At Villanova, they have the Wright stuff

Under tutelage of level-headed coach, the Wildcats are once again in championship form.

Let the madness begin. The basketball tournament – not the weather.

The serious March Madness begins Thursday, when Villanova kicks off the defense of its national title.

And when they do so, they will be occupying the same lofty position they finished with last spring – looking down on the rest of the college basketball world.

The Wildcats Sunday learned that not only would they be the No. 1 seed in the East, as expected, but they also would check in as the No. 1 seed in the entire tournament.

The tiny Catholic school from the Main Line continues to build on its national reputation.

All Jay Wright’s team did for an encore is win their first 14 games this season, while vaulting to the No. 1 ranking in the AP men’s college hoops poll. The Wildcats compiled a 31-3 record, the most wins ever racked up by a defending national champion.

Here is a warning shot for the rest of the NCAA field: Villanova is 8-0 this season in games played on a neutral court. They captured the Big East Championship by pounding Creighton Saturday.

They were rewarded with that No. 1 seed in the East, along with the top seed in the entire tourney. But the NCAA bracketologists are not making it easy on the Wildcats. The East is loaded, with Duke, Baylor and Florida all being potential landmines.

We’ll leave all that to the bracketologists.

What Jay Wright has done in building this dynasty borders on the miraculous. This is not a huge state school. Enrollment at Villanova tops out at a little more than 6,000 undergraduate students. There are another 3,000 grad students and about 800 attending Villanova Law School. A diploma factory this is not. An excellence factory is what it is.

And nowhere does that hold forth more than inside the Pavilion, home of the defending national champions.

In a way, you could say that Villanova has the Wright Stuff.

They are built in the vision of their coach, Jay Wright. He has taken a proud basketball tradition and elevated it to another level, all while doing things the “Wright” way.

It is not a team of superstars. It is, at its essence, a team, with all members contributing.

Wright, always nattily attired, is the maestro, the king of cool orchestrating his hoops vision from the sidelines.

They lost several key members from their national title team, including big man Daniel Ochefu and floor leader Ryan Arcidiacono. It was Arcidiacono who calmly brought the ball up the floor as time expired in last year’s title tilt, drawing the defense to him before dishing to an open Kris Jenkins, who buried “The Shot” as time expired to lift the Wildcats to a thrilling victory over North Carolina.

Those who insisted last year was a fluke likely have not been watching this year. Most experts picked the Wildcats to be a power again in the Big East, but no one saw them sprinting out of the gate at 14-0. They lost only three times, blitzed through the Big East Tournament and are right back where they left off, on top of the college hoops heap.

It is the fifth straight year Villanova has made the postseason NCAA dance, and the 12th time under Wright’s tutelage. For many of those seasons, the Wildcats’ season ended with way almost every college basketball team’s does – with a loss. Only the Wildcats had developed a reputation for early, unexpected exits from the NCAA tournament.

Some teams, some coaches would have reacted to those disappointments with a surly snarl, the telltale sign of a “big time” program and elite athletes unaccustomed to hardship, to losses, to the kind of disappointment most people deal with every day.

It was the way Wright and his teams reacted to those losses that tell you everything you need to know about what is simply referred to as “Villanova basketball.”

Handling a season that ends with a win is a whole different animal.

Yet there were no “big heads,” inflated egos or outrageous braggadocio on the Main Line campus. That also is part of the Wright Stuff.

Now they try to do it again. To repeat. To capture a second straight national title. There are plenty of potential pitfalls along the way.

But Villanova already has an advantage as they shuffle off to Buffalo.

They have the Wright Stuff.