wildcats any game. It did Wednesday. They had two stretches of more than five minutes in which they didn’t hit a shot from the field. Seton Hall, having lost to ‘Nova by 26 at the Wells Fargo Center last month, had redoubled its emphasis on defense in its recent practices before Wednesday’s game. “Little bit extra sauce,” coach Shaheen Holloway said. But there’s a reason the only two teams in the conference that score fewer points per game than Villanova are the Big East’s bottom-feeders: Georgetown and DePaul.

Everything is a grind for the Wildcats. It’s a style that makes them capable of beating any opponent, but to get in the NCAAs, what they need most now is to win a game that they shouldn’t necessarily be expected to win. Saturday against Creighton might not quite qualify as such. But a Big East Tournament quarterfinal game next Thursday — against, in all likelihood, either the Bluejays or Marquette — probably would. First things first, of course, and the first thing is to not get too far ahead, in deed or word. “Our next game,” Bamba said, “is our biggest game of the year.” Just the latest of them.