’Nova dominates to win NCAA title
Villanova players celebrate after they beat Michigan 79-62 in the NCAA Tournament championship game in San Antonio to complete one of the most dominant runs in tournament history. The Wildcats became the first team to win both of its Final Four games by 16 or more points since UCLA in 1968. Donte DiVincenzo led the way, scoring 31 points on 10-for-15 shooting, including 5-for-7 on three-point tries. The title continues a big sports year for Philadelphia, whose Eagles won the Super Bowl in February.
SAN ANTONIO — Juggernauts are not supposed to look like this, without a superstar, a catchy nickname, a lineup of future NBA All-Stars or the air of intimidation and moxie that is palpable even in layup lines. Villanova has none of these things.
History, though, will look back at these Wildcats and their tactical, almost apologetic dominance throughout six games of this NCAA Tournament as a team that was, perhaps, just one or two steps ahead of the rest of the 350 laggards in Division I, a field that was forced to watch — mouths agape — revolutionary basketball before their eyes.
Villanova did not need to hit 18 three-pointers against Michigan in the national-title game on Monday, as it did in dismantling Kansas in its semifinal. But the Wildcats found a multitude of other ways to outflank and out-finesse another opponent, this time on basketball’s biggest stage, in a 79-62 win over the Wolverines before a crowd of 67,831 at the Alamodome.
It is the Wildcats’ second national championship in three years, and though it is a younger team than the one that beat North Carolina with a buzzer-beater in 2016, it is unquestionably better.
“I really can’t get my mind around it. I never dreamed of this,” Villanova head coach Jay Wright said of the second title in an interview with TBS after the game. “We just took it one day at a time. We tried to get better every day, and I thought we played our best game in the championship game.”
Michigan largely had answers for five of Villanova’s top players, but not its sixth: Donte DiVincenzo, who came off the bench to score 31 points. He fueled a first-half comeback and put on a show in the second, scoring 11 straight points midway through the half to build Villanova’s lead to 16.
The blowout capped a season that began, unofficially, in the early morning of Sept. 26, the day federal officials publicly disclosed a covert investigation into widespread corruption in the shadowy swale of college basketball recruiting, and the sport lost its last claim to sanctity. Ten men had been arrested, including four Division I assistants, and within days, Rick Pitino, the Hall of Fame head coach at Louisville, was out of a job. The news lingered over the rest of the season.
There will be more on that. But the NCAA got something of a pass at the Final Four this time, when the tournament’s most prominent figure became Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, and the games more subtly revealed a different tectonic shift in the sport.
Michigan head coach John Beilein and his Villanova counterpart, Wright, might not have imagined the way that offense would evolve when they first crossed paths, in tiny high school gyms in upstate New York in 1984: Wright as an assistant at Rochester, Beilein a 41-yearold journeyman coach at Division II LeMoyne College. But they reached this pinnacle by largely ignoring the blue-chip prospects eager to flee to the NBA. Instead, they brought the NBA style to college.
But even after their recordsetting offensive show Saturday, Villanova’s players insisted their performance was possible only because of their defense. A team meeting in February refocused the Wildcats on the defensive end.
On nights when shots were not falling, Villanova needed to make sure it could find other ways to win. Like Monday. Jalen Brunson showed flashes of frustration, Omari Spellman was neutralized and Eric Paschall was conspicuously quiet.
Yet Villanova outrebounded Michigan, 38-27 and held the Wolverines to three threepointers.
And an unlikely hero emerged. The juggernaut rolled on.