Villanova tries to avoid another upset on opening weekend
PITTSBURGH » Carlik Jones’ phone has exploded since he hit the 3-pointer at the buzzer that sent Radford into the NCAA Tournament.
“The experience after the shot has been crazy,” he said. It should be.
The biggest win ever for the Highlanders? Sure. But the Big South Tournament champs may have topped it a week later when it went to Dayton, Ohio, and won a First Four game to advance in the bracket.
There are plenty of questions when a little-known program like Radford, out of rural southwest Virginia, makes a splash in the tourney. Like, who else have you beat? Jones noted the top win in the regular season was a 7-point win at East Carolina.
“I can’t really compare Villanova to ECU,” Jones said. He’s got that right. The top-seeded Wildcats (30-4) are rolling as they open the tournament against Radford (23-12) in a first-round matchup in Pittsburgh.
Villanova opens as a 23½-point favorite and had a pair of blowout wins en route to winning the Big East Tournament. Without a senior on the roster, the Wildcats have turned to their B-list junior guards — Phil Booth, Mikal Bridges and Jalen Brunson — to carry them to the top of the AP Top 25 poll, the top of the Big East, and a favorite to win it all in San Antonio.
Bridges and Brunson are likely headed to the NBA after this season and Booth led the Wildcats in scoring in the 2016 national championship game. The Wildcats know the expectation among fans and experts is Final Four or bust.
“I can definitely see it,” coach Jay Wright. “I see when people talk about being out here Thursday and Saturday, you know, and we’re talking about Thursday. We’ve got to get by Thursday. It’s something that I know is around our players, also. And we have to talk to them about that, you know?”
Radford’s top expectation is having some fun.
The team crashed coached Mike Jones’ press conference on Wednesday and yelled and laughed and bounced around at the back of the room while he tried to answer questions.
“Is this legal,” Jones said, smiling. “Are you allowed to break into a press conference like this?”
The Highlanders are loose with nothing to lose — no No. 16 seed has ever beat a No. 1. Jones doesn’t have to dig deep to motivate his team to finally knock off the tourney’s top dog. He was an assistant at VCU in 2011 when the Rams won a playin game, then beat Georgetown, Purdue, Florida State and Kansas en route to the Final Four.
“A lot of people didn’t believe we belonged in the tournament at all, and then to go to the Final Four certainly is an amazing story,” Jones said. “But our guys believed that they could, and that is the point that we’ve tried to get across to our team is that anything is possible if you believe.”
If recent history is an indicator, few 1 seeds are primed to get toppled like Villanova. The Wildcats lost in the first weekend as a 1 or 2 in 2010, 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018.
“You experience the national championship, you experience losing in the first weekend,” Brunson said. “You see both ends of the spectrum.”
Other things to watch in the East Region on Thursday: